It is to be inferred that the aspect of things at Chaumont has not changed much since that day,--always saving that spider-net wire bridge. The population of the town has doubtless grown somewhat, even though small towns in France sometimes do not increase their population in centuries; but the topographical aspect of the long-drawn-out village, backed by green hills on one side and the Loire on the other, is much as it always has been. [Illustration: _Signature of Diane de Poitiers_] The château at Chaumont had its origin as far back as the tenth century, and its proprietors were successively local seigneurs, Counts of Blois, the family of Amboise, and Diane de Poitiers, who received it from Catherine in exchange for Chenonceaux. This was not a fair exchange, and Diane was, to some extent, justified in her complaints. Chaumont was for a time in the possession of Scipion Sardini, one of the Italian partisans of the Medici, "whose arms bore _trois sardines d'argent_," and who had married Isabelle de la Tour, "_la Demoiselle de Limieul_" of unsavoury reputation. The "_Demoiselle de Limieul_" was related, too, to Catherine, and was celebrated in the gallantries of the time in no enviable fashion. She was a member of that band of demoiselles whose business it was--by one fascination or another--to worm political secrets from the nobles of the court. One horrible scandal connected the unfortunate lady with the Prince de Condé, but it need not be repeated here. The Huguenots ridiculed it in those memorable verses beginning thus: "Puella illa nobilis Quæ erat tam amabilis." After the reign of Sardini and of his direct successors, the house of Bullion, Chaumont passed through many hands. Madame de Staël arrived at the château in the early years of the nineteenth century, when she had received the order to separate herself from Paris, "by at least forty leagues." She had made the circle of the outlying towns, hovering about Paris as a moth about a candle-flame; Rouen, Auxerre, Blois, Saumur, all had entertained her, but now she came to establish herself in this Loire citadel. As the story goes, journeying from Saumur to Tours, by post-chaise, on the opposite side of the river, she saw the imposing mass of Chaumont rising high above the river-bed, and by her good graces and winning ways installed herself in the affections of the then proprietor, M. Leray, and continued her residence "and made her court here for many years." Chaumont is to-day the property of the Princesse de Broglie, who has sought to restore it, where needful, even to reëstablishing the ancient fosse or moat. This last, perhaps, is not needful; still, a moated château, or even a moated grange has a fascination for the sentimentally inclined.