Catherine De Medici

III

THE CHATEAU DE BLOIS

The banks of the Loire, from Blois to Angers, were the favorite resort of the last two branches of the royal race which occupied the throne before the house of Bourbon.  That beautiful valley plain so well deserves the honor bestowed upon it by kings that we must here repeat what was said of it by one of our most eloquent writers:—­

“There is one province in France which is never sufficiently admired.  Fragrant as Italy, flowery as the banks of the Guadalquivir, beautiful especially in its own characteristics, wholly French, having always been French,—­unlike in that respect to our northern provinces, which have degenerated by contact with Germany, and to our southern provinces, which have lived in concubinage with Moors, Spaniards, and all other nationalities that adjoined them.  This pure, chaste, brave, and loyal province is Touraine.  Historic France is there!  Auvergne is Auvergne, Languedoc is only Languedoc; but Touraine is France; the most national river for Frenchmen is the Loire, which waters Touraine.  For this reason we ought not to be surprised at the great number of historically noble buildings possessed by those departments which have taken the name, or derivations of the name, of the Loire.  At every step we take in this land of enchantment we discover a new picture, bordered, it may be, by a river, or a tranquil lake reflecting in its liquid depths a castle with towers, and woods and sparkling waterfalls.  It is quite natural that in a region chosen by Royalty for its sojourn, where the court was long established, great families and fortunes and distinguished men should have settled and built palaces as grand as themselves.”

But is it not incomprehensible that Royalty did not follow the advice indirectly given by Louis XI. to place the capital of the kingdom at Tours?  There, without great expense, the Loire might have been made accessible for the merchant service, and also for vessels-of-war of light draught.  There, too, the seat of government would have been safe from the dangers of invasion.  Had this been done, the northern cities would not have required such vast sums of money spent to fortify them, —­sums as vast as were those expended on the sumptuous glories of Versailles.  If Louis XIV. had listened to Vauban, who wished to build his great palace at Mont Louis, between the Loire and the Cher, perhaps the revolution of 1789 might never have taken place.

These beautiful shores still bear the marks of royal tenderness.  The chateaus of Chambord, Amboise, Blois, Chenonceaux, Chaumont, Plessis-les-Tours, all those which the mistresses of kings, financiers, and nobles built at Veretz, Azay-le-Rideau, Usse, Villandri, Valencay, Chanteloup, Duretal, some of which have disappeared, though most of them still remain, are admirable relics which remind us of the marvels of a period that is little understood by the literary sect of the Middle-agists.

Among all these chateaus, that of Blois, where the court was then staying, is one on which the magnificence of the houses of Orleans and of Valois has placed its brilliant sign-manual,—­making it the most interesting of all for historians, archaeologists, and Catholics.  It was at the time of which we write completely isolated.  The town, enclosed by massive walls supported by towers, lay below the fortress,—­for the chateau served, in fact, as fort and pleasure-house.  Above the town, with its blue-tiled, crowded roofs extending then, as now, from the river to the crest of the hill which commands the right bank, lies a triangular plateau, bounded to the west by a streamlet, which in these days is of no importance, for it flows beneath the town; but in the fifteenth century, so say historians, it formed quite a deep ravine, of which there still remains a sunken road, almost an abyss, between the suburbs of the town and the chateau.

It was on this plateau, with a double exposure to the north and south, that the counts of Blois built, in the architecture of the twelfth century, a castle where the famous Thibault de Tircheur, Thibault le Vieux, and others held a celebrated court.  In those days of pure fuedality, in which the king was merely primus inter pares (to use the fine expression of a king of Poland), the counts of Champagne, the counts of Blois, those of Anjou, the simple barons of Normandie, the dukes of Bretagne, lived with the splendor of sovereign princes and gave kings to the proudest kingdoms.  The Plantagenets of Anjou, the Lusignans of Poitou, the Roberts of Normandie, maintained with a bold hand the royal races, and sometimes simple knights like du Glaicquin refused the purple, preferring the sword of a connetable.

When the Crown annexed the county of Blois to its domain, Louis XII., who had a liking for this residence (perhaps to escape Plessis of sinister memory), built at the back of the first building another building, facing east and west, which connected the chateau of the counts of Blois with the rest of the old structures, of which nothing now remains but the vast hall in which the States-general were held under Henri III.

Before he became enamoured of Chambord, Francois I. wished to complete the chateau of Blois by adding two other wings, which would have made the structure a perfect square.  But Chambord weaned him from Blois, where he built only one wing, which in his time and that of his grandchildren was the only inhabited part of the chateau.  This third building erected by Francois I. is more vast and far more decorated than the Louvre, the chateau of Henri II.  It is in the style of architecture now called Renaissance, and presents the most fantastic features of that style.  Therefore, at a period when a strict and jealous architecture ruled construction, when the Middle Ages were not even considered, at a time when literature was not as clearly welded to art as it is now, La Fontaine said of the chateau de Blois, in his hearty, good-humored way:  “The part that Francois I. built, if looked at from the outside, pleased me better than all the rest; there I saw numbers of little galleries, little windows, little balconies, little ornamentations without order or regularity, and they make up a grand whole which I like.”

The chateau of Blois had, therefore, the merit of representing three orders of architecture, three epochs, three systems, three dominions.  Perhaps there is no other royal residence that can compare with it in that respect.  This immense structure presents to the eye in one enclosure, round one courtyard, a complete and perfect image of that grand presentation of the manners and customs and life of nations which is called Architecture.  At the moment when Christophe was to visit the court, that part of the adjacent land which in our day is covered by a fourth palace, built seventy years later (by Gaston, the rebellious brother of Louis XIII., then exiled to Blois), was an open space containing pleasure-grounds and hanging gardens, picturesquely placed among the battlements and unfinished turrets of Francois I.’s chateau.

These gardens communicated, by a bridge of a fine, bold construction (which the old men of Blois may still remember to have seen demolished) with a pleasure-ground on the other side of the chateau, which, by the lay of the land, was on the same level.  The nobles attached to the Court of Anne de Bretagne, or those of that province who came to solicit favors, or to confer with the queen as to the fate and condition of Brittany, awaited in this pleasure-ground the opportunity for an audience, either at the queen’s rising, or at her coming out to walk.  Consequently, history has given the name of “Perchoir aux Bretons” to this piece of ground, which, in our day, is the fruit-garden of a worthy bourgeois, and forms a projection into the place des Jesuites.  The latter place was included in the gardens of this beautiful royal residence, which had, as we have said, its upper and its lower gardens.  Not far from the place des Jesuites may still be seen a pavilion built by Catherine de’ Medici, where, according to the historians of Blois, warm mineral baths were placed for her to use.  This detail enables us to trace the very irregular disposition of the gardens, which went up or down according to the undulations of the ground, becoming extremely intricate around the chateau,—­a fact which helped to give it strength, and caused, as we shall see, the discomfiture of the Duc de Guise.

The gardens were reached from the chateau through external and internal galleries, the most important of which was called the “Galerie des Cerfs” on account of its decoration.  This gallery led to the magnificent staircase which, no doubt, inspired the famous double staircase of Chambord.  It led, from floor to floor, to all the apartments of the castle.

Though La Fontaine preferred the chateau of Francois I. to that of Louis XII., perhaps the naivete of that of the good king will give true artists more pleasure, while at the same time they admire the magnificent structure of the knightly king.  The elegance of the two staircases which are placed at each end of the chateau of Louis XII., the delicate carving and sculpture, so original in design, which abound everywhere, the remains of which, though time has done its worst, still charm the antiquary, all, even to the semi-cloistral distribution of the apartments, reveals a great simplicity of manners.  Evidently, the court did not yet exist; it had not developed, as it did under Francois I. and Catherine de’ Medici, to the great detriment of feudal customs.  As we admire the galleries, or most of them, the capitals of the columns, and certain figurines of exquisite delicacy, it is impossible not to imagine that Michel Columb, that great sculptor, the Michel-Angelo of Brittany, passed that way for the pleasure of Queen Anne, whom he afterwards immortalized on the tomb of her father, the last duke of Brittany.

Whatever La Fontaine may choose to say about the “little galleries” and the “little ornamentations,” nothing can be more grandiose than the dwelling of the splendid Francois.  Thanks to I know not what indifference, to forgetfulness perhaps, the apartments occupied by Catherine de’ Medici and her son Francois II. present to us to-day the leading features of that time.  The historian can there restore the tragic scenes of the drama of the Reformation,—­a drama in which the dual struggle of the Guises and of the Bourbons against the Valois was a series of most complicated acts, the plot of which was here unravelled.

The chateau of Francois I. completely crushes the artless habitation of Louis XII. by its imposing masses.  On the side of the gardens, that is, toward the modern place des Jesuites, the castle presents an elevation nearly double that which it shows on the side of the courtyard.  The ground-floor on this side forms the second floor on the side of the gardens, where are placed the celebrated galleries.  Thus the first floor above the ground-floor toward the courtyard (where Queen Catherine was lodged) is the third floor on the garden side, and the king’s apartments were four storeys above the garden, which at the time of which we write was separated from the base of the castle by a deep moat.  The chateau, already colossal as viewed from the courtyard, appears gigantic when seen from below, as La Fontaine saw it.  He mentions particularly that he did not enter either the courtyard or the apartments, and it is to be remarked that from the place des Jesuites all the details seem small.  The balconies on which the courtiers promenaded; the galleries, marvellously executed; the sculptured windows, whose embrasures are so deep as to form boudoirs —­for which indeed they served—­resemble at that great height the fantastic decorations which scene-painters give to a fairy palace at the opera.

But in the courtyard, although the three storeys above the ground-floor rise as high as the clock-tower of the Tuileries, the infinite delicacy of the architecture reveals itself to the rapture of our astonished eyes.  This wing of the great building, in which the two queens, Catherine de’ Medici and Mary Stuart, held their sumptuous court, is divided in the centre by a hexagon tower, in the empty well of which winds up a spiral staircase,—­a Moorish caprice, designed by giants, made by dwarfs, which gives to this wonderful facade the effect of a dream.  The baluster of this staircase forms a spiral connecting itself by a square landing to five of the six sides of the tower, requiring at each landing transversal corbels which are decorated with arabesque carvings without and within.  This bewildering creation of ingenious and delicate details, of marvels which give speech to stones, can be compared only to the deeply worked and crowded carving of the Chinese ivories.  Stone is made to look like lace-work.  The flowers, the figures of men and animals clinging to the structure of the stairway, are multiplied, step by step, until they crown the tower with a key-stone on which the chisels of the art of the sixteenth century have contended against the naive cutters of images who fifty years earlier had carved the key-stones of Louis XII.’s two stairways.

However dazzled we may be by these recurring forms of indefatigable labor, we cannot fail to see that money was lacking to Francois I. for Blois, as it was to Louis XIV. for Versailles.  More than one figurine lifts its delicate head from a block of rough stone behind it; more than one fantastic flower is merely indicated by chiselled touches on the abandoned stone, though dampness has since laid its blossoms of mouldy greenery upon it.  On the facade, side by side with the tracery of one window, another window presents its masses of jagged stone carved only by the hand of time.  Here, to the least artistic and the least trained eye, is a ravishing contrast between this frontage, where marvels throng, and the interior frontage of the chateau of Louis XII., which is composed of a ground-floor of arcades of fairy lightness supported by tiny columns resting at their base on a graceful platform, and of two storeys above it, the windows of which are carved with delightful sobriety.  Beneath the arcade is a gallery, the walls of which are painted in fresco, the ceiling also being painted; traces can still be found of this magnificence, derived from Italy, and testifying to the expeditions of our kings, to which the principality of Milan then belonged.

Opposite to Francois I.’s wing was the chapel of the counts of Blois, the facade of which is almost in harmony with the architecture of the later dwelling of Louis XII.  No words can picture the majestic solidity of these three distinct masses of building.  In spite of their nonconformity of style, Royalty, powerful and firm, demonstrating its dangers by the greatness of its precautions, was a bond, uniting these three edifices, so different in character, two of which rested against the vast hall of the States-general, towering high like a church.

Certainly, neither the simplicity nor the strength of the burgher existence (which were depicted at the beginning of this history) in which Art was always represented, were lacking to this royal habitation.  Blois was the fruitful and brilliant example to which the Bourgeoisie and Feudality, Wealth and Nobility, gave such splendid replies in the towns and in the rural regions.  Imagination could not desire any other sort of dwelling for the prince who reigned over France in the sixteenth century.  The richness of seignorial garments, the luxury of female adornment, must have harmonized delightfully with the lace-work of these stones so wonderfully manipulated.  From floor to floor, as the king of France went up the marvellous staircase of his chateau of Blois, he could see the broad expanse of the beautiful Loire, which brought him news of all his kingdom as it lay on either side of the great river, two halves of a State facing each other, and semi-rivals.  If, instead of building Chambord in a barren, gloomy plain two leagues away, Francois I. had placed it where, seventy years later, Gaston built his palace, Versailles would never have existed, and Blois would have become, necessarily, the capital of France.

Four Valois and Catherine de’ Medici lavished their wealth on the wing built by Francois I. at Blois.  Who can look at those massive partition-walls, the spinal column of the castle, in which are sunken deep alcoves, secret staircases, cabinets, while they themselves enclose halls as vast as that great council-room, the guardroom, and the royal chambers, in which, in our day, a regiment of infantry is comfortably lodged—­who can look at all this and not be aware of the prodigalities of Crown and court?  Even if a visitor does not at once understand how the splendor within must have corresponded with the splendor without, the remaining vestiges of Catherine de’ Medici’s cabinet, where Christophe was about to be introduced, would bear sufficient testimony to the elegances of Art which peopled these apartments with animated designs in which salamanders sparkled among the wreaths, and the palette of the sixteenth century illumined the darkest corners with its brilliant coloring.  In this cabinet an observer will still find traces of that taste for gilding which Catherine brought with her from Italy; for the princesses of her house loved, in the words of the author already quoted, to veneer the castles of France with the gold earned by their ancestors in commerce, and to hang out their wealth on the walls of their apartments.

The queen-mother occupied on the first upper floor of the apartments of Queen Claude of France, wife of Francois I., in which may still be seen, delicately carved, the double C accompanied by figures, purely white, of swans and lilies, signifying candidior candidis—­more white than the whitest—­the motto of the queen whose name began, like that of Catherine, with a C, and which applied as well to the daughter of Louis XII. as to the mother of the last Valois; for no suspicion, in spite of the violence of Calvinist calumny, has tarnished the fidelity of Catherine de’ Medici to Henri II.

The queen-mother, still charged with the care of two young children (him who was afterward Duc d’Alencon, and Marguerite, the wife of Henri IV., the sister whom Charles IX. called Margot), had need of the whole of the first upper floor.

The king, Francois II., and the queen, Mary Stuart, occupied, on the second floor, the royal apartments which had formerly been those of Francois I. and were, subsequently, those of Henri III.  This floor, like that taken by the queen-mother, is divided in two parts throughout its whole length by the famous partition-wall, which is more than four feet thick, against which rests the enormous walls which separate the rooms from each other.  Thus, on both floors, the apartments are in two distinct halves.  One half, to the south, looking to the courtyard, served for public receptions and for the transaction of business; whereas the private apartments were placed, partly to escape the heat, to the north, overlooking the gardens, on which side is the splendid facade with its balconies and galleries looking out upon the open country of the Vendomois, and down upon the “Perchoir des Bretons” and the moat, the only side of which La Fontaine speaks.

The chateau of Francois I. was, in those days, terminated by an enormous unfinished tower which was intended to mark the colossal angle of the building when the succeeding wing was built.  Later, Gaston took down one side of it, in order to build his palace on to it; but he never finished the work, and the tower remained in ruins.  This royal stronghold served as a prison or dungeon, according to popular tradition.

As we wander to-day through the halls of this matchless chateau, so precious to art and to history, what poet would not be haunted by regrets, and grieved for France, at seeing the arabesques of Catherine’s boudoir whitewashed and almost obliterated, by order of the quartermaster of the barracks (this royal residence is now a barrack) at the time of an outbreak of cholera.  The panels of Catherine’s boudoir, a room of which we are about to speak, is the last remaining relic of the rich decorations accumulated by five artistic kings.  Making our way through the labyrinth of chambers, halls, stairways, towers, we may say to ourselves with solemn certitude:  “Here Mary Stuart cajoled her husband on behalf of the Guises.”  “There, the Guises insulted Catherine.”  “Later, at that very spot the second Balafre fell beneath the daggers of the avengers of the Crown.”  “A century earlier, from this very window, Louis XII. made signs to his friend Cardinal d’Amboise to come to him.”  “Here, on this balcony, d’Epernon, the accomplice of Ravaillac, met Marie de’ Medici, who knew, it was said, of the proposed regicide, and allowed it to be committed.”

In the chapel, where the marriage of Henri IV. and Marguerite de Valois took place, the sole remaining fragment of the chateau of the counts of Blois, a regiment now makes it shoes.  This wonderful structure, in which so many styles may still be seen, so many great deeds have been performed, is in a state of dilapidation which disgraces France.  What grief for those who love the great historic monuments of our country to know that soon those eloquent stones will be lost to sight and knowledge, like others at the corner of the rue de la Vieille-Pelleterie; possibly, they will exist nowhere but in these pages.

It is necessary to remark that, in order to watch the royal court more closely, the Guises, although they had a house of their own in the town, which still exists, had obtained permission to occupy the upper floor above the apartments of Louis XII., the same lodgings afterwards occupied by the Duchesse de Nemours under the roof.

The young king, Francois II., and his bride Mary Stuart, in love with each other like the girl and boy of sixteen which they were, had been abruptly transferred, in the depth of winter, from the chateau de Saint-Germain, which the Duc de Guise thought liable to attack, to the fortress which the chateau of Blois then was, being isolated and protected on three sides by precipices, and admirably defended as to its entrance.  The Guises, uncles of Mary Stuart, had powerful reasons for not residing in Paris and for keeping the king and court in a castle the whole exterior surroundings of which could easily be watched and defended.  A struggle was now beginning around the throne, between the house of Lorraine and the house of Valois, which was destined to end in this very chateau, twenty-eight years later, namely in 1588, when Henri III., under the very eyes of his mother, at that moment deeply humiliated by the Lorrains, heard fall upon the floor of his own cabinet, the head of the boldest of all the Guises, the second Balafre, son of that first Balafre by whom Catherine de’ Medici was now being tricked, watched, threatened, and virtually imprisoned.