he sons of Henry IV.--who was
no more fortunate as a father than as a husband--younger brother of
Louis XIII. and father of the great Mademoiselle, the most celebrated,
most ambitious, most self-complacent and most unsuccessful _fille a
marier_ in French history, passed in enforced retirement at the castle
of Blois the close of a life of clumsy intrigues against Cardinal
Richelieu, in which his rashness was only equalled by his pusillanimity
and his ill-luck by his inaccessibility to correction, and which, after
so many follies and shames, was properly summed up in the
project--begun, but not completed--of demolishing the beautiful
habitation of his exile in order to erect a better one. With Gaston
d'Orleans, however, who lived there without dignity, the history of the
Chateau de Blois declines. Its interesting period is that of the wars of
religion. It was the chief residence of Henry III., and the scene of the
principal events of his depraved and dramatic rule. It has been restored
more than enough, as I have said, by architects and decorators; the
visitor, as he moves through its empty rooms, which are at once
brilliant and ill-lighted (they have not been refurnished), undertakes a
little restoration of his own. His imagination helps itself from the
things that remain; he tries to see the life of the sixteenth century in
its form and dress--its turbulence, its passions, its loves and hates,
its treacheries, falsities, sincerities, faith, its latitude of personal
development, its presentation of the whole nature, its nobleness of
costume, charm of speech, splendour of taste, unequalled
picturesqueness. The picture is full of movement, of contrasted light
and darkness, full altogether of abominations. Mixed up with them all is
the great theological motive, so that the drama wants little to make it
complete. What episode was ever more perfect--looked at as a dramatic
occurrence--than the murder of the Duke of Guise? The insolent
prosperity of the victim; the weakness, the vices, the terrors, of the
author of the deed; the perfect execution of the plot; the accumulation
of horror in what followed it--render it, as a crime, one of the classic
things.

But we must not take the Chateau de Blois too hard: I went there, after
all, by way of entertainment. If among these sinister memories your
visit should threaten to prove a tragedy, there is an excellent way of
removing the impression. You may treat yourself at Blois to a ve