A trifle of agitation might easily have been excused in any prospective caretaker confronted for the first time by the chateau of Mirabel. Since there was, on this side of it, no half-concealing avenue, nor, indeed, trees of any kind whatever, but only the prone skeletons of what had been a series of formal gardens, the whole towering extent of the fa?ade broke in one oppressive moment upon eye and brain. And that, no doubt, was why Mme Vidal, walking at first with fair speed towards it over the wide gravel approach, suddenly came to a standstill, and, gripping tightly the handle of her basket, stood like a statue, gazing, across its forlorn parterres, at the overpowering bulk of her new home. Forty-two years had gone to the making of Mirabel. Begun in 1528 for Fran?ois I., at the same time as that other palace of Fontainebleau, it had risen under the eyes of successive Royal architects, de l’Orme and Primaticcio, till it became the great chateau reckoned, in that day of the French Renaissance, so wonderful a novelty—a residence not built round courtyards one or many, but constructed in a solid mass, a parallelogram of great length and height, whereof the north side exactly reproduced the south and the east the west. And Girolamo della Robbia, brought from Italy, had ornamented it in every part with details of many-coloured majolica.
So it stood, this great pile, before the eyes of Mme Vidal—its five-storeyed fa?ade cut, as it were, into three portions by the two square-faced towers which ran up it, and which were repeated, something larger and more aspiring, at the corners. Along both of the two lower storeys, making a sort of colonnade or loggia in front of the tall windows, went richly decorated arcading, fifteen bays of it, lofty and round-arched. Interrupted by similar towers at intervals the colonnading ran, in fact, round the entire building. But the five bays of the central portion were more deeply recessed than the others, for at their pillar bases stretched, from tower to tower, twelve immensely long, wide and shallow steps. Save for the absence of these steps and of the great entrance door to which they led—and for a difference, also, in the frieze over the arches—the second storey exactly reproduced the first. But the third and fourth gained a measure of variety from the absence of the colonnading; though on the third there was still an uncovered terrace or balcony. Here too the windows, no longer so lofty, showed differing schemes of ornamentation, the frames of the lower row being supported by a sort of winged design, the upper accompanied by flat columns.
Yet, despite these devices to break monotony, it was with relief that the eye, travelling upwards over this regular assemblage of colonnades and windows, came at last to the high-pitched roofs, with their agreeably different levels, their dormer windows, and their tall, ornate chimney-stacks. The roof of the midmost portion of the chateau, between the two central towers, was the lowest; yet even this, after putting forth two great decorated chimneys, suddenly soared up at each end into a peak higher even than those of the towers. And on either hand of it sprang the great pointed pavilion-roofs of the side wings, much higher again, and blossoming, they also, into the most intricately ornamented chimneys and dormer windows.
And everywhere there was this astounding many-hued, glazed and highly-modelled decoration, lavished in frieze and medallion from the richly diapered soffits of the arcading on the ground floor to the very crests of the roofs themselves. It was true that it did not glitter so brightly in the sun of 1799 as in that of 1570, that more than two centuries of exposure to northern weather had dimmed—not perhaps to its disadvantage—something of the Italian’s lustre and colouring, and that the far more destructive human agencies of the last seven years had obliterated some of his ornaments altogether, yet Mirabel still was a “palais de fa?ence,” still supported the enthusiastic testimony of a Renaissance contemporary that its mass was “fort éclattante à la veue.” And even if the decoration were too exuberant, even if the whole building were imposing rather from sheer size than from any other architectural virtue, it was undeniably a great house, with a majesty and a history of its own, a house that bore out the proud motto of its vanished owners, Memini et permaneo—‘I remember and I remain.’
Such was the chateau of Mirabel, built for the first King of the Valois-Angouléme branch, whose salamander still in places adorned it, and given by the last to his favourite, César de Saint-Chamans, Marquis de Trélan. Up and down those great steps, in the last two hundred years, had gone many a prince and warrior and statesman and courtier, many a great lady and fair. Mirabel with its colonnades and majolica had known much revelry, much wit, much evil; some good deeds, no little patronage of art and letters, now and then a liberal charity; once or twice, in brides of the line, some approach to saintliness. And it had sheltered always a brilliant courage, a brilliant egoism, an astoundingly tenacious self-will, and a pride as great as the Rohans’. For these last qualities it had been no unfit setting.
Now it was . . . as it was; and a poor semptress from Paris, whom the warrant of that little hunchbacked, cross-grained Angevin attorney, the Director Larevellière-Lépeaux, had appointed its only tenant, stood in front of the blind, shuttered mass and gazed at it. The sun might strike on the majolica, but how eyeless looked those great lofty windows of the lower storeys, through that empty colonnading where no one ever now walked or talked! The glass was gone from some of them. Everything was dead, ruined, deserted—a pulseless body. Only, over the level central roof, against the clear sky of afternoon, voyaged with light heart a feather of an April cloud, and the April breeze shook cheerfully the few self-sown flowers that flaunted haphazard in what was the mere chart of the formal gardens. But Mme Vidal’s eyes were on the house, and the house only.
Presently a lively discussion of sparrows took place near her on the gravel. The angry cheeping appeared to rouse her, and she began to go on again towards the chateau, while the victor of the affray, hopping to the basin of a sunken fountain, drank delicately of that water with which the spring rains, and they alone, had filled it.
Very soon the new concierge was close enough to the house to distinguish plainly the winged beasts, like dragon-headed horses, that went in couples, face to face, all along the frieze running above the colonnading of the ground floor, and the medallions of classical heads that filled the spandrils below the frieze, and the Doric entablature of the next storey. Walking now like an automaton, she came nearer and nearer, and stood at last at the foot of the great steps, and, looking up, saw, over the blotched and discoloured marble, through which the grass was pushing triumphant fingers, how the great door, visible now through the richly diapered archway, was roughly mended and yet more roughly boarded up. It still wore the scars of that August day seven years ago when, for the first time in all its proud history, it had been opened to a will that was neither its master’s nor the King’s. At it, too, the concierge stood a moment or two gazing, then, as she had b............