Au saint bal des dryades, A Phoebus, ce grand dieu, Aux humides nayades J'ai consacré ce lieu.
This highly plaster-cast lyric was recited during the 'triomphe' held at Chenonceaux to celebrate the arrival there of François II and Mary Stuart. The hostess was as distinguished as her visitors; and never, before I went to Chenonceaux, did I associate naiads and dryads and poems of welcome with Catherine de'Medici. But we must allow this monstrous personage an eye for good houses. She preferred Chenonceaux to all her dwellings--she preferred it so much, indeed, that she made another lady get out of it, exchanging for it the decidedly inferior residence of Chaumont. And we have Catherine to thank (I fear) for the strangely felicitous fancy that placed upon the arches built from the rear of the house to the farther side of the river by her rejected predecessor, Diane de Poitiers, that enchanting hall or gallery, which rises three stories high, if you count the nine windows in the steeply and gracefully pitched slate roof.
Basti si magnifiquement Il est debout, comme un géant, Dedans le lit de la rivière, C'est-a-dire dessus un pont Qui porte cent toises de long.
These verses bump down heavily upon the bridge, and, despite their scrupulous statistics as to its length, they scarcely measure the excellence of Chenonceaux, but rather the gap between French verse and French architecture in the sixteenth century. Villon could have come nearer the mark; but Villon was long gone before the ancient mill on the river Cher was transfigured by its purchaser into the château he did not live to complete. 'S'il vient à point' said Thomas Bohier, and he graved it in many ornamental places of his edifice, 'me souviendra.'
And here am I writing his name and thinking about him, three hundred and ninety-two years after his death. What a pleasant reason for being remembered! What a quietly illustrious introduction to posterity: the originator of the mansion whose sheer beauty brought a succession of kings and queens and other great people to sojourn in it, whose walls have listened to the blandishments of François I, the sallies of Fontenelle and Voltaire, the sentimentalities of Rousseau. Do their ghosts walk here upon these terraces? Do they meet in the long gallery over the Cher? If they don't, they are less wise in the next world than they were in this. Almost might one envy some figure in a well-preserved piece of tapestry, hanging in any hall or chamber here and commanding a view out of any window that looked up or down the placid river. Embroidered thus for ever, amid high company, ladies and gentlemen of importance with hawks and feathers and armor and steeds richly caparisoned, ministered to by esquires and serfs, one would exist admired, valued, and carefully dusted. Daily sight-seers from all lands would be conducted into one's presence (Sundays included, 10-11 A.M., 2-6 P.M.), thus animating one's feudal leisure with sufficient variety. There one would be, an acknowledged masterpiece, for ever aloof from the unstable present, nevermore driven to enlist against the restless evils of the world. The trouble is, somebody from Pittsburg might buy one. Now I could no more brook living as tapestry in America than I could live as an American in Europe, expatriated and trivially evaporating amid beauties and comforts that were none of my native heritage.