The town, or rather village, or even hamlet, of Chambord is about the most abbreviated thing of its kind existent. There is practically no village; there are a score or two of houses, an inn of the frankly tourist kind, which evidently does not cater to the natives, the aforesaid wash-house by the river bank, the dwellings of the gamekeepers, gardeners, and workmen on the estate, and a diminutive church rising above the trees not far away. These accessories practically complete the make-up of the little settlement of Chambord, on the borders of the Blaisois and Touraine. Chambord has been called top-heavy, but it is hardly that. Probably the effect is caused by its low-lying situation, for, as has been intimated before, this most imposing of all of the Loire châteaux has the least desirable situation of any. There is a certain vagueness and foreignness about the sky-line that is almost Eastern, though we recognize it as pure Renaissance. Perhaps it is the magnitude and lonesomeness of it all that makes it seem so strange, an effect that is heightened when one steps out upon its roof, with the turrets, towers, and cupolas still rising high above. [Illustration: _PLAN OF CHAMBORD_] The ground-plan is equally magnificent, flanked at every corner by a great round tower, with another quartette of them at the angles of the interior court. Most of the stonework of the fabric is brilliant and smooth, as if it were put up but yesterday, and, beyond the occasional falling of a tile from the wonderful array of chimney-pots, but little evidences are seen exteriorly of its having decayed in the least. On the tower which flanks the little door where one meets the _concierge_ and enters, there are unmistakable marks of bullets and balls, which a revolutionary or some other fury left as mementoes of its passage. Considering that Chambord was not a product of feudal times, these disfigurements seem out of place; still its peaceful motives could hardly have been expected to have lasted always. The southern façade is not excelled by the elevation of any residential structure of any age, and its outlines are varied and pleasing enough to satisfy the most critical; if one pardons the little pepper-boxes on the north and south towers, and perforce one has to pardon them when he recalls the magnificence of the general disposition and sky-line of this marvellously imposing château of the Renaissance. François Premier made Chambord his favourite residence, and in fact endowed Pierre Nepveu--who for this work alone will be considered one of the foremost architects of the French Renaissance--with the inspiration for its erection in 1526. [Illustration: _Château de Chambord_]