ould 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