From late September to early December there is a constant harvest going on in the vineyards, whose labourers, if not as picturesque and joyous as we are wont to see them on the comic-opera stage, are at least wonderfully clever and industrious, for they make a good wine crop out of a soil which previously gave a living only to charcoal-burners and goat-keepers.
François was indeed a rare devotee of the building mania when he laid out the wood which surrounds Chambord and which ultimately grew to some splendour. The nineteenth century saw this great wood cut and sold in huge quantities, so that to-day it is rather a scanty copse through which one drives on the way from Blois.
The country round about is by no means impoverished,—far from it. It is simply unworked to its fullest extent as yet. As it is plentifully surrounded by water it makes an ideal land for the growing of asparagus, strawberries, and grapes, and so it has come to be one of the most prosperous and contented regions in all the Loire valley.
The great white Château de Chambord, with its turrets and its magnificent lantern, looms large from whatever direction it is approached, though mostly it is framed by the somewhat stunted pines which make up the pleasant forest. The vistas which one sees when coming toward Chambord, through the drives and alleys of its park, with the château itself brilliant in the distance, are charming and fairy-like indeed. Straight as an arrow these roadways run, and he who traverses one of those centring at the château will see a tiny white fleck in the sunlight a half a dozen kilometres away, which, when it finally is reached, will be admitted to be the greatest triumph of the art-loving monarch.
François Premier was foremost in every artistic expression in France, and the court, as may be expected, were only too eager to follow the expensive tastes of their monarch,—when they could get the means, and when they could not, often enough François supplied the wherewithal.
François himself dressed in the richest of Italian velvets, the more brilliant the better, with a preponderant tendency toward pink and sky blue.
A dozen years after François came to the throne, a dozen years after the pleasant life of Amboise, when mother, daughter, and son lived together on the banks of the Loire in that "Trinity of love," the monarch and his wife, Queen Claude of France, the daughter of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, came to live at Chambord on the edge of the sandy Sologne waste.
Here, too, came Marguerite d'Alençon, the ever faithful and devoted sister of François, the duke, her husband, and all the gay members of the court. The hunt was the order of the day, for the forest tract of the Sologne, scanty though it was in growth, abounded in small game.
Chambord at this time had not risen to the grand and ornate proportions which we see to-day, but set snugly on the low, swampy banks of the tiny river Cosson, a dull, gloomy mediæval fortress, whose only aspect of gaiety was that brought by the pleasure-loving court when it assembled there. In size it was ample to accommodate the court, but François's artistic temperament already anticipated many and great changes. The Loire was to be turned from its course and the future pompous palace was to have its feet bathed in the limpid Loire water rather than in the stagnant pools of the morass which then surrounded it.
As a triumph of the royal château-builder's art, Chambord is far and away ahead of Fontainebleau or Versailles, both of which were built in a reign which ended two hundred years later than that which began with the erection of Chambord. As an example of the arts of François I. and his time compared with those of Louis XIV. and his, Chambord stands forth with glorious significance.