High above Saint Nicolas a steep flight of steps leads up to the great Château which has made history for the town below. The most striking view is from the other side, where the magnificent “aile François Ier” rises in imposing fashion above the high road; but the entrance is in the Louis XII. wing to the east, and here the beautiful inner court opens out a varied display of richness. The eastern wing itself contains the private apartments of Louis XII. and his wife, Anne de Bretagne--these are now converted into a local museum and picture gallery--and the lower storey is in the form of an arcade, with unrestored capitals of the fifteenth century. Facing this is the wing of “ruled lines and blank spaces,” constructed by Gaston d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII., upon the foundations of a wing erected by his ancestor, the poet-duke Charles, whom Henry V. took prisoner at Agincourt, and whose son became Louis XII. The old castle of the Counts of Blois had been sold to the Orléans family by the last of the line in 1397, and the new possessors, each in his day, occupied themselves in restoring and embellishing it. So zealous indeed, in this respect, was Duke Gaston, that, had not fate intervened, not only the west wing but the entire building would have been pulled down to make way for his plans. Happily for posterity, this devastation never took place, and the François Ier wing, the chief treasure of the Château, is still preserved to us much as it was at the end of the sixteenth century, at which time Blois may be said to have reached the zenith of its fame in the history of France. The Château was then a royal residence, and the roll of its inhabitants forms a long list of illustrious names, foremost among which stand those of Catherine dé Medici and Charles IX., Henri III., and the King of Navarre, and the famous Henri de Guise, who met his death here through the suspicion and jealousy of the king, his cousin. In the Guise tragedy the chief interest of the Château appears to centre. Dark hints concerning “le Balafré” are thrown out during the progress through a succession of dim, empty rooms--council room and bed-chamber, oratory and private closet, some flooded with sunshine, others dark with the strange misty curtain that age will sometimes hang across an old chamber, and through whose thin veil one seems to see the shades of those old-time kings and queens, walking, plotting and praying as they did when the Château was alive with the tread of men. All this appears to lead up to the scene of the Guise murder, and as the guide reaches the royal bed-chamber and points through a doorway here and down a passage there, one seems to have reached the heart of the tragedy. There, in the long council-room, the Balafré stood, warming his hands by the fire, when the message came that the king awaited him in a cabinet at the far end of the wing; here, in an ante-room close by, Henri III.