The second time I went to Blois I took a carriage for Chambord,and came back by the Chateau de Cheverny and the forest of Russy,a charming little expedition,to which the beauty of the afternoon (the finest in a rainy season that was spotted with bright days)contributed not a little.To go to Chambord,you cross the Loire,leave it on one side,and strike away through a country in which salient features become less and less numerous,and which at last has no other quality than a look of intense,and peculiar rurality,the characteristic,even when it is not the charm,of so much of the landscape of France.This is not the appearance of wildness,for it goes with great cultivation;it is simply the presence of the delving,drudging,economizing peasant.But it is a deep,unrelieved rusticity.It is a peasant's landscape;not,as in England,a landlord's.On the way to Chambord you enter the flat and sandy Sologne.The wide horizon opens out like a great potager,without interruptions,without an eminence,with here and there a long,low stretch of wood.There is an absence of hedges,fences,signs of property;everything is absorbed in the general flatness,the patches of vineyard,the scattered cottages,the villages,the children (planted and staring and almost always pretty),the women in the fields,the white caps,the faded blouses,the big sabots.At the end of an hour's drive (they assure you at Blois that even with two horses you will spend double that time),I passed through a sort of gap in a wall,which does duty as the gateway of the domain of an exiled pretender.I drove along a straight avenue,through a disfeatured park,the park of Chambord has twentyone miles of circumference,a very sandy,scrubby,melancholy plantation,in which the timber must have been cut many times over and is today a mere tangle of brushwood.Here,as in so many spots in France,the traveller perceives that he is in a land of revolutoins.Nevertheless,its great extent and the long perspective of its avenues give this desolate boskage a certain majesty;just as its shabbiness places it in agreement with one of the strongest impressions of the chateau.You follow one of these long perspectives a proportionate time,and at last you see the chimneys and pinnacles of Chambord rise apparently out of the ground.The fillingin of the wide moats that formerly surrounded it has,in vulgar parlance,let it down,bud given it an appearance of topheaviness that is at the same time a magnificent Orientalism.The towers,the turrets,the cupolas,the gables,the lanterns,the chimneys,look more like the spires of a city than the salient points of a single building.
You emerge from the avenue and find yourself at the foot of an enormous fantastic mass.Chambord has a strange mixture of society and solitude.A little village clusters within view of its stately windows,and a couple of inns near by offer entertainment to pilgrims.These things,of course,are incidents of the political proion which hangs its thick veil over the place.
Chambord is truly royal,royal in its great scale,its grand air,its indifference to common considerations.
If a cat may look at a king,a palace may lock at a tavern.I enjoyed my visit to this extraordinary structure as much as if I had been a legitimist;and indeed there is something interesting in any monument of a great system,any bold presentation of a tradition.
You leave your vehicle at one of the inns,which are very decent and tidy,and in which every one is very civil,as if in this latter respect the influence of the old regime pervaded the neighborhood,and you walk across the grass and the gravel to a small door,a door infinitely subordinate and conferring no title of any kind on those who enter it.Here you ring a bell,which a highly respectable person answers (a person perceptibly affiliated,again,to the old regime),after which she ushers you across a vestibule into an inner court.Perhaps the strongest impression I got at Chambord came to me as I stood in this court.
The woman who admitted me did not come with me;I was to find my guide somewhere else.The specialty of Chambord is its prodigious round towers.
There are,I believe,no less than eight of them,placed at each angle of the inner and outer square of buildings;for the castle is in the form of a larger structure which encloses a smaller one.One of these towers stood before me in the court;it seemed to fling its shadow over the place;while above,as Ilooked up,the pinnacles and gables,the enormous chimneys,soared into the bright blue air.The place was empty and silent;shadows of gargoyles,of extraordinary projections,were thrown across the clear gray surfaces.One felt that the whole thing was monstrous.A cicerone appeared,a languid young man in a rather shabby livery,and led me about with a mixture of the impatient and the desultory,of condescension and humility.I do not profess to understand the plan of Chambord,and I may add that Ido not even desire to do so;for it is much more entertaining to think of it,as you can so easily,as an irresponsible,insoluble labyrinth.Within,it is a wilderness of empty chambers,a royal and romantic barrack.The exiled prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four hundred rooms;he contents himself with preserving the huge outside.
The repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb a large part of his revenue.The great feature of the interior is the celebrated double staircase,rising straight through the building,with two courses of steps,so that people may ascend and descend without meeting.This staircase is a truly majestic piece of humor;it gives you the note,as it were,of Chambord.