f the origin of
the edifice, as the _maistre de l'oeuvre de maconnerie_. Behind this
modest title, apparently, we must recognise one of the most original
talents of the French Renaissance; and it is a proof of the vigour of
the artistic life of that period that, brilliant production being
everywhere abundant, an artist of so high a value should not have been
treated by his contemporaries as a celebrity. We make our celebrities
to-day at smaller cost.

The immediate successors of Francis I. continued to visit Chambord; but
it was neglected by Henry IV. and was never afterwards a favourite
residence of any French king. Louis XIV. appeared there on several
occasions, and the apparition was characteristically brilliant; but
Chambord could not long detain a monarch who had gone to the expense of
creating a Versailles ten miles from Paris. With Versailles,
Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain and Saint-Cloud within easy reach of their
capital, the later French sovereigns had little reason to take the air
in the dreariest province of their kingdom. Chambord therefore suffered
from royal indifference, though in the last century a use was found for
its deserted halls. In 1725 it was occupied by the luckless Stanislaus
Leczynski, who spent the greater part of his life in being elected King
of Poland and being ousted from his throne, and who, at this time a
refugee in France, had found a compensation for some of his misfortunes
in marrying his daughter to Louis XV. He lived eight years at Chambord
and filled up the moats of the castle. In 1748 it found an illustrious
tenant in the person of Maurice de Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy, who,
however, two years after he had taken possession of it, terminated a
life which would have been longer had he been less determined to make it
agreeable. The Revolution, of course, was not kind to Chambord. It
despoiled it in so far as possible of every vestige of its royal origin,
and swept like a whirlwind through apartments to which upwards of two
centuries had contributed a treasure of decoration and furniture. In
that wild blast these precious things were destroyed or for ever
scattered. In 1791 an odd proposal was made to the French Government by
a company of English Quakers, who had conceived the bold idea of
establishing in the palace a manufacture of some peaceful commodity not
to-day recorded. Napoleon allotted Chambord, as a "dotation," to one of
his marshals, Berthier, for whose benefit it was co