which are now crumbling away,
Moliere produced for the first time _Le Bourgeois gentilhomme_. Then it
was given to the Marechal de Saxe; then to the Polignacs, and finally to
a plain soldier, Berthier. It was afterwards bought back by subscription
and presented to the Duc de Bordeaux. It has been given to everybody, as
if nobody cared to have it or desired to keep it. It looks as if it had
hardly ever been used, and as if it had always been too spacious. It is
like a deserted hostelry where transient guests have not left even their
names on the walls.

When we walked through an outside gallery to the Orleans staircase, in
order to examine the caryatids which are supposed to represent Francis
the First, M. de Chateaubriand, and Madame d'Etampes, and turned around
the celebrated lantern that terminates the big staircase, we stuck our
heads several times through the railing to look down. In the courtyard
was a little donkey nursing its mother, rubbing up against her, shaking
its long ears and playfully jumping around. This is what we found in the
court of honour of the Chateau de Chambord; these are its present hosts:
a dog rolling in the grass, and a nursing, braying donkey frolicking on
the threshold of kings!

CHATEAU D'AMBOISE.

The Chateau d'Amboise, which dominates the whole city that appears to be
thrown at its feet like a mass of pebbles at the foot of a rock, looks
like an imposing fortress, with its large towers pierced by long, narrow
windows; its arched gallery that extends from the one to the other, and
the brownish tint of its walls, darkened by the contrast of the flowers,
which droop over them like a nodding plume on the bronzed forehead of an
old soldier. We spent fully a quarter of an hour admiring the tower on
the left; it is superb, imbrowned and yellowish in some places and
coated with soot in others; it has charming charlocks hanging from its
battlements, and is, in a word, one of those speaking monuments that
seem to breathe and hold one spellbound and pensive under their gaze,
like those paintings, the originals of which are unknown to us, but whom
we love without knowing why.

The Chateau is reached by a slight incline which leads to a garden
elevated like a terrace, from which the view extends on the whole
surrounding country. It was of a delicate green; poplar trees lined the
banks of the river; the meadows advanced to its edge, mingling their
grey border with the bluish and vapourous hori