uble exposure to the north and south,
that the counts of Blois built, in the architecture of the twelfth
century, a castle where the famous Thibault de Tircheur, Thibault
le Vieux, and others held a celebrated court. In those days of pure
fuedality, in which the king was merely _primus inter pares_ (to use
the fine expression of a king of Poland), the counts of Champagne, the
counts of Blois, those of Anjou, the simple barons of Normandie, the
dukes of Bretagne, lived with the splendor of sovereign princes and gave
kings to the proudest kingdoms. The Plantagenets of Anjou, the Lusignans
of Poitou, the Roberts of Normandie, maintained with a bold hand the
royal races, and sometimes simple knights like du Glaicquin refused the
purple, preferring the sword of a connetable.

When the Crown annexed the county of Blois to its domain, Louis XII.,
who had a liking for this residence (perhaps to escape Plessis of
sinister memory), built at the back of the first building another
building, facing east and west, which connected the chateau of the
counts of Blois with the rest of the old structures, of which nothing
now remains but the vast hall in which the States-general were held
under Henri III.

Before he became enamoured of Chambord, Francois I. wished to complete
the chateau of Blois by adding two other wings, which would have made
the structure a perfect square. But Chambord weaned him from Blois,
where he built only one wing, which in his time and that of his
grandchildren was the only inhabited part of the chateau. This third
building erected by Francois I. is more vast and far more decorated than
the Louvre, the chateau of Henri II. It is in the style of architecture
now called Renaissance, and presents the most fantastic features of that
style. Therefore, at a period when a strict and jealous architecture
ruled construction, when the Middle Ages were not even considered, at a
time when literature was not as clearly welded to art as it is now, La
Fontaine said of the chateau de Blois, in his hearty, good-humored way:
"The part that Francois I. built, if looked at from the outside, pleased
me better than all the rest; there I saw numbers of little galleries,
little windows, little balconies, little ornamentations without order or
regularity, and they make up a grand whole which I like."

The chateau of Blois had, therefore, the merit of representing three
orders of architecture, three epochs, three systems, three dominio