Montrichard, with Chinon, takes the lead in interesting old houses in these parts; in fact, they quite rival the ruinous lean-to houses of Rouen and Lisieux in Normandy, which is saying a good deal for their picturesque qualities.
One-third of Montrichard's population live underground or in houses built up against the hillsides. Even the lovely old parish church backs against the rock.
Everywhere are stairways and petits chemins leading upward or downward, with little façades, windows, or doorways coming upon one in most unexpected and mysterious fashion at every turn.
The magnificent donjon is a relic of the work of that great fortress-builder, Foulques Nerra, Comte d'Anjou, who dotted the land wherever he trod with these masterpieces of their kind, most of them great rectangular structures like the donjons of Britain, but quite unlike the structures of their class mostly seen in France.
Richard Cœur de Lion occupied the fortress in 1108, but was obliged to succumb to his rival in power, Philippe-Auguste, who in time made a breach in its walls and captured it. Thereafter it became an outpost of his own, from whence he could menace the Comte d'Anjou.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAMBORD
Chambord is four leagues from Blois, from which point it is usually approached. To reach it one crosses the Sologne, not the arid waste it has been pictured, but a desert which has been made to blossom as the rose.
A glance of the eye, given anywhere along the road from Blois to Chambord, will show a vineyard of a thousand, two thousand, or even more acres, where, from out of a soil that was once supposed to be the poorest in all wine-growing France, may be garnered a crop equalling a hundred dozen of bottles of good rich wine to the acre.
This wine of the Sologne is not one of the famous wines of France, to be sure, but what one gets in these parts is pure and astonishingly palatable; moreover, one can drink large portions of it—as do the natives—without being affected in either his head or his pocket-book.