he evil passions of its inhabitants, and not from siege or
invasion. The front of Louis XII. is of red brick, crossed here and
there with purple; and the purple slate of the high roof, relieved with
chimneys beautifully treated and with the embroidered caps of pinnacles
and arches, with the porcupine of Louis, the ermine and the festooned
rope which formed the devices of Anne of Brittany--the tone of this
decorative roof carries out the mild glow of the wall. The wide, fair
windows open as if they had expanded to let in the rosy dawn of the
Renaissance. Charming, for that matter, are the windows of all the
chateaux of Touraine, with their squareness corrected (as it is not in
the Tudor architecture) by the curve of the upper corners, which gives
this line the look, above the expressive aperture, of a pencilled
eyebrow. The low door of this front is crowned by a high, deep niche, in
which, under a splendid canopy, stiffly astride of a stiffly-draped
charger, sits in profile an image of the good King Louis. Good as he had
been--the father of his people, as he was called (I believe he remitted
various taxes)--he was not good enough to pass muster at the Revolution;
and the effigy I have just described is no more than a reproduction of
the primitive statue demolished at that period.

Pass beneath it into the court, and the sixteenth century closes round
you. It is a pardonable flight of fancy to say that the expressive faces
of an age in which human passions lay very near the surface seem to peep
out at you from the windows, from the balconies, from the thick foliage
of the sculpture. The portion of the wing of Louis XII. that fronts
toward the court is supported on a deep arcade. On your right is the
wing erected by Francis I., the reverse of the mass of building which
you see on approaching the castle. This exquisite, this extravagant,
this transcendent piece of architecture is the most joyous utterance of
the French Renaissance. It is covered with an embroidery of sculpture in
which every detail is worthy of the hand of a goldsmith. In the middle
of it, or rather a little to the left, rises the famous winding
staircase (plausibly, but I believe not religiously, restored), which
even the ages which most misused it must vaguely have admired. It forms
a kind of chiselled cylinder, with wide interstices, so that the stairs
are open to the air. Every inch of this structure, of its balconies, its
pillars, its great central colu