château. 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 château 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 château. 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 Vaudémont, 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.