re of society and solitude. A little village clusters
within view of its liberal windows, and a couple of inns near by offer
entertainment to pilgrims. These things of course are incidents of the
political proscription which hangs its thick veil over the place.
Chambord is truly royal--royal in its great scale, its grand air, its
indifference to common considerations. If a cat may look at a king, a
tavern may look at a palace. I enjoyed my visit to this extraordinary
structure as much as if I had been a legitimist; and indeed there is
something interesting in any monument of a great system, any bold
presentation of a tradition.

You leave your vehicle at one of the inns, which are very decent and
tidy and in which every one is very civil, as if in this latter respect
the neighbourhood of a Court veritably set the fashion, and you proceed
across the grass and the gravel to a small door, a door infinitely
subordinate and conferring no title of any kind on those who enter it.
Here you ring a bell, which a highly respectable person answers (a
person perceptibly affiliated, again, to the old regime), after which
she ushers you over a vestibule into an inner court. Perhaps the
strongest impression I got at Chambord came to me as I stood in this
court. The woman who admitted me did not come with me; I was to find my
guide somewhere else. The specialty of Chambord is its prodigious round
towers. There are, I believe, no less than eight of them, placed at each
angle of the inner and outer square of buildings; for the castle is in
the form of a larger structure which encloses a smaller one. One of
these towers stood before me in the court; it seemed to fling its
shadow

[Illustration: CHAMBORD]

over the place; while above, as I looked up, the pinnacles and gables,
the enormous chimneys, soared into the bright blue air. The place was
empty and silent; shadows of gargoyles, of extraordinary projections,
were thrown across the clear grey surfaces. One felt that the whole
thing was monstrous. A cicerone appeared, a languid young man in a
rather shabby livery, and led me about with a mixture of the impatient
and the desultory, of condescension and humility. I do not profess to
understand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I do not even desire
to do so; for it is much more entertaining to think of it, as you can so
easily, as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth. Within it is a
wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and roman