Four Valois and Catherine de' Medici lavished their wealth on the wing
built by Francois I. at Blois. Who can look at those massive
partition-walls, the spinal column of the castle, in which are sunken
deep alcoves, secret staircases, cabinets, while they themselves
enclose halls as vast as that great council-room, the guardroom, and
the royal chambers, in which, in our day, a regiment of infantry is
comfortably lodged--who can look at all this and not be aware of the
prodigalities of Crown and court? Even if a visitor does not at once
understand how the splendor within must have corresponded with the
splendor without, the remaining vestiges of Catherine de' Medici's
cabinet, where Christophe was about to be introduced, would bear
sufficient testimony to the elegances of Art which peopled these
apartments with animated designs in which salamanders sparkled among
the wreaths, and the palette of the sixteenth century illumined the
darkest corners with its brilliant coloring. In this cabinet an
observer will still find traces of that taste for gilding which
Catherine brought with her from Italy; for the princesses of her house
loved, in the words of the author already quoted, to veneer the
castles of France with the gold earned by their ancestors in commerce,
and to hang out their wealth on the walls of their apartments.

The queen-mother occupied on the first upper floor of the apartments
of Queen Claude of France, wife of Francois I., in which may still be
seen, delicately carved, the double C accompanied by figures, purely
white, of swans and lilies, signifying /candidior candidis/--more
white than the whitest--the motto of the queen whose name began, like
that of Catherine, with a C, and which applied as well to the daughter
of Louis XII. as to the mother of the last Valois; for no suspicion,
in spite of the violence of Calvinist calumny, has tarnished the
fidelity of Catherine de' Medici to Henri II.