to the Chateau; and as you've urged me to paint for you
what you can't see (this time), your blood be on your own head if I bore
you.

You would be happy in the courtyard of the Chateau, for it would be to
your mind, as to mine, one of the most delightful things in Europe. It's
a sort of object lesson in French architecture and history, showing at
least three periods; and when Miss Randolph looked up at that perfect,
open staircase, bewildering in its carved, fantastic beauty, I wasn't
surprised to have her ask if she were dreaming it, or if _we_ saw it
too. "It's lace, stone lace," she said. And so it is. She coined new
adjectives for the windows, the sculptured cornices, the exquisite and
ingenious perfection of the incomparable facade.

"I could be so _good_ if I always had this staircase to look at!" she
exclaimed. "It didn't seem to have any effect on Catherine de Medici's
soul; but then I suppose when she lived here she stopped indoors most of
the time, making up poisons. I'm sorry I said yesterday that Francis the
First had a ridiculous nose. A man who could build this had a right to
_have_ anything he liked, or _do_ anything he liked."

And you should have seen her stare when Talleyrand bestowed an
enthusiastic "_Comme c'est beau!_" on the left wing of the courtyard,
for which Gaston d'Orleans' bad taste and foolish extravagance is
responsible--a thing not to be named with the joyous Renaissance facade
of Francis.

When Miss Randolph could be torn away, we went inside, and throwing off
self-consciousness in the good cause, I flung myself into the drama of
the Guise murder. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for. My
one desire was to interest Miss Randolph, and (incidentally, perhaps)
show her what a clever chap she had got for a _chauffeur_--though he
_wasn't_ a gentleman, and Talleyrand was.

I pointed from a window to the spot where stands the house from which
the Duc de Guise was decoyed from the arms of his mistress; showed where
he stood impatiently leaning against the tall mantelpiece, waiting his
audience with Henri the Third; pointed to the threshold of the _Vieux
Cabinet_ where he was stabbed in the back as he lifted the arras; told
how he ran, crying "_a moi!_" and where he fell at last to die, bleeding
from more than forty wounds, given by the Forty Gentlemen of the Plot;
showed the little oratory in which, while the murderous work went on,
two monks gabbled prayers for its successfu