sor, Louis XII.
Amboise was a frequent resort of the French Court during the sixteenth
century; it was here that the young Mary Stuart spent sundry hours of
her first marriage. The wars of religion have left here the ineffaceable
stain which they left wherever they passed. An imaginative visitor at
Amboise to-day may fancy that the traces of blood are mixed with the red
rust on the crossed iron bars of the grim-looking balcony to which the
heads of the Huguenots executed on the discovery of the conspiracy of La
Renaudie are rumoured to have been suspended. There was room on the
stout balustrade--an admirable piece of work--for a ghastly array. The
same rumour represents Catherine de'Medici and the young queen as
watching from this balcony the _noyades_ of the captured Huguenots in
the Loire. The facts of history are bad enough; the fictions are, if
possible, worse; but there is little doubt that the future Queen of
Scots learnt the first lessons of life at a horrible school. If in
subsequent years she was a prodigy of innocence and virtue, it was not
the fault of her whilom mother-in-law, of her uncles of the house of
Guise, or of the examples presented to her either at the windows of the
castle of Amboise or in its more private recesses. It was difficult to
believe in these dark deeds, however, as we looked through the golden
morning at the placidity of the far-shining Loire. The ultimate
consequence of this spectacle was a desire to follow the river as far as
the castle of Chaumont. It is true that the cruelties practised of old
at Amboise might have seemed less phantasmal to persons destined to
suffer from a modern form of inhumanity. The mistress of the little inn
at the base of the castle-rock--it stands very pleasantly beside the
river, and we had breakfasted there--declared to us that the Chateau de
Chaumont, which is often during the autumn closed to visitors, was at
that particular moment standing so wide open to receive us that it was
our duty to hire one of her carriages and drive thither with speed. This
assurance was so satisfactory that we presently found ourselves seated
in this wily woman's most commodious vehicle and rolling, neither too
fast nor too slow, along the margin of the Loire. The drive of about an
hour, beneath constant clumps of chestnuts, was charming enough to have
been taken for itself; and indeed when we reached Chaumont we saw that
our reward was to be simply the usual reward of virtue, t