I never realised what an important lady Anne of Brittany was, till I was introduced to her sweet little ermine at Blois. Brown hinted then that I would keep on realising it more and more as we drove through the Loire country, and so I do. This chapel was hers-built for her, and I envy her having it. Couldn't you, Dad dear, just make a bid, and have it taken over for our garden at Lennox? But no! that would be sacrilege. It's almost sacrilege even to joke about it. Yet, oh, that carving of St. Hubert and his holy stag over the door! I've no jewellery so lovely as that cameo in stone; and I've got to leave it behind in Europe.
Poor Charles the Eighth, too, seemed to come to us like a human, every day young man one knew when we saw the low doorway where he knocked his head and killed himself, running in a great hurry to play tennis. How little he guessed when he started that he should never have that game, and why! I wonder if Anne was sorry when he died, or if she liked having another wedding and being a queen all over again when she married Louis the Twelfth?
I should have thought more about the ladies' love affairs, only I got so interested in an oubliette, and in a perfectly Titanic round tower, with an inclined plane corkscrewing up, round and round inside it, so broad and so gradual that horses and carriages used in old, old days to be driven from the town-level up to the top. "Only think what fun, Brown," I couldn't help saying, "if we could drive the car up here!" "The idea!" sniffed Aunt Mary. "As if they'd allow such a thing!" But Brown didn't answer; he just looked thoughtfully at the gradient.
We went up, too, on the top of one of the great towers of the castle itself, and it was glorious to stand there looking away over the windings of the river. We were at a bend midway between Blois and Tours, and ever so far off we could see two little horns sticking up over the undulations of the land. They were the towers of the cathedral of Tours; and in that same direction Brown showed me a queer thing like a long, thin finger pointing at the sky-the Lanterne of Rochecorbon. They used to flash signals from it all the way to Amboise, and so on to Blois, when any horror happened with which they were particularly pleased, like a massacre of Huguenots.
Now, most patient gentleman, at last I've finished my harangue. I'm ashamed to think how long it is, but I'm writing wrapped up in a warm coat, under a tilleul in the Château garden, where I've been allowed to bring my campstool. Do you know what a tilleul is? I don't believe you do. I didn't till the other day; but I shan't tell you, except that the very name suggests to me leisured ease and sauntering courtiers. You must come over to France and find out-and incidentally fetch me home-only not yet, please, oh, not yet. As for the tilleul, if you've any romance left in your dear old body you'd love sitting under it, even in winter. If it were summer, with the limes in blossom-well, the best way to express my feeling is to remark that if, in June moonlight, under a tilleul, a man I hated should propose to me, I'd believe for the moment I loved him and say "Yes-yes!" But you need not be frightened; it isn't summer or moonlight, and there's no man except Brown within a hundred miles of your silly
Molly.
MOLLY RANDOLPH TO HER FATHER
Tours, December 3.