I found myself thinking of Poe's descent of the Maelström, and when I said so to Brown afterwards, it turned out that he'd read it. He had the car perfectly in hand, and steered it to a hair's breadth. We were down in a moment-or it seemed so; and coming out into the bright little streets was like waking up after a strange dream. In three minutes more we were at the door of our hotel, and I really was asking myself if I had dreamed it.
"Brown," said I, "I told you once before that you were a leather angel. Now I believe you are a grey tweed Genie. This has been the nicest morning of my life. But you really must tell me how much you paid that custodian, and let me give you back the money at once."
He interrupted himself in the midst of a beaming smile to wrinkle his eyebrows together. "It's been a nice morning for me, too, miss," said he quite humbly; "but it will half spoil it if you won't let it stand as it is. It was only a few francs, and as you pay me a good screw, I can well afford it. You're always so good, that I know you'd be sorry to hurt my feelings."
Well, of course I would; so I couldn't say any more, could I? Though before all these motor-car wonders began it would have felt odd to take a "treat" from one's servant.
Now, Dad, I'm getting conscience-stricken, and keep wondering with every paragraph (especially what I call my "descriptive" paragraphs) if I'm boring you. I won't give you our daily programme en masse. I'll just sum things up by saying that we've simply lived, moved, and had our being in, on, or at castles. This country of the Loire is a sort of fairyland, where everybody had a castle, or at the very least a lordly dwelling-place that was more fortress than private house. You can't look up or down the river but that on every hill you see a château, with enough history clustering about it to make up a fat volume. How they all escaped the Revolution is a marvel. But they have; and if they've been much restored, it is so cleverly done that the most critical eyes are deceived.
If I could live in one of the "show" châteaux, I'd choose Chenonceaux. We drove to it on the day of the Tower, as I've labelled it in my book of memory, "taking it in" on our way to Tours. It's no use your making a note of that wish of mine, though Dad, and trying to buy it, because somebody else has done that already. But if you can find a river as pretty as the Cher (an appropriate name for the little daughter of the Loire, on which-over which, literally, Chenonceaux stands), you might build me one on the same pattern, so I'll give you a general idea of what the castle is like.
Let me see, what is it like? To make a comparison would be giving to an airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Not that Chenonceaux is nothing-quite the opposite; but it leaves in the mind an impression of airiness and gaiety, sweet and elusive as one of those quaint French chansons you like me to sing you, with my guitar, on a summer evening. I think, even if I hadn't been told, I should have felt instinctively that it must have been built to please a pretty, capricious woman. If such a woman could be turned into a house, she would look like Chenonceaux, and wouldn't suffer by the change. Perhaps Diane de Poitiers isn't a proper object of sympathy for a well-brought-up young lady like Chauncy Randolph's daughter; but I can't help pitying her, because that horrid old frump of a Catherine de Medici grabbed it away from her before Henry the Second was hardly cold in his grave. Think how Diane, who had loved the place, must have felt to fancy that stuffy Catherine in her everlasting black dresses, squatting in her beautiful rooms! We saw those rooms, by the way, for we came on one of the days when people are allowed to go through the Château (Brown had planned that), and the clever millionaires who own it have had the sense and the grace to leave everything just as it was, at least in Catherine's time. And one can take the bad, Catherine taste out of one's mouth by thinking of lovely little Mary Stuart singing like a lark through the rooms, and living there and in the garden the happiest days that she was ever to know.
One wouldn't suppose that a gloomy, plotting mind like Catherine's would have had a place in it for creating beauty; but it had its one ornamental corner, or she couldn't have thought out the bridge-gallery thrown across the Cher, springing from the original building and spanning the river to the farther shore.
There are two storeys over the bridge, long corridors, all windows, and lovely green and gold river lights, netted over the floors and walls-the most exquisite effect. I walked there, calling up the spirits of vanished queens and princesses-the "dear, dead women," seeing "all the gold that used to fall and hang about their shoulders." Oh, I've got the quotation wrong, but it's Aunt Mary's fault, for at this very minute she's reading aloud to herself in a guide-book about Rousseau and a lot of other shining lights who used to visit Chenonceaux when it belonged to Monsieur and Madame Dupin; but those days were comparatively modern, so I don't take much interest. Nothing at Chenonceaux seems worth while unless it happened before the days of Charles the Ninth.
Tours looked at first sight very sedate and grey, after Chenonceaux, for the airy picture of the castle had kept floating before my eyes during our run. It seems to me we are always on the other side of the river from things, and have to get to them by crossing long bridges. We did it again at Tours, and it was particularly long, and very fine. But it was evening, and dim and bitterly cold; and I'm afraid I shouldn't have paid as much attention to it as I did if Brown hadn't said that Balzac called it "one of the finest monuments of France." And then in a minute, at the entrance to the town, we saw two ghostly white statues glimmering in a wide, green place. "There, miss, are the two tutelary geniuses of this part of France," said Brown; "Rabelais and Descartes." By that time we had flashed past, but I screwed my neck round to look back at them till I got a "crick" in it. Have you ever noticed that most of the things people tell you to look at, or that you particularly want to see in life, are always behind your back or on one side, as if to give you the greatest possible trouble? It seems as if there must be a "moral in it," as Alice's Duchess would have said.