If the betrothal of Charles and Anne was accomplished with scant ceremony, their marriage at Langeais was celebrated in due form. The bride, accompanied by a distinguished suite, is described, as she arrived at the château upon her palfrey, wearing a rich travelling costume of cloth and velvet, trimmed with one hundred and thirty-nine sable skins. Her wedding dress of cloth of gold was even more sumptuous, as it was adorned with one hundred and sixty sable skins. Fortunately for the comfort of the wearer, the wedding was in December, and in these stone buildings, destitute of adequate heating arrangements, fur garments must have been particularly comfortable. The nuptial benediction was pronounced by the Bishop of Angers, probably in a chapel which was formerly in the southwest wing of the château, and in the presence of the Prince of Orange, the Duke of Bourbon, the Chancellor of France and other nobles of high degree, among them the Duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis XII, who was destined to become the second husband of Anne. One of the articles of the marriage contract signed in this room at Langeais was that if Charles should die without issue Anne should marry the next heir to the crown, thus uniting Brittany indissolubly with France.
Brantôme described the fourteen-year-old bride as pretty, with black eyes, well-marked eyebrows, black hair, fresh complexion and a dimpled chin, but as Lydia says, one cannot always trust Brantôme, as he painted Catherine de Médici whom he beheld with his mortal eyes in all the glory of the lily and rose, and later, when he saw Queen Elizabeth in London, he wrote of her as beautiful and of lofty bearing. It is quite evident that Brantôme's eyes were bedazzled by the glitter of royalty, or was it the glitter of royal gold?
"Well, whether or not Anne was beautiful, it is a comfort to have her safely married in the midst of so much confusion and warfare," said Miss Cassandra, with the satisfied air of a mother who has just made an eligible marriage for her daughter.
"But we have not done with her yet," exclaimed Lydia. "We shall meet her and her ermine tails and tasseled ropes in every château of the Loire, and at Amboise we shall go a step further in her history, and only reach the last chapter at Blois."
Café Rabelais opposite Château of Langeais
From the mediæval fortress, with its wealth of French and English history that Lydia and our guide poured into our willing ears, we crossed the Rue Gambetta to the little Café Rabelais, opposite the entrance to the château, where we spent a cheerful quart d'heure over cups of tea, and classic buns that are temptingly displayed in the window. Although this genial reformed monk, as Walter is pleased to call Rabelais, was born at Chinon, he seems to have lived at Langeais at two different periods of his wandering and eventful life, Guillaume, Sieur de Langeais, having given him a cottage near the château.
Having come to Langeais by train we engaged a hack to convey us to Azay-le-Rideau, a drive of about six miles. As we drove over a long bridge that crosses the Loire, we had another view of the château, with its three massive towers, many chimneys, and of the wide shining river that flows beside it, bordered by tall poplars and dotted with green islets. Our drive was through a level farming land, where men and women were at work cutting grass and turning over the long rows of yellow flax which were drying in the sun. Here again we saw many women with the large baskets or hottes on their backs, as if to remind us that the burden-bearers are not all of Italy, for the women of France work quite as hard as the men, more constantly it would seem, if we may judge by the number of men who are to be seen loafing about the little inns and cabarets.
Across the wide, low-lying fields and pasture lands, we could see the long line of foliage that marks the forest of Chambord. All these great country palaces of the kings and nobles of France were comparatively near each other, "quite within visiting distance," as Miss Cassandra says. As we walked along the avenue of horse-chestnut trees, and over the little bridge that spans the Indre, we felt that no site could have been better chosen for the building of a palace of pleasure than this. With a background of forest trees, a river flowing around it, the stone walls and bridges draped with a brilliant crimson curtain of American ivy, the Château of Azay-le-Rideau justifies Balzac's enthusiastic description: "A diamond with a thousand facets, with the Indre for a setting and perched on piles buried in flowers." Yet this gay palace, like most of the châteaux of the Loire, has arisen upon the foundations of a fortress, and its odd name was given it in honor of a certain Hughes Ridel or Rideau, who in the thirteenth century built a castle on an island to defend the passage of the Indre, the position being an important one strategically. When our old Dijon friend, Jean Sans-Peur, came this way in 1417, he took care to place a garrison of several hundred men at Azay. These Burgundian soldiers, having a high opinion of the strength of the castle and of their own prowess, undertook to jeer at the Dauphin, afterwards Charles VII, as he passed by on his way from Chinon to Tours, upon which he laid siege to Azay and captured and meted out summary vengeance upon those who had mocked at and insulted him. The story told to us sounds, as Miss Cassandra says, like a chapter from the Chronicles or the Book of Kings, for although a great bear did not come out of the woods and devour those wicked mockers, they were hanged, every one, their captain was beheaded and the castle razed to the ground.
Upon the piles of the old fortress the Château of Azay arose to please the fancy of a certain Grilles Berthold, a relative of the Bohier who built the Château of Chenonceaux, and like him a minister of Finance.