You poor, dear, stay-at-home Dad, to think of your never having seen any of these lovely places that you've nobly sent me to browse among! You say you admire Wall Street more than French châteaux, and that when you want a grand view you can go and look at Brooklyn Bridge or the statue of Liberty by night; but you don't know what you're missing. And if travelling would really bore you, why do you like me to describe things, so that I can "give you a picture though my eyes"?
I wonder if girls who have lived all their lives in old, old countries can have the same sort of awed, surprised, almost dream-like feeling that comes to me when I see these great feudal castles that are like history in stone? Yes, in stone, and yet the stone seems alive too as if it were the flesh of history; and as I think of all the things that have happened behind the splendid walls, I can hear history's heart beating as if it and the world were young with me.
This château country of the Loire must be one of the most interesting spots on earth, centring as it did the old Court life of France, and Brown says it really is so. He has travelled tremendously and remembers everything, though he is nothing but a chauffeur.
Each place we have come to I have thought must be the best; but I know that no other castle will make me take Amboise down off the pedestal I've set it on, in my mind.
As I glanced up at it in the sunshine the great white carved façade dazzled me. It looked as if it had been cut out of ivory. The bridge rests on an island in the middle of the wide, yellow, slow-moving stream of the Loire, which has a curiously still surface like ice. Brown drove slowly without my having to ask. He's wonderful that way. He always knows what you are feeling, as if you had telegraphed him the news. And there before us lay the little town of Amboise, sprinkled along the river-bank as if each house were a votive offering on the shrine of the Château towering above on its plateau of rock.
I couldn't make out the architecture at first. The castle was just a vast, dazzling complication of enormous round towers, bastions, terraces, balconies, and crenellations. Oh, those balconies! Instantly I could see poor little fainting Queen Mary held up by wicked Catherine de Medici-the record wickedest mother-in-law of history-to watch the execution of the Huguenots. And then the row of heads hanging from the balcony afterwards, like terrible red gargoyles! When we went into the Château later the custodian, or whatever you call him, showed us where the fine ironwork was stained and rusted with the Huguenots' blood.
I was very angry with Aunt Mary because she kept her nose in her Baedeker, and preferred reading about the castle to seeing it when she had the chance. I have my opinion of people who won't take their Baedeker in doses either before or after meals of sight-seeing; but Aunt Mary spreads it so thick over hers that what's underneath is lost.
We drove to a nice little hotel tucked away at the foot of the Château, for déjeuner, and to get rid of our luggage, for we'd have to stop at Amboise till the four new tyres (which Brown now wired for) should arrive from Paris. We had so many courses that I grew quite impatient, for I wanted to be off to the castle. And to save time I insisted on Brown lunching with us. That's happened before several times, so that it doesn't seem at all strange now, though Aunt Mary fussed at first, and even I felt rather funny. But the queer part is, it's so much more difficult to remember that Brown's not a gentleman than to make an effort to be civil to him as if he were one. Rattray at the table was beyond words, and so are a lot of Frenchmen who ought to know better; but-you'll laugh at me-I don't see how a duke could eat any better than Brown, or have nicer hands and nails; though how he does it with the car to clean is more than I can tell.
We came towards the castle, after déjeuner, from the back through the town, which was gay with booths and blue blouses and pretty peasant girls, because the market was being held. We went right through the crowd, up, up a sloping path, where suddenly we were in a restful silence, after the chattering and chaffering below. And I felt as if we had got into a novel of Scott's; for if we'd been his characters he would have brought us up short at a secretive door in a tower, just like the one where we had to knock. One couldn't guess what would be on the other side of that tower; and it was like walking on through the next chapter of the same novel (walking slowly and with dignity, so that we might "live up to" the author of our being) to wander up a steep road leading to a plateau and reach the still, formal garden with the great castle rising out of it.
On this plateau a lovely thing simply took my eyes captive and wouldn't let them go. It was the most perfect gem of a little chapel out of dreamland. Brown said it was "a jewel of the pure Gothic, one of the most precious of the florid kind in France." Comic to have one's chauffeur talking to one like that, isn't it? But I'm used to it now, and feel quite injured if Brown happens not to know something I ask him about.