A great fete and water-masque had been arranged by Catherine to take place on the Cher, with a banquet to follow in the Long Gallery in honor of her arrival at Chenonceaux.

When twilight had fallen, torches were ignited and myriads of lights blazed forth from the boats on the river and from the windows of the chateau.  Music and song went forth into the night, and all was as gay and lovely as a Venetian night’s entertainment.  The hunting-horns echoed through the wooded banks, and through the arches above which the chateau was built passed great highly colored barges, including a fleet of gondolas to remind the queen-mother of her Italian days—­the ancestors perhaps of the solitary gondola which to-day floats idly by the river-bank just before the grand entrance to the chateau.  From parterre and balustrade, and from the clipt yews of the ornamental garden, fairy lamps burned forth and dwindled away into dim infinity, as the long lines of soft light gradually lost themselves in the forest.  It was a grand affair and idyllic in its unworldliness ...

Catherine bequeathed Chenonceaux to the wife of Henry III., Louise de Vaudemont, who died here in 1601.  For a hundred years it still belonged to royalty, but in 1730 it was sold to M. Dupin, who, with his wife, enriched and repaired the fabric.  They gathered around them a company so famous as to be memorable in the annals of art and literature.  This is best shown by the citing of such names as Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Buffon, Bolingbroke, Voltaire, and Rousseau, all of whom were frequenters of the establishment, the latter being charged with the education of the Dupins’ only son.

Chenonceaux to-day is no whited sepulcher.  It is a real living and livable thing, and moreover, when one visits it, he observes that the family burn great logs in their fireplaces, have luxurious bouquets of flowers on their dining-table, and use wax candles instead of the more prosaic oil-lamps, or worse—­acetyline gas.

FOIX[A]

[Footnote A:  From “Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre.”  By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, L.C.  Page & Co.  Copyright, 1907.]

BY FRANCIS MILTOUN

Above the swift flowing Ariege in their superb setting of mountain and forest are the towers and parapets of the old chateau, in itself enough to make the name and fame of any city....  The actual age of the monument covers many epochs.  The two square towers and the main edifice, as seen to-day, are anterior to the thirteenth century, as is proved by the design in the seals of the Comtes de Foix of 1215 and 1241 now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.  In the fourteenth century these towers were strengthened and enlarged with the idea of making them more effective for defense and habitation.