programme _en masse_. I'll just
sum things up by saying that we've simply lived, moved, and had our
being in, on, or at castles. This country of the Loire is a sort of
fairyland, where everybody had a castle, or at the very least a lordly
dwelling-place that was more fortress than private house. You can't look
up or down the river but that on every hill you see a chateau, with
enough history clustering about it to make up a fat volume. How they
all escaped the Revolution is a marvel. But they have; and if they've
been much restored, it is so cleverly done that the most critical eyes
are deceived.

If I could live in one of the "show" chateaux, I'd choose Chenonceaux.
We drove to it on the day of the Tower, as I've labelled it in my book
of memory, "taking it in" on our way to Tours. It's no use your making a
note of that wish of mine, though Dad, and trying to buy it, because
somebody else has done that already. But if you can find a river as
pretty as the Cher (an appropriate name for the little daughter of the
Loire, on which--_over_ which, literally, Chenonceaux stands), you might
build me one on the same pattern, so I'll give you a general idea of
what the castle is like.

Let me see, what _is_ it like? To make a comparison would be giving to
an airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Not that Chenonceaux is
_nothing_--quite the opposite; but it leaves in the mind an impression
of airiness and gaiety, sweet and elusive as one of those quaint French
_chansons_ you like me to sing you, with my guitar, on a summer evening.
I think, even if I hadn't been told, I should have felt instinctively
that it must have been built to please a pretty, capricious woman. If
such a woman could be turned into a house, she would look like
Chenonceaux, and wouldn't suffer by the change. Perhaps Diane de
Poitiers isn't a proper object of sympathy for a well-brought-up young
lady like Chauncy Randolph's daughter; but I can't help pitying her,
because that horrid old frump of a Catherine de Medici grabbed it away
from her before Henry the Second was hardly cold in his grave. Think how
Diane, who had loved the place, must have felt to fancy that stuffy
Catherine in her everlasting black dresses, squatting in her beautiful
rooms! We saw those rooms, by the way, for we came on one of the days
when people are allowed to go through the Chateau (Brown had planned
that), and the clever millionaires who own it have had the sense and the
grac