This highly plaster-cast lyric was recited during the 'triomphe' held at Chenonceaux to celebrate the arrival there of François II and Mary Stuart. The hostess was as distinguished as her visitors; and never, before I went to Chenonceaux, did I associate naiads and dryads and poems of welcome with Catherine de'Medici. But we must allow this monstrous personage an eye for good houses. She preferred Chenonceaux to all her dwellings—she preferred it so much, indeed, that she made another lady get out of it, exchanging for it the decidedly inferior residence of Chaumont. And we have Catherine to thank (I fear) for the strangely felicitous fancy that placed upon the arches built from the rear of the house to the farther side of the river by her rejected predecessor, Diane de Poitiers, that enchanting hall or gallery, which rises three stories high, if you count the nine windows in the steeply and gracefully pitched slate roof.
| Basti si magnifiquement |
| Il est debout, comme un géant, |
| Dedans le lit de la rivière, |
| C'est-a-dire dessus un pont |
| Qui porte cent toises de long. |
These verses bump down heavily upon the bridge, and, despite their scrupulous statistics as to its length, they scarcely measure the excellence of Chenonceaux, but rather the gap between French verse and French architecture in the sixteenth century. Villon could have come nearer the mark; but Villon was long gone before the ancient mill on the river Cher was transfigured by its purchaser into the château he did not live to complete. 'S'il vient à point' said Thomas Bohier, and he graved it in many ornamental places of his edifice, 'me souviendra.'
And here am I writing his name and thinking about him, three hundred and ninety-two years after his death. What a pleasant reason for being remembered! What a quietly illustrious introduction to posterity: the originator of the mansion whose sheer beauty brought a succession of kings and queens and other great people to sojourn in it, whose walls have listened to the blandishments of François I, the sallies of Fontenelle and Voltaire, the sentimentalities of Rousseau. Do their ghosts walk here upon these terraces? Do they meet in the long gallery over the Cher? If they don't, they are less wise in the next world than they were in this. Almost might one envy some figure in a well-preserved piece of tapestry, hanging in any hall or chamber here and commanding a view out of any window that looked up or down the placid river. Embroidered thus for ever, amid high company, ladies and gentlemen of importance with hawks and feathers and armor and steeds richly caparisoned, ministered to by esquires and serfs, one would exist admired, valued, and carefully dusted. Daily sight-seers from all lands would be conducted into one's presence (Sundays included, 10-11 A.M., 2-6 P.M.), thus animating one's feudal leisure with sufficient variety. There one would be, an acknowledged masterpiece, for ever aloof from the unstable present, nevermore driven to enlist against the restless evils of the world. The trouble is, somebody from Pittsburg might buy one. Now I could no more brook living as tapestry in America than I could live as an American in Europe, expatriated and trivially evaporating amid beauties and comforts that were none of my native heritage.
Do you know the country where Chenonceaux stands? Do you know the river? Have you ever gone there from Tours, or come there the opposite way, from Bourges through Vierzon and Montrichard?
The region shares a secret with certain rare people, whom all of us are glad to count among our acquaintance. Certain men and women, immediately on our first meeting them, make us desire to meet them again; not because they have uttered remarkable thoughts or reminded us of Venus or Apollo: perhaps they have said nothing that you and I couldn't say, and we may know people much better looking. But they radiate—what is it that they radiate? We feel it, we bask in it, it flows over us. It isn't sunlight or moonlight, but a fairy-light of their own. When these shining creatures come into the room, happiness enters with them. How do they do it? It gets us nowhere to say that there is 'something' in the tone of their voice, or 'something' in the look of their eyes: what is the something? I'm glad I don't know; mystery is growing so scarce, that I am thankful for anything which cannot be explained.
Now this rare quality (and don't flatter yourself that you understand it because you happen to know its name) is possessed not only by men and women, but also by places; and, no more than with people, has it anything to do with their being remarkable or beautiful. The White Mountains in New Hampshire haven't a trace of it; it fills the mountains of North Carolina; there is almost none along our Atlantic seaboard, but it hangs over and haunts nearly every foot of our Pacific Coast.
Whenever one of these happy spots has been long known to man, man has invariably cherished it in word and deed. His chronicles celebrate it; he sets it lovingly like a jewel in his romances, dramas, verse, prose, song; he graces it with his best in architecture; his roads and gardens bring it alike into his hours of work and of ease; in fine, he garlands it with his imagination, weaves it into his life century after century, until it comes to smile upon him from the heart of his History and Literature, as well as upon his daily present. That is what mankind has done beneath the spell of a place which has charm.
Thus Touraine to the Frenchman,—beau pays de Touraine, as the page in Meyerbeer's Huguenots sings of it in that opera's second act, which takes place at Chenonceaux. I suppose—indeed I remember—that rain falls in that country; yet, when I think about it, sunshine invariably sparkles through the picture—not the kind that glares and burns, but the kind that plays gently among leaves and shores and shadows; sunshine upon the twinkling, feathered silver of the poplars, the grapes in sloping vineyards, the green islands and tawny bluffs of the Loire, the quiet waters of the Indre and the Cher; a jocund harmony seems to play about the very names,—Beaulieu, Montrésor, Saint-Symphorien,—but were I to begin upon the music in the names of France, I should run far beyond the limits of Touraine and of your patience. Say to yourself aloud, properly, Amboise, Châteaurenault, La Chapelle-Blanche, Saint-Martin-le-Beau, and then say Naugatuck, Saugatuck, Pawtucket, Woonsocket, Manayunk, Manunkachunk, and you will catch my drift. Stevenson's joy in our names was at bottom purely that of the collector.
But have you ever seen the Loire and its tributary realm? I have already owned myself (together with all other men) as unable to explain the mystery of charm. No Niagara is hereabouts, nor Matterhorn, nor anything you could call sublime; nothing so lustrously beautiful as Bar Harbor, or the Berkshire Hills. Wildness is wholly absent, but so is tameness too. It is somehow through its very moderation that the glamour of this land is wrought. But we must nicely distinguish between the poetry and the prose of moderation: Princeton Junction, New Jersey, is perfectly moderate, and is also the type and pattern of hundreds of thousands of square, comfortable, unoffending miles in the United States which you would never wish to see again—indeed which you would never wish to see once; whereas, even as I write, I am homesick for Touraine, though it isn't my home.