viewed from the courtyard, appears gigantic when
seen from below, as La Fontaine saw it. He mentions particularly that
he did not enter either the courtyard or the apartments, and it is to
be remarked that from the place des Jesuites all the details seem
small. The balconies on which the courtiers promenaded; the galleries,
marvellously executed; the sculptured windows, whose embrasures are so
deep as to form boudoirs--for which indeed they served--resemble at that
great height the fantastic decorations which scene-painters give to a
fairy palace at the opera.

But in the courtyard, although the three storeys above the ground-floor
rise as high as the clock-tower of the Tuileries, the infinite delicacy
of the architecture reveals itself to the rapture of our astonished
eyes. This wing of the great building, in which the two queens,
Catherine de' Medici and Mary Stuart, held their sumptuous court, is
divided in the centre by a hexagon tower, in the empty well of which
winds up a spiral staircase,--a Moorish caprice, designed by giants,
made by dwarfs, which gives to this wonderful facade the effect of a
dream. The baluster of this staircase forms a spiral connecting itself
by a square landing to five of the six sides of the tower, requiring
at each landing transversal corbels which are decorated with arabesque
carvings without and within. This bewildering creation of ingenious
and delicate details, of marvels which give speech to stones, can be
compared only to the deeply worked and crowded carving of the Chinese
ivories. Stone is made to look like lace-work. The flowers, the figures
of men and animals clinging to the structure of the stairway, are
multiplied, step by step, until they crown the tower with a key-stone
on which the chisels of the art of the sixteenth century have contended
against the naive cutters of images who fifty years earlier had carved
the key-stones of Louis XII.'s two stairways.

However dazzled we may be by these recurring forms of indefatigable
labor, we cannot fail to see that money was lacking to Francois I. for
Blois, as it was to Louis XIV. for Versailles. More than one figurine
lifts its delicate head from a block of rough stone behind it; more than
one fantastic flower is merely indicated by chiselled touches on the
abandoned stone, though dampness has since laid its blossoms of mouldy
greenery upon it. On the facade, side by side with the tracery of one
window, another window presents i