Chapter 6

You may go to Amboise either from Blois or from
Tours; it is about half-way between these towns. The
great point is to go, especially if you have put it off
repeatedly; and to go, if possible, on a day when the
great view of the Loire, which you enjoy from the
battlements and terraces, presents itself under a friendly
sky. Three persons, of whom the author of these
lines was one, spent the greater part of a perfect
Sunday morning in looking at it. It was astonishing,
in the course of the rainiest season in the memory of
the oldest Tourangeau, how many perfect days we
found to our hand. The town of Amboise lies, like
Tours, on the left bank of the river, a little white-
faced town, staring across an admirable bridge, and
leaning, behind, as it were, against the pedestal of
rock on which the dark castle masses itself. The town
is so small, the pedestal so big, and the castle so high
and striking, that the clustered houses at the base of
the rock are like the crumbs that have fallen from a
well-laden table. You pass among them, however, to
ascend by a circuit to the chateau, which you attack,
obliquely, from behind. It is the property of the
Comte de Paris, another pretender to the French
throne; having come to him remotely, by inheritance,
from his ancestor, the Duc de Penthievre, who toward
the close of the last century bought it from the crown,
which had recovered it after a lapse. Like the castle
of Blois it has been injured and defaced by base uses,
but, unlike the castle of Blois, it has not been com-
pletely restored. "It is very, very dirty, but very
curious," - it is in these terms that I heard it described
by an English lady, who was generally to be found
engaged upon a tattered Tauchnitz in the little _salon
de lecture_ of the hotel at Tours. The description is
not inaccurate; but it should be said that if part of
the dirtiness of Amboise is the result of its having
served for years as a barrack and as a prison, part of
it comes from the presence of restoring stone-masons,
who have woven over a considerable portion of it a
mask of scaffolding. There is a good deal of neatness
as well, and the restoration of some of the parts seems
finished. This process, at Amboise, consists for the
most part of simply removing the vulgar excrescences
of the last two centuries.

The interior is virtually a blank, the old apart-
ments having been chopped up into small modern
rooms; it will have to be completely reconstructed. A
worthy woman, with a military profile and that sharp,
positive manner which the goodwives who show you
through the chateaux of Touraine are rather apt to
have, and in whose high respectability, to say nothing
of the