tic barrack. The exiled
prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four
hundred rooms; he contents himself with preserving the huge outside. The
repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb a large part of his
revenue. The great feature of the interior is the celebrated double
staircase, rising straight through the building, with two courses of
steps, so that people may ascend and descend without meeting. This
staircase is a truly majestic piece of humour; it gives you the note, as
it were, of Chambord. It opens on each landing to a vast guard-room, in
four arms, radiations of the winding shaft. My guide made me climb to
the great open-work lantern which, springing from the roof at the
termination of the rotund staircase (surmounted here by a smaller one),
forms the pinnacle of the bristling crown of the pile. This lantern is
tipped with a huge _fleur-de-lis_ in stone--the only one, I believe,
that the Revolution did not succeed in pulling down. Here, from narrow
windows, you look over the wide, flat country and the tangled,
melancholy park, with the rotation of its straight avenues. Then you
walk about the roof in a complication of galleries, terraces, balconies,
through the multitude of chimneys and gables. This roof, which is in
itself a sort of castle in the air, has an extravagant, fabulous
quality, and with its profuse ornamentation--the salamander of Francis
I. is a constant motive--its lonely pavements, its sunny niches, the
balcony that looks down over the closed and grass-grown main entrance, a
strange, half-sad, half-brilliant charm. The stonework is covered with
fine mould. There are places that reminded me of some of those quiet
mildewed corners of courts and terraces into which the traveller who
wanders through the Vatican looks down from neglected windows. They show
you two or three furnished rooms, with Bourbon portraits, hideous
tapestries from the ladies of France, a collection of the toys of the
_enfant du miracle_, all military and of the finest make. "Tout cela
fonctionne," the guide said of these miniature weapons; and I wondered,
if he should take it into his head to fire off his little cannon, how
much harm the Comte de Chambord would do.

From below the castle would look crushed by the redundancy of its upper
protuberances if it were not for the enormous girth of its round towers,
which appear to give it a robust lateral development. These towers,
however, fine as they ar