on one side and
strike away through a country in which salient features become less and
less numerous and which at last has no other quality than a look of
intense and peculiar rurality--the characteristic, even when it be not
the charm, of so much of the landscape of France. This is not the
appearance of wildness, for it goes with great cultivation; it is simply
the presence of the delving, drudging, economising peasant. But it is a
deep, unrelieved rusticity. It is a peasant's landscape; not, as in
England, a landlord's. On the way to Chambord you enter the flat and
sandy Sologne. The wide horizon opens out like a great _potager_,
without interruptions, without an eminence, with here and there a long,
low stretch of wood. There is an absence of hedges, fences, signs of
property; everything is absorbed in the general flatness--the patches of
vineyard, the scattered cottages, the villages, the children (planted
and staring and almost always pretty), the women in the fields, the
white caps, the faded blouses, the big sabots. At the end of an hour's
drive (they assure you at Blois that even with two horses you will spend
double that time), I passed through a sort of gap in a wall which does
duty as the gateway of the domain of a proscribed pretender. I followed
a straight avenue through a disfeatured park--the park of Chambord has
twenty-one miles of circumference; a very sandy, scrubby, melancholy
plantation, in which the timber must have been cut many times over and
is to-day a mere tangle of brushwood. Here, as in so many spots in
France, the traveller perceives that he is in a land of revolutions.
Nevertheless its great extent and the long perspective of its avenues
give this frugal shrubbery a certain state; just as its shabbiness
places it in agreement with one of the strongest impressions awaiting
you. You pursue one of these long perspectives a proportionate time, and
at last you see the chimneys and pinnacles of Chambord rise apparently
out of the ground. The filling-in of the wide moats that formerly
surrounded it has, in vulgar parlance, let it down and given it a
monstrous over-crowned air that is at the same time a magnificent
Orientalism. The towers, the turrets, the cupolas, the gables, the
lanterns, the chimneys look more like the spires of a city than the
salient points of a single building. You emerge from the avenue and
find yourself at the foot of an enormous fantastic mass. Chambord has a
strange mixtu