is the right one--was a Venetian gondolier doing at
Chenonceaux? He had been brought from Venice, gondola and all, by the
mistress of the charming house, to paddle about on the Cher. Our meeting
was affectionate, though there was a kind of violence in seeing him so
far from home. He was too well dressed, too well fed; he had grown
stout, and his nose had the tinge of good claret. He remarked that the
life of the household to which he had the honour to belong was that of a
_casa regia_; which must have been a great change for poor Checco, whose
habits in Venice were not regal. However, he was the sympathetic Checco
still; and for five minutes after I left him I thought less about the
little pleasure-house by the Cher than about the palaces of the
Adriatic.

But attention was not long in coming round to the charming structure
that presently rose before us. The pale yellow front of the chateau, the
small scale of which is at first a surprise, rises beyond a considerable
court, at the entrance of which a massive and detached round tower, with
a turret on its brow (a relic of the building that preceded the actual
villa), appears to keep guard. This court is not enclosed--or is
enclosed at least only by the gardens, portions of which are at present
in process of radical readjustment. Therefore, though Chenonceaux has no
great height, its delicate facade stands up boldly enough. This facade,
one of the most finished things in Touraine, consists of two storeys,
surmounted by an attic which, as so often in the buildings of the
French Renaissance, is the richest part of the house. The high-pitched
roof contains three windows of beautiful design, covered with
embroidered caps and flowering into crocketed spires. The window above
the door is deeply niched; it opens upon a balcony made in the form of a
double pulpit--one of the most charming features of the front.
Chenonceaux is not large, as I say, but into its delicate compass is
packed a great deal of history--history which differs from that of
Amboise and Blois in being of the private and sentimental kind. The
echoes of the place, faint and far as they are to-day, are not
political, but personal. Chenonceaux dates, as a residence, from the
year 1515, when the shrewd Thomas Bohier, a public functionary who had
grown rich in handling the finances of Normandy and had acquired the
estate from a family which, after giving it many feudal lords, had
fallen into poverty, erected the pr