Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/118

 make up a fat volume. How they all escaped the Revolution is a marvel. But they have; and if they've been much restored, it is so cleverly done that the most critical eyes are deceived.

If I could live in one of the "show" châteaux, I'd choose Chenonceaux. We drove to it on the day of the Tower, as I've labelled it in my book of memory, "taking it in" on our way to Tours. It's no use your making a note of that wish of mine, though Dad, and trying to buy it, because somebody else has done that already. But if you can find a river as pretty as the Cher (an appropriate name for the little daughter of the Loire, on which—over which, literally, Chenonceaux stands), you might build me one on the same pattern, so I'll give you a general idea of what the castle is like.

Let me see, what is it like? To make a comparison would be giving to an airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Not that Chenonceaux is nothing—quite the opposite; but it leaves in the mind an impression of airiness and gaiety, sweet and elusive as one of those quaint French chansons you like me to sing you, with my guitar, on a summer evening. I think, even if I hadn't been told, I should have felt instinctively that it must have been built to please a pretty, capricious woman. If such a woman could be turned into a house, she would look like Chenonceaux, and wouldn't suffer by the change. Perhaps Diane de Poîtiers isn't a proper object of sympathy for a well-brought-up young lady like Chauncy Randolph's daughter; but I can't help pitying her, because that horrid old frump of a Catherine