he
consciousness of having attempted the right. The Chateau de Chaumont was
inexorably closed; so we learned from a talkative lodge-keeper, who gave
what grace she could to her refusal. This good woman's dilemma was
almost touching; she wished to reconcile two impossibles. The castle was
not to be visited, for the family of its master was staying there; and
yet she was loath to turn away a party of which she was good enough to
say that it had a _grand genre_; for, as she also remarked, she had her
living to earn. She tried to arrange a compromise, one of the elements
of which was that we should descend from our carriage and trudge up a
hill which would bring us to a designated point where, over the paling
of the garden, we might obtain an oblique and surreptitious view of a
small portion of the castle walls. This suggestion led us to inquire (of
each other) to what degree of baseness it is lawful for an enlightened
lover of the picturesque to resort in order not to have a blank page in
his collection. One of our trio decided characteristically against any
form of derogation; so she sat in the carriage and sketched some object
that was public property while her two companions, who were not so
proud, trudged up a muddy ascent which formed a kind of back-stairs. It
is perhaps no more than they deserved that they were disappointed.
Chaumont is feudal, if you please; but the modern spirit is in
possession. It forms a vast clean-scraped mass, with big round towers,
ungarnished with a leaf of ivy or a patch of moss, surrounded by gardens
of moderate extent (save where the muddy lane of which I speak passes
near it), and looking rather like an enormously magnified villa. The
great merit of Chaumont is its position, which almost exactly resembles
that of Amboise; it sweeps the river up and down and seems to look over
half the province. This, however, was better appreciated as, after
coming down the hill and re-entering the carriage, we drove across the
long suspension-bridge which crosses the Loire just beyond the village
and over which we made our way to the small station of Onzain, at the
farther end, to take the train back to Tours. Look back from the middle
of this bridge; the whole picture composes, as the painters say. The
towers, the pinnacles, the fair front of the chateau, perched above its
fringe of garden and the rusty roofs of the village and facing the
afternoon sky, which is reflected also in the great stream that sw