NOT alone because of their good meat and drink are three meals shrined at the heart of these following impressions. Singly, each one did delightfully engage the palate, but the three together speak appealingly to sentiment. It is of a great house, a little inn, and of the fair region round about them that I shall mainly discourse—and whether I do or don't give a final x to the name of the house, there are people and documents to say I have spelt it wrong: which comes very near to saying that both ways are right. The x shall remain, the majority seems to favor it, and I at once beg that you share my relish of these posturing Renaissance lines, written by royal command in honor of Chenonceaux:—

This highly plaster-cast lyric was recited during the 'triomphe' held at Chenonceaux to celebrate the arrival there of FranÇois II and Mary Stuart. The hostess was as distinguished as her visitors; and never, before I went to Chenonceaux, did I associate naiads and dryads and poems of welcome with Catherine de'Medici. But we must allow this monstrous personage an eye for good houses. She preferred Chenonceaux to all her dwellings—she preferred it so much, indeed, that she made another lady get out of it, exchanging for it the decidedly inferior residence of Chaumont. And we have Catherine to thank (I fear) for the strangely felicitous fancy that placed upon the arches built from the rear of the house to the farther side of the river by her rejected predecessor, Diane de Poitiers, that enchanting hall or gallery, which rises three stories high, if you count the nine windows in the steeply and gracefully pitched slate roof.

These verses bump down heavily upon the bridge, and, despite their scrupulous statistics as to its length, they scarcely measure the excellence of Chenonceaux, but rather the gap between French verse and French architecture in the sixteenth century. Villon could have come nearer the mark; but Villon was long gone before the ancient mill on the river Cher was transfigured by its purchaser into the chÂteau he did not live to complete. 'S'il vient À point' said Thomas Bohier, and he graved it in many ornamental places of his edifice, 'me souviendra.'

And here am I writing his name and thinking about him, three hundred and ninety-two years after his death. What a pleasant reason for being remembered! What a quietly illustrious introduction to posterity: the originator of the mansion whose sheer beauty brought a succession of kings and queens and other great people to sojourn in it, whose walls have listened to the blandishments of FranÇois I, the sallies of Fontenelle and Voltaire, the sentimentalities of Rousseau. Do their ghosts walk here upon these terraces? Do they meet in the long gallery over the Cher? If they don't, they are less wise in the next world than they were in this. Almost might one envy some figure in a well-preserved piece of tapestry, hanging in any hall or chamber here and commanding a view out of any window that looked up or down the placid river. Embroidered thus for ever, amid high company, ladies and gentlemen of importance with hawks and feathers and armor and steeds richly caparisoned, ministered to by esquires and serfs, one would exist admired, valued, and carefully dusted. Daily sight-seers from all lands would be conducted into one's presence (Sundays included, 10-11 A.M., 2-6 P.M.), thus animating one's feudal leisure with sufficient variety. There one would be, an acknowledged masterpiece, for ever aloof from the unstable present, nevermore driven to enlist against the restless evils of the world. The trouble is, somebody from Pittsburg might buy one. Now I could no more brook living as tapestry in America than I could live as an American in Europe, expatriated and trivially evaporating amid beauties and comforts that were none of my native heritage.

Do you know the country where Chenonceaux stands? Do you know the river? Have you ever gone there from Tours, or come there the opposite way, from Bourges through Vierzon and Montrichard?

The region shares a secret with certain rare people, whom all of us are glad to count among our acquaintance. Certain men and women, immediately on our first meeting them, make us desire to meet them again; not because they have uttered remarkable thoughts or reminded us of Venus or Apollo: perhaps they have said nothing that you and I couldn't say, and we may know people much better looking. But they radiate—what is it that they radiate? We feel it, we bask in it, it flows over us. It isn't sunlight or moonlight, but a fairy-light of their own. When these shining creatures come into the room, happiness enters with them. How do they do it? It gets us nowhere to say that there is 'something' in the tone of their voice, or 'something' in the look of their eyes: what is the something? I'm glad I don't know; mystery is growing so scarce, that I am thankful for anything which cannot be explained.

Now this rare quality (and don't flatter yourself that you understand it because you happen to know its name) is possessed not only by men and women, but also by places; and, no more than with people, has it anything to do with their being remarkable or beautiful. The White Mountains in New Hampshire haven't a trace of it; it fills the mountains of North Carolina; there is almost none along our Atlantic seaboard, but it hangs over and haunts nearly every foot of our Pacific Coast.

Whenever one of these happy spots has been long known to man, man has invariably cherished it in word and deed. His chronicles celebrate it; he sets it lovingly like a jewel in his romances, dramas, verse, prose, song; he graces it with his best in architecture; his roads and gardens bring it alike into his hours of work and of ease; in fine, he garlands it with his imagination, weaves it into his life century after century, until it comes to smile upon him from the heart of his History and Literature, as well as upon his daily present. That is what mankind has done beneath the spell of a place which has charm.

Thus Touraine to the Frenchman,—beau pays de Touraine, as the page in Meyerbeer's Huguenots sings of it in that opera's second act, which takes place at Chenonceaux. I suppose—indeed I remember—that rain falls in that country; yet, when I think about it, sunshine invariably sparkles through the picture—not the kind that glares and burns, but the kind that plays gently among leaves and shores and shadows; sunshine upon the twinkling, feathered silver of the poplars, the grapes in sloping vineyards, the green islands and tawny bluffs of the Loire, the quiet waters of the Indre and the Cher; a jocund harmony seems to play about the very names,—Beaulieu, MontrÉsor, Saint-Symphorien,—but were I to begin upon the music in the names of France, I should run far beyond the limits of Touraine and of your patience. Say to yourself aloud, properly, Amboise, ChÂteaurenault, La Chapelle-Blanche, Saint-Martin-le-Beau, and then say Naugatuck, Saugatuck, Pawtucket, Woonsocket, Manayunk, Manunkachunk, and you will catch my drift. Stevenson's joy in our names was at bottom purely that of the collector.

But have you ever seen the Loire and its tributary realm? I have already owned myself (together with all other men) as unable to explain the mystery of charm. No Niagara is hereabouts, nor Matterhorn, nor anything you could call sublime; nothing so lustrously beautiful as Bar Harbor, or the Berkshire Hills. Wildness is wholly absent, but so is tameness too. It is somehow through its very moderation that the glamour of this land is wrought. But we must nicely distinguish between the poetry and the prose of moderation: Princeton Junction, New Jersey, is perfectly moderate, and is also the type and pattern of hundreds of thousands of square, comfortable, unoffending miles in the United States which you would never wish to see again—indeed which you would never wish to see once; whereas, even as I write, I am homesick for Touraine, though it isn't my home.

Once again I must draw the parallel between human qualities and the ways of our mother earth. We place at the top of our esteem those people who take chivalrously the heavy blows of life, who are not brave merely, but gallant. We draw scant inspiration from the sight of somebody who is all too obviously and dutifully bearing something; who goes, day after day, with a set and sombre expression that says as plainly as words: 'Just watch me carrying my Cross. Just wait till you have one.' We prefer those whose gayety so conceals the fact that they're behaving well, that we should never suspect it, did we not know what they have passed, and are passing, through. Thus also does Touraine conceal the tears and the blood she has known. Louis the Eleventh, Catherine de' Medici, the gibbet balcony of the Salle des Armes at Amboise, the iron cage and the black dungeons of Loches,—Touraine, with her smiling, high-bred elegance, keeps all this to herself, and gives you a bright welcome. Often as she has been the scene of Tragedy, often as the glaive and not the lute has been the instrument of her drama, she might well look in her glass and exclaim with Richard the Second,—

Wearing no crape, betraying no scars, hinting naught of its dark experience of life, this realm, this beau pays, more than any in Europe, to my thinking, lies in the true key of high comedy, of masque and pastoral. If, here and there above its trees or upon its hills, the brooding frown of some tower, the gaunt stare of some donjon in ruins, fierce with memories, brings one up short, so that in joy's mid-current some smack of the bitter wells up—this is not Nature's doing. Look away from these works of man to the feathered poplars, the vineyards, the gentle waters, and see the earth's countenance, smiling and serene. Decorous it is always; only the irregularities of the Loire and its channel seem to bear any reference to the conduct of those beautiful historic ladies who dispersed their reputations in the vicinity. Even man did not always build a Langeais or a Loches. Urbane and gracious amid their parks or on their bluffs rise those dwellings planned when France's architectural genius was in its happiest mood—though not its loftiest. They look like the good society which once assembled in them; their mere aspect suggests the wits, the brilliant talkers and listeners of a day when conversation was a living art still, the day which furnishes us even now with those letters and memoirs which are the dainty wainscotting and mantelpieces, the interior decorations of Literature. You may wander almost anywhere among the poplars and the chestnuts in the valleys of the Loire's quiet tributaries; you can hardly go wrong; if the turrets of UssÉ against their rising woodland do not regale your eye, it will be Azay-le-Rideau, or something less famous, or, best of all, Chenonceaux, to which I now return.

II

I saw it first upon an afternoon when no air was stirring, even in the poplars, when the green of Touraine was changing to gold: golden fruit, pears, and apples, where summer's fruit had been; golden leaves flickering down from high branches, or raked into golden heaps; while the faint, sweet smoke of burning twigs hovered in the autumn day. It was the moment and scene of the year when, just because other things have ceased to grow, memories blossom in the mind; and on every golden heap of leaves retrospect seemed to be sitting. We visitors were three. I can recall the first sight of the chÂteau's yellow faÇade, framed by the distant end of the high, formal avenue into which we turned to approach it. All sorts of feet had stepped where we were walking: almost four centuries of distinguished feet had gone in and out of that beautiful front door; but over its appealing associations the still more appealing aspect of the wonderful house triumphed. If I knew about Le Devin du Village then, the scene of its first performance interested me much more because that long and many-windowed gallery was built right over the water, right across the Cher, upon arches that the glassy surface of the stream reflected symmetrically. I was captured then and for ever by the beauty and the originality of this residence. Our best country houses take earth and air into partnership, but this abode of grace possessed, embraced, a little river. To go in at your front door on one green margin and come out of your back door on the other; to dwell in a masterpiece that was house and bridge in one—I can still recover my first sensations of delight at this triumph of French art. Only—the concierge didn't let us go out of the back door; and my disappointment was cherished through long years, until its sequel, which I shall presently reach. This first afternoon became a chapter in the most delightful of guide-books, from which I quote the following:—

'We took our way back to the Grand Monarque, and waited in the little inn parlor for a late train to Tours. We were not impatient, for we had an excellent dinner to occupy us; and even after we had dined we were still content to sit a while and exchange remarks upon the superior civilization of France. Where else, at a village inn, should we have fared so well?... At the little inn at Chenonceaux the cuisine was not only excellent, but the service was graceful. We were waited on by mademoiselle and her mamma; it was so that mademoiselle alluded to the elder lady, as she uncorked for us a bottle of Vouvray mousseux.'

On another page of this same guide-book you may read how, at the HÔtel de l'Univers in Tours, the chÂteau of Amboise was described to us by an English lady of a type that I sadly miss to-day. One met her everywhere then. She was a more fragile sister of that robust, brick-complexioned spinster who used to climb all the Alps in practical but awful garments. She didn't often venture to speak to you for fear you weren't respectable, or might think she wasn't. When she did, it was apt to be with explosive shyness, running all her words together, as she did about Amboise. 'It's-very-very-dirty-and-very-keeawrious!' Curious and furious she always pronounced to rhyme with glorious and victorious; and it invariably made me think of 'God Save the Queen.'

In my interest as to whether we should again have the excellent fare and graceful service which I so well remembered at the little inn, and whether now at last my long-cherished wish to step out of that back door on the river's farther side were to be gratified, Chenonceaux itself had so dropped out of my thoughts that it fairly burst upon my sight. Bursting is, of course, a thing which that delicate and restrained edifice could never really do, only I wasn't thinking about it as our party (we were four on this second visit, and it was spring-time) came into the avenue. There at the other end stood the fair, gay vision of the chÂteau, and its beauty and wonder so suddenly waked my admiration, that I exclaimed, 'How young it looks!'

Yes; it didn't look new, but it looked young: youth is the particular and essential note of this enchanted building. None of its neighbors have it, not even Azay-le-Rideau or Blois, which are its rivals, though never its equals. Chenonceaux was four hundred years old in January, 1915. Age makes one type of person decrepit, and so it is with houses. But Chenonceaux, if ever it come to show its years, will belong to the other type: it will look venerable. Did it, do you think, catch its secret from the ring of Charlemagne, by whose sorceries its mistress, Diane de Poitiers, was accused of preserving her youth? This lady's success with FranÇois Premier so disconcerted the amiability of the Duchesse d'Etampes, that she constantly reminded Diane she was born on the day Diane was married.—But I resist the temptation to dwell upon Diane and everybody else linked to Chenonceaux by history; it's all accessible to you in books; and I proceed with the visit our party of four made, this spring day.

Touraine was now all delicate in green; as lovely, as gracious, as discreet in its budding leaves as when the leaves had flickered down, spangling the air and grass and garden-walks with their gold. We had met at the little inn the same welcome, the same excellent cuisine, the same agreeable Vouvray mousseux. Mademoiselle was not there, but mamma was. Her premises and herself showed no ill effect from the prosperity brought to her through the guide-book I have already quoted. No guide-book in its author's plan, it was now become established as one, and he, petitioned in a letter from mamma, had corrected a certain error. In the first edition, page 60, you may read that we took our way back to the Grand Monarque; in later editions it is the HÔtel du Bon-Laboureur. The confusion to travelers, the injury to her custom, ensuing from the wrong name, madame had represented to the author; and now all was well. The inn wasn't any larger, but more and more each season were pilgrims with expectant appetites led to her door.

'Tenez, monsieur,' she said to me eagerly, when I narrated to her how I had been present at the germination of her renown, 'tenez. VoilÀ!' She showed me the precious guide-book. She treasured it, though she couldn't read it, because it was in English. And I came in for her smiles and cordiality, which really belonged to the author.

You will have perceived, our party this time took their dÉjeuner, not their dinner, at the Bon-Laboureur. The good omelette and cheese and fruit and wine, mamma's prosperity and her well-preserved state,—for now she was really an elderly woman,—all this had brought us in peaceful and pleased spirits to the chÂteau. When we had seen the rooms downstairs and the concierge was conducting the other sightseers—some ten or twelve—to the second story, our party under my guidance stole away to the back door.

'Back door' implies no dishonorable passage through pantry and kitchen; we simply didn't go up the staircase in the wake of the concierge, but independently along the hall instead, and thus across the Cher through Catherine's celebrated gallery. Le Devin du Village came into my mind, and I wondered which figure was the more diverting, Jean-Jacques Rousseau composing opera, or Richard Wagner dabbling in philosophy.

The door was open. I emerged, the happy leader of my party, upon stone steps, crossed a little draw-bridge, and our triumphant feet trod the grass beneath the trees which shaded the river's bank. I had my wish; and as my obedient band followed me, I fear my complacent back and Anabasis manner expressed some sentiment like this: 'Only observe how it pays to see France with a person who knows the ropes!' We sauntered, we expatiated, we paused before what I'll call by metonymy the tocsin—a great bell and chain suspended from strong framework; from this point the chÂteau, with its fine, detached, cylindrical donjon tower of the fifteenth century, looked, in the afternoon light, particularly well: those poor sheep with the concierge weren't getting this view. We must have lingered by the tocsin a quarter of an hour, enjoying ourselves, before returning to the back door.

It was shut. It was locked. Rattling made no impression upon it, nor shaking, nor kicking. We knocked then, fancying this to be an accident. Next we called, or rather, I, the party's personal conductor and competent guide, began to call. Nothing happened. I augmented my efforts. Catherine's gallery, famous scene of the first performance of Rousseau's Devin du Village, responded with cavernous echoes. Between these reigned silence, and a gentle breeze rustled the young leaves of the chestnuts. We abandoned the door and went a few steps down the river to where our gesticulations could be seen from the windows of Chenonceaux. We made these gesticulations with our four umbrellas, whilst I shouted continually. Not a window blinked. It might have been a sorcerer's palace, and we his four new victims, presently to be roasted, boiled, or changed into cats. We looked down the river—no escape; up the river half-a-mile was a bridge; but what impediment mightn't lie between? And even if the way were clear, to go round by the bridge would lose us our train to Tours. One of us, in her deep voice, said that she hoped the robin-red-breasts would find her body and cover it with leaves. Again we flourished our four umbrellas, during vociferations from me, at the imperturbable chÂteau. Then, quite suddenly, something did happen. Out of a window in the donjon tower of the fifteenth century was thrust a head, and from across the river it wagged at us malevolently.

It was the concierge. The shock of discovering he had locked us out purposely in punishment of our independent excursion, threw me into extreme rage. My Anabasis manner had already dropped from me; but Xenophon got his party successfully back, and this same task was now searchingly, compellingly, 'up to me.' More malevolent wagging from the tower was all that resulted from my next demonstrations. In these I was now alone; my party, at the apparition of the concierge, had become abruptly quiet, thinking doubtless that loud calls and wavings would diminish my dignity less than theirs, whose years and discretion were more than mine. Therefore my companions brandished their umbrellas no more, but stood upon the banks of the Cher decorously, in a reserved attitude, patient yet stately, as if awaiting the tumbril; I, meanwhile, hurled international threats across the river. These wrought no change. In repose my French halts, but when roused it acquires both speed and point; yet none of my idioms disturbed the concierge at his window. And now I was visited by inspiration. I seized the chain and rang the tocsin. It sounded as if Attila were coming at once. Somebody would have come, undoubtedly,—the whole arrondissement I should think,—but after a few moments of that din, the head disappeared; in a few more the door was unlocked, and my companions preceded me with restraint yet with celerity across Catherine's gallery and out of Chenonceaux's front door and away, down the avenue to the railway, whilst I delivered some final idioms to the concierge. I am happy to record that these made him livid, and in the presence of a highly attentive audience. But—we had in truth small idea with whom we were dealing. Some time later we got final news of him. He had committed a murder, been caught, tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed.

You will remember the British lady at the HÔtel de l'Univers in Tours, who, in her description of Amboise, pronounced curious to rhyme with glorious. Her kind was still pervading the quieter hotels of the continent (the HÔtel de l'Univers was still quiet) while her more muscular sister was still climbing all the Alps in valiant weeds. This time, another of the identical type sat next me at the table d'hÔte, and from the corner of my eye I perceived her to be making endless and surreptitious dives with her head at my bottle of Vouvray mousseux. Becoming sure that this was neither St. Vitus's dance nor kleptomania, but a desire to learn the name of my wine, I made her a slight bow, turning my bottle so that she could more easily read its label; at which she squeaked skittishly, 'I-didn't-think-you'd-see-me!'

III

The mid-Victorian spinster was gone, the automobile was come, the much expanded HÔtel de l'Univers was quiet no more and had abandoned the table d'hÔte for small tables when next I saw Chenonceaux. Eager as I had been to return to it, still more did I desire to enjoy that particular pleasure which one takes in introducing a scene one delights in to a friend. We were, this time, as we had been the first time, a party of three, and the day was July 4, 1914; but in the Cathedral of Bourges that morning, and at Montrichard and along the Cher that forenoon, firecrackers seemed remote. Later, the HÔtel de l'Univers had illuminations and national melodies for the benefit of its American patrons—these having now swelled to the lucrative proportions of invasion.

But Chenonceaux hadn't changed, Chenonceaux looked just as young as ever. Its bright, serene aspect showed no confusion at changing masters so often. To my friends it more than fulfilled my promises for it, while for me it was even fairer than my memory. The concierge, a woman this time, told her band of sightseers enough, but much less than she knew. She had acquired (one somehow divined and discerned) a certain scorn for her sightseers. She had found (one saw) the affluent automobile to be the chariot of well-informed stomachs, but seldom of intelligences which had ever heard, or would ever care to hear, about Madame Dupin and her many distinguished guests. They knew their Michelin, where to buy pÉtrol along the road, which roads to avoid; and the road they had particularly avoided was the one conducting to civilization. Some of them were present on this occasion with their goggles, their magenta veils, and their brass voices. To these the concierge imparted what she deemed them able to digest. She didn't mention the Devin du Village—but I did! This brought an immediate rapprochement, as we lingered with her behind the departing goggles. She knew and loved her Chenonceaux; her scorn fell from her; but she told us nothing so interesting as the fact that during the last twelvemonth twenty thousand visitors had given each their required franc to see the place. The chÂteau, at this rate, will pay its way down the ages.

But what of the Bon-Laboureur? If the mid-Victorian spinster and the table d'hÔte hadn't survived the pace of the new century, what had the automobile done to the innocent village inn? I hope you will be glad to learn that it hadn't—as yet—done much. I have now reached the third of those meals which I mentioned at the outset. The Bon-Laboureur seemed a little larger,—people were lunching in two rooms instead of one, and out behind, kitchenward, there was a hint of bustle and of chauffeurs, and perhaps the personal note of welcome was fainter. But it wasn't quite absent; and still the food was excellent, still the service was courteous, a pleasant young woman waiting; and I felt that here was a good, small tradition still somewhat holding out against the beleaguering pressure of the wholesale. So I spoke to the pleasant young woman and inquired if the old patronne were still living.

'Mais si, monsieur!' I was, to my astonishment, answered. 'A deux pas d'ici.'

The personal note of welcome warmed up on learning that I was an old visitor here; the patronne would value a call from one who remembered her good cooking; she was now very old; she had sold the business and the good-will; she lived very quietly; would I not go to see her? And her house was pointed out to me.

Along the street of the little white village I went, slowly, in the midsummer warmth. The grape-leaves, trailing and basking on the walls, the full-leaved trees, the light and laziness of earth and sky, conveyed the same hush of repose that had exhaled from the golden autumn and the delicate spring I remembered so well; in this July sunshine, also, the pleasant land lay dreamy and unvexed. At a door standing slightly open, I knocked. Though a pause followed, I felt I had been heard; then I was bidden to enter, by a very old voice. Two rooms were accessible from the tiny hall, but I entered the right one, and there by the window sat the patronne. I had remembered her as moving alertly round her table, quiet and vigorous, above average height. All of this was gone; and as her dark, feeble eyes looked at me, I felt in them a certain apprehension, and found myself unpremeditatedly saying,—

'Madame, I trust you will not think ill of an intruder when you learn why it is that he has ventured to knock at your door. They assured me you would like my visit. Here is my little story: One Sunday afternoon in September, 1882, three travelers came to the Bon-Laboureur. I was one of them; and never forgetting your excellent meal and service, I returned at my first opportunity, in April, 1896. Meanwhile that good meal of yours, and you its hostess, had been mentioned in a book by another of those three guests; and you told me of the prosperity this had brought you. Since that visit, thirty-two years ago, I have become a writer of books too. Of me you will not have heard, but you cannot have forgotten Mr. Henry James, whose praise brought so many guests to the Bon-Laboureur.'

Her eyes, during my speech, had awakened, and now she stood up.

'My servant is absent,' she said, 'or you would not have had to come in so. But my son lives close by in that large place. He will like very much to see you. I will call him.'

She would have gone for him on her trembling feet, but this I begged she would not do; I had but five minutes; friends were waiting for me.

'I am ninety years old,' she said. 'Ah, monsieur, il est bien triste de vieillir. One has nothing any more.' She became suddenly moved, and tears fell from her.

I need not recall the little talk we had then. Strangers though we were, we did not speak as strangers; the memories that rose in each of us, so separate, so different, flowed together in some way, united beneath our spoken words, and made them sacred. But I may record that she got out her old books to show me, her registry-books of the Bon-Laboureur, little, old, modest volumes, where in many handwritings through many years the names of her guests had been inscribed. They had come from almost everywhere in the world. No longer strong enough, she had parted with the business and the good-will; but from these tokens of her past she could not part. She clung to the inanimate survivals of her good days and her renown. And on a blank page of the last volume which she placed before me, putting a pen in my hand, I wrote briefly for her of my three pilgrimages to her petit pays. Of the international distinction of her son she was touchingly and justly proud: famous peonies have spread his name wide as their cultivator and producer. For this, too, was the Bon-Laboureur in its way responsible.

Perhaps I may not see it again, or its grand neighbor, the chÂteau, that secular shrine of a vivacious and select Past. But I shall need no Michelin, or Baedeker, or Joanne, to guide my memories thither. They are with me, every moment and breath of them, for my perpetual delight, a safe possession, unweakened and undimmed; and to conjure them before me it needs no more than the haunting syllables of Chenonceaux and the quaint, cherished volumes of the patronne.

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