eeps
below, all this makes a contribution to your happiest memories of
Touraine.

[Illustration]

Chapter vii

[Chenonceaux]

We never went to Chinon; it was a fatality. We planned it a dozen times;
but the weather interfered, or the trains didn't suit, or one of the
party was fatigued with the adventures of the day before. This excursion
was so much postponed that it was finally postponed to everything.
Besides, we had to go to Chenonceaux, to Azay-le-Rideau, to Langeais, to
Loches. So I have not the memory of Chinon; I have only the regret. But
regret, as well as memory, has its visions; especially when, like
memory, it is assisted by photographs. The castle of Chinon in this form
appears to me as an enormous ruin, a mediaeval fortress of the extent
almost of a city. It covers a hill above the Vienne, and after being
impregnable in its time is indestructible to-day. (I risk this phrase in
the face of the prosaic truth. Chinon, in the days when it was a prize,
more than once suffered capture, and at present it is crumbling inch by
inch. It is apparent, however, I believe, that these inches encroach
little upon acres of masonry.) It was in the castle that Jeanne Dare had
her first interview with Charles VII., and it is in the town that
Francois Rabelais is supposed to have been born. To the castle,
moreover, the lover of the picturesque is earnestly recommended to
direct his steps. But one always misses something, and I would rather
have missed Chinon than Chenonceaux. Fortunate exceedingly were the few
hours we passed on the spot on which we missed nothing.

"In 1747," says Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his "Confessions," "we went to
spend the autumn in Touraine, at the Chateau of Chenonceaux, a royal
residence upon the Cher, built by Henry II. for Diana of Poitiers, whose
initials are still to be seen there, and now in possession of M. Dupin,
the farmer-general. We amused ourselves greatly at this fine place; the
living was of the best, and I became as fat as a monk. We made a great
deal of music and acted comedies."

This is the only description that Rousseau gives of one of the most
romantic houses in France and of an episode that must have counted as
one of the most agreeable in his uncomfortable career. The eighteenth
century contented itself with general epithets; and when Jean-Jacques
has said that Chenonceaux was a "beau lieu," he thinks himself absolved
from further characterisation. We later sons o