Before he became enamoured of Chambord, Francois I. wished to complete the chateau of Blois by adding two other wings, which would have made the structure a perfect square.  But Chambord weaned him from Blois, where he built only one wing, which in his time and that of his grandchildren was the only inhabited part of the chateau.  This third building erected by Francois I. is more vast and far more decorated than the Louvre, the chateau of Henri II.  It is in the style of architecture now called Renaissance, and presents the most fantastic features of that style.  Therefore, at a period when a strict and jealous architecture ruled construction, when the Middle Ages were not even considered, at a time when literature was not as clearly welded to art as it is now, La Fontaine said of the chateau de Blois, in his hearty, good-humored way:  “The part that Francois I. built, if looked at from the outside, pleased me better than all the rest; there I saw numbers of little galleries, little windows, little balconies, little ornamentations without order or regularity, and they make up a grand whole which I like.”

The chateau of Blois had, therefore, the merit of representing three orders of architecture, three epochs, three systems, three dominions.  Perhaps there is no other royal residence that can compare with it in that respect.  This immense structure presents to the eye in one enclosure, round one courtyard, a complete and perfect image of that grand presentation of the manners and customs and life of nations which is called Architecture.  At the moment when Christophe was to visit the court, that part of the adjacent land which in our day is covered by a fourth palace, built seventy years later (by Gaston, the rebellious brother of Louis XIII., then exiled to Blois), was an open space containing pleasure-grounds and hanging gardens, picturesquely placed among the battlements and unfinished turrets of Francois I.’s chateau.

These gardens communicated, by a bridge of a fine, bold construction (which the old men of Blois may still remember to have seen demolished) with a pleasure-ground on the other side of the chateau, which, by the lay of the land, was on the same level.  The nobles attached to the Court of Anne de Bretagne, or those of that province who came to solicit favors, or to confer with the queen as to the fate and condition of Brittany, awaited in this pleasure-ground the opportunity for an audience, either at the queen’s rising, or at her coming out to walk.  Consequently, history has given the name of “Perchoir aux Bretons” to this piece of ground, which, in our day, is the fruit-garden of a worthy bourgeois, and forms a projection into the place des Jesuites.  The latter place was included in the gardens of this beautiful royal residence, which had, as we have said, its upper and its lower gardens.  Not far from the place des Jesuites may still be seen a pavilion built by Catherine de’ Medici, where, according to the historians of Blois, warm mineral baths were placed for her to use.  This detail enables us to trace the very irregular disposition of the gardens, which went up or down according to the undulations of the ground, becoming extremely intricate around the chateau,—­a fact which helped to give it strength, and caused, as we shall see, the discomfiture of the Duc de Guise.