If Chambord was built, so to speak, as a sort of hunting lodge, it is the largest one on record. Francis kept eighteen hundred men busy at it for twelve years, and then did not get it done. He lived in it, more or less, for some seven years, however; then went to Rambouillet to die, and left his son, Henry II, to carry on the work. Henry did not care for Chambord--the marshy place gave him fever, but he kept the building going until he was killed in a tourney, when the construction stopped. His widow, the bloody Catherine de' Medici, retired to Chambord in her old age, and set the place in order. She was terribly superstitious and surrounded herself with astrologers and soothsayers. At night she used to go up to the great lantern tower to read her fortune in the stars. It is my opinion that she did not go up there alone, not with that record of hers.
Mansard, who laid a blight on architecture that lasted for two hundred years, once got hold of Chambord and spoiled what he could, and had planned to do worse things, but something--death, perhaps--interfered. That was when Louis XIV brought Queen Maria Theresa to Chambord, and held high and splendid court there, surrounding himself with brilliant men and women, among them Molière and the widow of the poet Scarron, Françoise d'Aubigné, the same that later became queen, under the title of Madame de Maintenon. That was the heyday of Chambord's history. A large guardroom was gilded and converted into a theater. Molière gave first presentations there and received public compliment from the king. Diversion was the order of the day and night.
"The court is very gay--the king hunts much," wrote Maintenon; "one eats always with him; there is one day a ball, and the next a comedy."
Nothing very startling has happened at Chambord since Louis' time. Its tenants have been numerous enough, and royal, or distinguished, but they could not maintain the pace set by Louis XIV. Stanislas Leckzinski, the exiled Polish king, occupied it during the early years of the eighteenth century, and succeeded in marrying his daughter to the dissolute Louis XV. Seventy years later the revolution came along. An order was issued to sell the contents of Chambord, and a greedy rabble came and stripped it clean. There was a further decree to efface all signs of royalty, but when it was discovered that every bit of carving within and without the vast place expressed royalty in some manner, and that it would cost twenty thousand dollars to cut it away, this project was happily abandoned. Chambord was left empty but intact. Whatever has been done since has been in the way of restoration.