We ended our visit by ascending the bell-tower, the summit of which is reached by a succession of ladders, sufficiently steep and not very reassuring. About half way up, in a kind of store-room, through which you pass, we saw a row of gigantic marionettes, coloured and dressed in the fashion of the last century, and used in I don’t know what kind of a procession similar to that of Tarascon.
The magnificent view which is seen from the tall spire amply repays you for all the fatigue of the ascent. The whole town is presented before you with all the sharpness and precision of M. Pelet’s cork-models, so much admired at the last Exposition de l’industrie. This comparison is doubtless very prosaic and unpicturesque; but really I cannot find a better, nor a more accurate one. The dwarfed and misshapen rocks of blue granite, which encase the Tagus and encircle the horizon of Toledo on one side, add still more to the singularity of the landscape, inundated and dominated by crude, pitiless, blinding light, which no reflections temper and which is increased by the cloudless and vapourless sky quivering with white heat like iron in a furnace.
Voyage en Espagne (Paris, new ed. 1865).
THE CHÂTEAU DE CHAMBORD.
JULES LOISELEUR.
Chambord is the Versailles of the feudal monarchy; it was to the Château de Blois, that central residence of the Valois, what Versailles was to the Tuileries; it was the country-seat of Royalty. Tapestries from Arras, Venetian mirrors, curiously sculptured chests, crystal chandeliers, massive silver furniture, and miracles of all the arts, amassed in this palace during eight reigns and dispersed in a single day by the breath of the Revolution, can never be collected again save under one condition: that there should be a sovereign sufficiently powerful and sufficiently artistic, sufficiently concerned about the glory and the memories of the ancient monarchy to make of Chambord what has been made out of the Louvre and Versailles—a museum consecrated to all the intimate marvels, to all the curiosities of the Arts of the Renaissance, at least to all those with which the sovereigns were surrounded, something like the way the Hôtel de Cluny exhibits royal life.
It has often been asked why François I., to whom the banks of the Loire presented many marvellous sites, selected a wild and forsaken spot in the midst of arid plains for the erection of the strange building which he planned. This peculiar choice has been attributed to that prince’s passion for the chase and in memory of his amours with the beautiful Comtesse de Thoury, châtelaine in that neighbourhood, before he ascended the throne.
Independently of these motives, which doubtless counted greatly in his selection, perhaps the very wildness of this place, this distance from the Loire, which reminded him too much of the cares of Royalty, was a determining reason. Kings, like private individuals, and even more than they, experience the need at times of burying themselves, and therefore make a hidden and far-away nest where they may be their own masters and live to please themselves. Moreover, Chambord, with its countless rooms, its secret stairways, and its subterranean passages, seems to have been built for a love which seeks shadow and mystery. At the same time that he hid Chambord in the heart of the uncultivated plains of the Sologne, François I. built in the midst of the Bois de Boulogne a château, where, from time to time, he shut himself up with learned men and artists, and to which the courtiers, who were positively forbidden there, gave the name of Madrid, in memory of the prison in which their master had suffered. Chambord, like Madrid, was not a prison: it was a retreat.
That sentiment of peculiar charm which is attached to the situation of Chambord will be felt by every artist who visits this strange realization of an Oriental dream. At the end of a long avenue of poplars breaking through thin underbrush which bears an illustrious name, like all the roads to this residence, you see, little by little, peeping and mounting upward from the earth, a fairy building, which, rising in the midst of arid sand and heath, produces the most striking and unexpected effect. A genie of the Orient, a poet has said, must have stolen it from the country of sunshine to hide it in the country of fog for the amours of a handsome prince. At the summit of an imposing mass of battlements, of which the first glance discerns neither the style nor the order, above terraces with ornamental balustrades, springs up, as if from a fertile and inexhaustible soil, an incredible vegetation of sculptured stone, worked in a thousand different ways. It is a forest of campaniles, chimneys, sky-lights, domes, and towers, in lace-work and open-work, twisted according to a caprice which excludes neither harmony nor unity, and which ornaments with the Gothic F the salamanders and also the mosaics of slate imitating marble,—a singular poverty in the midst of so much wealth. The beautiful open-worked tower of the large staircase dominates the entire mass of pinnacles and steeples, and bathes in the blue sky its colossal fleur-de-lis, the last point of the highest pinnacle among pinnacles, the highest crown among all crowns....
We must take Chambord for what it is, an ancient Gothic château dressed out in great measure according to the fashion of the Renaissance.
