FRENCH ROYAL CHÂTEAUX.
L-THE CHATEAU OF CHENONCEAUX.

LONG ago I bought in London a splendid

which had been in an earlier age forbidden to buildings liable to attack, and built wholly or in part for defense.

The engraving which accompanies this photograph of a grand old French châ- sketch shows not only the portions of the teau, with high-pitched roof, and lofty carved river and château given in my cherished chimneys and turrets, and draw-bridge with photograph, but also the full breadth of a river running under it. There was a great both. The original château consisted of the arch under the château, through which flow-large, square, central portion shown in the ed, dark and swift, a stream large enough to picture, flanked by angle turrets and diverbe called a river even in America. The riv-sified by the projecting chapel. This, with er had three channels. One flowed in front the draw-bridge and advanced tower seen to of the château, and was crossed by a draw- the right, was built on the site of an old bridge; another-the main channel-flowed mill by the wife of Bohier, a follower of through a vast dark archway under the châ- Charles VIII., who had returned rich with teau; and a third flowed behind it, and was him from Italy. Diane de Poitiers added lost in the accessories of my picture. Out the long bridge to the rear, built on piers, of one side of the château, between the and connecting the château with the further draw-bridge and the arch aforesaid, project- bank of the river. Catherine de Medicis ed a little apse-like Gothic chapel--an inte- added the two-story gallery which now surgral part of the château, yet the only part mounts the bridge, and is shown on the left which was Gothic. All the rest was French of the picture. renaissance of the early and most attractive period, abounding in carvings and ornamental devices of a thousand fanciful va-ed for us in this château, which has about it, rieties.

What was this château? The print-seller of whom I bought the photograph did not know. No one whom I asked about it knew. I had it framed and hung where many people—many well-educated and traveled and art-loving people-saw and admired it; and some were sure they had seen the original: but where? So it hung there for years, a delightful and beautiful mystery; not less interesting because a mystery perfectly easy of solution if the right man would only come to solve it.

It was, then, a woman who conceived the charming and unique idea which has result

the French declare, something fairy-like and almost supernatural. Every thing is in harmony. The Cher is a smiling river, and they say it stops for a minute at Chenonceaux that it may leisurely bathe the feet of the gracious towers and enchanted gardens of this Palace of Armida.

What a woman commenced women have finished. Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medicis completed the thought of Catherine Briçonnet.

This château is unlike all other royal French châteaux: it has no blood upon its One day he came. A Frenchman in pass-stones-no sad histories of treasons, perfiing through the room glanced up at the pic-dies, conspiracies. These smiling walls reture, and said, "Ah! you have Chenonceaux call only souvenirs of youth, elegance, poetthere!" and passed on. That is, he essayed to pass on, but we arrested him forthwith, and kept him till we had recorded all he knew of the beautiful edifice.

The château of Chenonceaux was built in the reign of Francis I. Later it was given by Henry II. to the beautiful Diane de Poitiers, who enlarged it and held there her court; and hither her royal lover used to repair after hunting in the neighboring forest of Loches. Diane could not see too often the reflection of her own beautiful face; so the king gave her the château of Chenonceaux, where, when she looked out of the window, she might see her face reflected in the river which flowed beneath it.

A strange but, as it turned out, a charming fancy, to build a château in the middle of a river, on piers; and a happy period at which to build one, when the decay of feudalism left architecture only the picturesque features of feudalism-the draw-bridge, the flanking turrets, the donjon tower—and yet allowed it all the adornments and comforts and light and air and other accessories

ry, and love. Here Diane de Poitiers, Mary Stuart, Gabrielle, and others like them, for two hundred years came to animate this smiling nature, and mirror in the clear river their beautiful faces. And worthy the frame for this picture-fair home for fair ladies!

We approached it by a royal avenue of trees, which terminates in a "court of honor" on the river-bank-a handsome terrace flanked by stone balustrades. On one side is the advanced tower, forming a dwelling for the concierge, and which, built on the firm earth, seems a timid sister regarding from afar, and without daring to follow them, her elder sisters, who bathe their feet in the river. Then comes the bridge, with its arches and "draw," and heavy, wedgeshaped piers, ornamented with daintily curved projections, behind which one can retire from the roadway; and after the bridge comes the front of the château, with its two angle towers projecting corbeled out over the water, its semicircular balconies, and its lofty, richly carved dormers; then the chapel, so harmonious a part of the whole, yet

so different; and the little mole, used as a flower-garden, pushing out into the river from the great arch and hiding its importance. All these, with the river for a foreground, and the great trees on the two banks of the river, and a glimpse of gardens through the arches of the bridge, the lofty chimneys covered with ornament, the steep roofs with gilded crests-all these, under the beautiful sky of La Touraine, make the ensemble which we owe to three women-Catherine Briçonnet, Diane de Poitiers, and Catherine de Medicis. "It seems," says a French writer, "as if women alone had hands light enough to touch this delicate work."

The most remarkable circumstance connected with Chenonceaux is that it escaped the revolution and remains so perfect. The lady who occupied it at the time of my visit knew my fellow-traveler, and we were treated with the greatest kindness, and shown every thing of interest in the château from garret to cellars. The latter are formed in the piers on which the house stands, and the dimensions of these piers are such that in them, besides the prison and the baths of Catherine de Medicis, were two kitchens, a bakery, and a dining-room where there are seats at table for thirty domestics.

You

frowns a mass of mighty walls and grand, decapitated towers which might have been built by giants. There were giants in those days, for surely not in ours were piled those walls, a vast fortress placed at the gate of "La Touraine," a jealous sentinel to guard the entrance to that Garden of the Hesperides.

II. THE CHÂTEAU OF AMBOISE, When we entered this enchanting abode, two summers ago, the air was warm and High above the surrounding country, on balmy, the roses were blooming, and the the edge of a beetling promontory, hangs the cherries were ripe. They gave us strawber- vast château of Amboise, stretching along, ries and cream in the little inn before we like a range of rocks, above the quiet town came to the end of the avenue, and Marie of Amboise, which nestles at its feet. waited on us-rosy Marie, with black eyes see it first from the railway which threads and wooden sabots. They are all named the valley of the Loire. As you approach Marie, the waitresses at these little French the station for Amboise, at your feet lies the country inns, and they are all rosy, and river, crossed by a suspension-bridge, behave black eyes, and wear wooden sabots. yond stretches the little city, with its bouleWe gave the cocher an extra pourboire, and vard-that characteristic feature of a French he took us up the entire length of the ave-town-along the river bank; and over it all nue to the court of honor itself. When we entered the château we had a delightful surprise. Every thing was just as it had been left—if not when it was finished, at any rate a long time ago. There was the old furniture, and the old cabinets, glasses, enamels, and china; and the vaulted hall hung with armor, its walls covered with stamped cloth, its doors screened by tapestry curtains which drew aside, and its rich ceilings, with blue centres studded with stars. There was the very glass out of which Francis I. drank, and the mirror in which Mary Queen of Scots saw the faint image of that too fair face. Here was the initial of Diane de Poitiers plentifully introduced, combined with that of her royal lover; and beyond was the bedroom, with all its original furniture, which the unscrupulous Catherine de Medicis occupied when, on the death of the king, she despoiled Diane of her fair mansion. And then there was the bedroom of Catherine's heir, Louise de Lorraine, widow of Henry III., whose chamber is still hung with black; and there were the chambers successively occupied by the duchesses de Vendôme and all the Condés. There, too, was the salon where a later owner, Madame Dupin, assembled around her Voltaire, the exiled Bolingbroke, Rousseau, and many others of the literary men of the last century. There was also a curious collection of historical portraits of all the chief people who had ever lived in the château, including a portrait of Diane de Poitiers in the character of the goddess of whom she was a namesake, with a taffeta petticoat embroidered with fleurs-de-lis.

Cæsar lodged there his Roman garrison when he warred against the Armoricans. Here the counts d'Anjou, and later the Plantagenets, jealously held their own, and sometimes that which was their neighbors'. These walls served under Charles VII. as the rampart of the national monarchy, menaced by English invasion. They have afforded protection to Catholic royalty. They have been the prison of illustrious victims of royal ingratitude, of powerful rebels, of prisoners of state, of vanquished enemies. No tales of love and joy are hinted to us by those old walls, which only tell of might, and grief, and blood. The grand tragedy of Blois, the splendid pomps of Chambord, the local color and character of Chaumont, the smiling elegance of Chenonceaux, are all wanting to those dull walls, which only speak of ages of brute strength. A dull Opher, serving one and another in turn, but always, like Opher, serving the stronger.

From these walls came the bloody doom of those 12,000 Huguenot prisoners conceived in the celebrated “Conjuration d'Amboise,” which had for its object to extricate the young King Francis II. from the clutches and influence of the Guises in A.D. 1560.

The secret of the plot was betrayed to the Duc de Guise by one of the conspirators, and

HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.