Loire Valley Châteaux

per 7 year old Mary Queen of Scots

Preamble: The year is 1549.  7 year old Mary Stuart is the Queen of Scotland, but is living in exile in France while England & Scotland are at war.   She lives and plays with the 6 year old future François II, King of France, and her future husband.

   As Mary passed her days in the palace suite with the French royal children, France itself came to seem a rainbow swirl of colours to her, and Scotland resolved itself into a dark mist that receded farther and farther with each year, until she remembered almost nothing of it, the way she remembered only shreds of dreams upon awaking.

Amboise

    The light in France was clear, soft, and merry, especially in the light in the Loire Valley, where the court travelled from one magical château to another, following the seasons and the hunt.  There was Amboise, with its huge circular tower that had a spiral ramp that horsemen could ride up, five abreast, and its geometrical gardens with arabesques of boxwood and sculptures of naked men and women set in groves of evergreen.  Uncle the Cardinal said this was quite all right because they were from ancient Rome - and anyway he had a number of them in his own villa, where he had built an artificial grotto as well.

Blois

   There was Blois, with its grand staircase in an octagonal tower, where Mary liked to look out over the courtyard and wave to the people far below.  Its gardens had elaborate fountains that could be operated to put on a water display, or to squirt passersby, and a magical house called an orangerie, where orange trees could grow their fruit far from their native land.

Chaumont

   There was Chaumont, with its astronomical observatory and the study where Ruggieri, the Queen's astronomer - some said necromancer - kept his instruments.  Mary was not supposed to go up there, but once she climbed the steep steps to the tower room and surprised Ruggieri, who was polishing a large flat mirror.  He jumped like a guilty man, but then, like everyone else, smiled when he saw who it was.

"Oh, Monsieur Astrologue, what are you doing?" she asked, approaching him.
"I am shining up my magic mirror," he said simply.
"Can you tell my fortune?" she asked.
"Yes. I could." He turned the mirror toward her.  Her straight, slim form became even more elongated in it.  "But I won't.  I am sure your future is an enviable one."
"Then whose fortunes do you tell?"
"Those who have reaon to be worried about them."
"Do you always tell the truth? What if you see bad things?"
"Then I must tell them.  But gently" He put away the mirror. "It can be difficult." He sighed.

Chambord

   There was the huge white Chambord, sitting in the midst of a great hunting forest, with its enormous kennels with royal packs of hours, and more than three hundred facons in the mews for hawking.  The massive chateau - it had found hundred forty rooms - boasted a gigantic central staircase with double intertwining ramps, made so that the people going up could never see the people going down.  Mary and François and the other children delighted in playing on it, taking off their shoes and trying to make the ones on the lower ramps guess where they were.

Anet

   The roof bristled with a forest of chimneys, spires, and capitals, where the children could play and hide - often startling adults who were playing quite another sort of hiding game.  The children thought it was screamingly funny to catch a courtier with his hose down and his breeches unbuttoned, wheezing and panting.  Once they even saw a bare bottom and recognized it as that of the fat count from Angers, because of the red ribbons on this shoes.  As a result of their pestering, court lovers were forced to retreat to their rooms for assignations and abandon the roof.

Chenonceau

    More sedate activities at Chambord also took place on the roof, when the King (Henry II), Queen (Catherine de Medicis, "the Italian Woman"), and Diane (the King's mistress), surrounded by all the court, would watch the start and return of hunts, military reviews, and tournaments.  The flaring torches, the fireworks, and the brassy blare of trumpets in the rich air made a tapestry of sound and colour in the little girl's mind.

    Then there were Diane's châteaux: Anet, which was a white classical palace dedicated to her widowhood and presided over by Diana the goddess, and Chenonceau, a faerie place spanning the Cher River, rising gracefully on arches over the lazy, shallow river.  Here there was nothing masculine, nothing military or commanding.  Instead, everything whispered of delicate, chosen pleasures, of appetites stimulated only to be satisfied, as the water flowed slowly beneath.

    Always there were the place blue skies, stretching huge and open under the deeper blue Loire River, bounded by its golden sandbanks and bathed in serene clear light.

excerpt from Mary Queen of Scotland and Isles, by Margaret George