It opens on each landing to a vast guardroom,in four arms,radiations of the winding shaft.My guide made me climb to the great openwork lantern which,springing from the roof at the termination of the rotund staircase (surmounted here by a smaller one),forms the pinnacle of the bristling crown of Chambord.This lantern is tipped with a huge fleurdelisin stone,the only one,I believe,that the Revolution did not succeed in pulling down.Here,from narrow windows,you look over the wide,flat country and the tangled,melancholy park,with the rotation of its straight avenues.Then you walk about the roof,in a complication of galleries,terraces,balconies,through the multitude of chimneys and gables.This roof,which is in itself a sort of castle in the air,has an extravagant,faboulus quality,and with its profuse ornamentation,the salamander of Francis I.is a contant motive,its lonely pavements,its sunny niches,the balcony that looks down over the closed and grassgrown main entrance,a strange,halfsad,halfbrilliant charm.The stonework is covered with fine mould.There are places that reminded me of some of those quiet,mildewed corners of courts and terraces,into which the traveller who wanders through the Vatican looks down from neglected windows.They show you two or three furnished rooms,with Bourbon portraits,hideous tapestries from the ladies of France,a collection of the toys of the enfant du miracle,all military and of the finest make."Tout cela fonctionne,"the guide said of these miniature weapons;and I wondered,if he should take it into his head to fire off his little canon,how much harm the Comte de Chambord would do.
From below,the castle would look crushed by the redundancy of its upper protuberances if it were not for the enormous girth of its round towers,which appear to give it a robust lateral development.These towers,however,fine as they are in their way,struck me as a little stupid;they are the exaggeration of an exaggeration.In a building erected after the days of defence,and proclaiming its peaceful character from its hundred embroideries and cupolas,they seem to indicate a want of invention.I shall risk the accusation of bad taste if I say that,impressive as it is,the Chateau de Chambord seemed to me to have altogether a little of that quality of stupidity.The trouble is that it represents nothing very particular;it has not happened,in spite of sundry vicissitudes,to have a very interesting history.Compared with that of Blois and Amboise,its past is rather vacant;and one feels to a certain extent the contrast between its pompous appearance and its spacious but somewhat colorless annals.It had indeed the good fortune to be erected by Francis I.,whose name by itself expresses a good deal of history.Why he should have built a palace in those sandy plains will ever remain an unanswered question,for kings have never been obliged to give reasons.In addition to the fact that the country was rich in game and that Francis was a passionate hunter,it is suggested by M.de la Saussaye,the author of the very complete little history of Chambord which you may buy at the bookseller's at Blois,that he was govemed in his choice of the site by the accident of a charming woman having formerly lived there.The Comtesse de Thoury had a manor in the neighborhood,and the Comtesse de Thoury had been the object of a youthful passion on the part of the most susceptible of princes before his accession to the throne.This great pile was reared,therefore,according to M.de la Saussaye,as a souvenir de premieres amours!It is certainly a very massive memento;and if these tender passages were proportionate to the building that commemorates them,they were tender indeed.There has been much discussion as to the architect employed by Francis I.,and the honor of having designed this splendid residence has been claimed for several of the Italian artists who early in the sixteenth century came to seek patronage in France.It seems well established today,however,that Chambord was the work neither of Primaticcio,of Vignola,nor of Il Rosso,all of whom have left some trace of their sojourn in France;but of an obscure yet very complete genius,Pierre Nepveu,known as Pierre Trinqueau,who is designated in the papers which preserve in some degree the history of the origin of the edifice,as the maistre de l'oeuvre de maconnerie.Behind this modest title,apparently,we must recognize one of the most original talents of the French Renaissance;and it is a proof of the vigor of the artistic life of that period that,brilliant production being everywhere abundant,an artist of so high a value should not have been treated by his contemporaries as a celebrity.We manage things very differently today.
The immediate successors of Francis I.continued to visit,Chambord;but it was neglected by Henry IV.,and was never afterwards a favorite residence of any French king.Louis XIV.appeared there on several occasions,and the apparition was characteristically brilliant;but Chambord could not long detain a monarch who had gone to the expense of creating a Versailles ten miles from Paris.With Versailles,Fontainebleau,SaintGermain,and SaintCloud within easy reach of their capital,the later French sovereigns had little reason to take the air in the dreariest province of their kingdom.Chambord therefore suffered from royal indifference,though in the last century a use was found for its deserted halls.In 1725it was occupied by the luckless Stanislaus Leszczynski,who spent the greater part of his life in being elected King of Poland and being ousted from his throne,and who,at this time a refugee in France,had found a compensation for some of his misfortunes in marrying his daughter to Louis XV.He lived eight years at Chambord,and filled up the moats of the castle.