place is neither a castle nor
a palace. It is a very exceptional villa, but it has the
villa-quality--the look of being intended for life in common. This look
is not at all contradicted by the wing across the Cher, which only
suggests indoor perspectives and intimate pleasures--walks in pairs on
rainy days; games and dances on autumn nights; together with as much as
may be of moonlighted dialogue (or silence) in the course of evenings
more genial still, in the well-marked recesses of windows.

It is safe to say that such things took place there in the last century,
during the kindly reign of Monsieur and Madame Dupin. This period
presents itself as the happiest in the annals of Chenonceaux. I know not
what festive train the great Diana may have led, and my imagination, I
am afraid, is only feebly kindled by the records of the luxurious
pastimes organised on the banks of the Cher by that terrible daughter of
the Medici whose appreciation of the good things of life was perfectly
consistent with a failure to perceive why others should live to enjoy
them. The best society that ever assembled there was collected at
Chenonceaux during the middle of the eighteenth century. This was
surely, in France at least, the age of good society, the period when the
"right people" made every haste to be born in time. Such people must of
course have belonged to the fortunate few--not to the miserable many;
for if a society be large enough to be good, it must also be small
enough. The sixty years that preceded the Revolution were the golden age
of fireside talk and of those amenities that proceed from the presence
of women in whom the social art is both instinctive and acquired. The
women of that period were, above all, good company; the fact is attested
in a thousand documents. Chenonceaux offered a perfect setting to free
conversation; and infinite joyous discourse must have mingled with the
liquid murmur of the Cher. Claude Dupin was not only a great man of
business, but a man of honour and a patron of knowledge; and his wife
was gracious, clever, and wise. They had acquired this famous property
by purchase (from one of the Bourbons, as Chenonceaux, for two centuries
after the death of Catherine de'Medici, remained constantly in princely
hands), and it was transmitted to their son, Dupin de Francueil,
grandfather of Madame George Sand. This lady, in her Correspondence,
lately published, describes a visit that she paid more than thirty yea