[Original]
The great dining-room and salons (in feudal times the "Salle des Gardes") have been turned into dormitories, white cots stand in rows beneath the painted beams of the ceilings; frescoed knights, bishops and ladies gaze down from the lofty walls on the broken soldiers of today; hooded chimneys of stone, heavily carved with armorial bearings, still burn, in their black depths, logs from the neighboring forest. Through cross-barred windows, cut in eighteen feet of masonry, one catches glimpses of white and blue skies, of seas of verdant leaves, of sunlight glinting on yellow lichen roofs far below. A pale blue smoke drifts upward, the voices of children, the clang of forge, the lowing of cattle in the market place, sound faintly through the autumn air, and gazing downwards from this elevation, one realizes vaguely how great was the distance, socially and morally, separating in the middle ages the serf from his overlord!
After a most excellent luncheon of chicken "en casserole," venison, fresh vegetables and salads, a pastry and some fine Burgundy (all furnished by the estate, except the wine), the host and hostess, the singer, my husband and I, climbed around the upper turrets, gazed down through the "Machiacoli" whence boiling oil was hurled on the besieger in the Dark Ages, scrambled through low stone arches, up corkscrew-stairs to the bedroom of the famous Comte de Chateaubriand, great-uncle of the present owner, and from whom she inherited the property. Here he spent his lonely childhood, full of dreams and fears; in one of his books, complaining of the bats circling and flapping outside his window, in the moonlight, around this white-washed room high up in this silent tower! What a dreary abode for an imaginative boy!
Down the turning staircase, where an ancestral ghost with a wooden leg and accompanied by a spectral cat "walks" before any disaster comes to the family, we came to the Poet's Library, a circular room, lined from floor to ceiling with books, as well as many unbound manuscripts. A ladder on runners can be pushed around to reach the higher rows. Here are many family relics; a comfortable oak armchair and table before the open fireplace, where Chateaubriand wrote many of his world-renowned books.
On returning to one of the salons, we found some thirty-five wounded awaiting the little concert we had arranged for them. Some village notables, the mayor, the cure, the postmaster and a few elderly neighbors, were amongst them.
The singer, Miss Marion Gregory, of New York, confided to me afterwards that she was so overcome, facing those poor wounded fellows, especially the blind with their sightless eyes turned towards her, that her voice seemed to die in her throat; but the singer was new to all the pain and sorrow, having only just come from "'God's Country." She said she had faced many large audiences in America, but never with so many qualms. The soldiers, however, ignoring this, sat in blissful attention, enjoying every note of her lovely voice, and heartily applauding. The postmaster then recited some stirring French poetry, then, rising, we all sang the "Marseillaise." One poor blind boy, with tears streaming down, said to me: "Oh, Madame, I am so sad, I have no longer eyes to see to fight to avenge the wrongs of my beloved France."
A "gouter" served in the dining-hall made us all very cheerful. Speeches were made, hands shaken, toasts drunk, in that excellent wine of Champagne to "la Victoire," and to the intimacy of France and the United States.
The Comte and his beautiful wife, surrounded by their "blessés," bade us farewell at the foot of the "escalier d'honneur;" the castle behind them looming gray and forbidding against the evening sky. The sun, gilding the crests of the chestnuts and oaks and glinting on the tricolor, the Red Cross flag and the family banner hanging limply in the lambent air, sent its flood of red over the little group.
As we waved goodbye, we felt how intimately the past and present are related. How great traditions never die, but repeat themselves in national life from generation to generation. The high caring for the humble, the rich for the poor. How love of country wipes out all distinctions of caste, making France what she is today, the world's example of sacrifice, devotion and patriotism.