第17章

You may go to Amboise either from Blois or from Tours;it is about halfway between these towns.The great point is to go,especially if you have put it off repeatedly;and to go,if possible,on a day when the great view of the Loire,which you enjoy from the battlements and terraces,presents itself under a friendly sky.Three persons,of whom the author of these lines was one,spent the greater part of a perfect Sunday morning in looking at it.It was astonishing,in the course of the rainiest season in the memory of the oldest Tourangeau,how many perfect days we found to our hand.The town of Amboise lies,like Tours,on the left bank of the river,a little whitefaced town,staring across an admirable bridge,and leaning,behind,as it were,against the pedestal of rock on which the dark castle masses itself.The town is so small,the pedestal so big,and the castle so high and striking,that the clustered houses at the base of the rock are like the crumbs that have fallen from a wellladen table.You pass among them,however,to ascend by a circuit to the chateau,which you attack,obliquely,from behind.It is the property of the Comte de Paris,another pretender to the French throne;having come to him remotely,by inheritance,from his ancestor,the Duc de Penthievre,who toward the close of the last century bought it from the crown,which had recovered it after a lapse.Like the castle of Blois it has been injured and defaced by base uses,but,unlike the castle of Blois,it has not been completely restored."It is very,very dirty,but very curious,"it is in these terms that I heard it described by an English lady,who was generally to be found engaged upon a tattered Tauchnitz in the little salon de lecture of the hotel at Tours.The deion is not inaccurate;but it should be said that if part of the dirtiness of Amboise is the result of its having served for years as a barrack and as a prison,part of it comes from the presence of restoring stonemasons,who have woven over a considerable portion of it a mask of scaffolding.There is a good deal of neatness as well,and the restoration of some of the parts seems finished.This process,at Amboise,consists for the most part of simply removing the vulgar excrescences of the last two centuries.

The interior is virtually a blank,the old apartments having been chopped up into small modern rooms;it will have to be completely reconstructed.Aworthy woman,with a military profile and that sharp,positive manner which the goodwives who show you through the chateaux of Touraine are rather apt to have,and in whose high respectability,to say nothing of the frill of her cap and the cut of her thick brown dress,my companions and I thought we discovered the particular note,or nuance,of Orleanism,a competent,appreciative,peremptory person,I say,attended us through the particularly delightful hour we spent upon the ramparts of Amboise.Denuded and disfeatured within,and bristling without with bricklayers'ladders,the place was yet extraordinarily impressive and interesting.I should confess that we spent a great deal of time in looking at the view.

Sweet was the view,and magnificent;we preferred it so much to certain portions of the interior,and to occasional effusions of historical information,that the old lady with the prove sometimes lost patience with us.We laid ourselves open to the charge of preferring it even to the little chapel of Saint Hubert,which stands on the edge of the great terrace,and has,over the portal,a wonderful sculpture of the miraculous hunt of that holy man.In the way of plastic art this elaborate scene is the gem of Amboise.It seemed to us that we had never been in a place where there are so many points of vantage to look down from.In the matter of position Amboise is certainly supreme among the old houses of the Loire;and Isay this with a due recollection of the claims of Chaumont and of Loches,which latter,by the way (excuse the afterthought),is not on the Loire.The platforms,the bastions,the terraces,the highperched windows and balconies,the hanging gardens and dizzy crenellations,of this complicated structure,keep you in perpetual intercourse with an immense horizon.