Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/119

 de Medici grabbed it away from her before Henry the Second was hardly cold in his grave. Think how Diane, who had loved the place, must have felt to fancy that stuffy Catherine in her everlasting black dresses, squatting in her beautiful rooms! We saw those rooms, by the way, for we came on one of the days when people are allowed to go through the Château (Brown had planned that), and the clever millionaires who own it have had the sense and the grace to leave everything just as it was, at least in Catherine's time. And one can take the bad, Catherine taste out of one's mouth by thinking of lovely little Mary Stuart singing like a lark through the rooms, and living there and in the garden the happiest days that she was ever to know.

One wouldn't suppose that a gloomy, plotting mind like Catherine's would have had a place in it for creating beauty; but it had its one ornamental corner, or she couldn't have thought out the bridge-gallery thrown across the Cher, springing from the original building and spanning the river to the farther shore.

There are two storeys over the bridge, long corridors, all windows, and lovely green and gold river lights, netted over the floors and walls—the most exquisite effect. I walked there, calling up the spirits of vanished queens and princesses—the "dear, dead women," seeing "all the gold that used to fall and hang about their shoulders." Oh, I've got the quotation wrong, but it's Aunt Mary's fault, for at this very minute she's reading aloud to herself in a guide-book about Rousseau and a lot of other shining