Meanwhile, the crowning distinction of the Early Renaissance palaces was the high-pitched roofs, surmounted in the case of the turrets with lanterns or louvers, and everywhere enlivened with tall decorated chimneys and recurring dormer windows, in frames of richly carved tracery. It was, in fact, in the treatment of the roofs that the French architects chiefly preserved the Gothic tendency to verticality; and, correspondingly, it was in the gradual lowering of the roofs and the emphasis of the horizontal features of the façades that they exhibited their gradual conversion to Italian influences. To-day, these _châteaux_ of Touraine, embosomed in the beauty of their natural surroundings, quietly mirrored in the river’s surface, still testify to the vigour and freshness of the Gallic genius in the dayspring of its acceptance of Italian refinements. A little effort of imagination, assisted, maybe, by pictures such as those of Eugène Isabey, can reconstruct in fancy the splendour and vivacity of the scene, when the terraces vied with the parterres in their blossoming of colours, as courtly men and women in the bravery of imported Italian velvets and brocades, lounged in elegant ease or gathered in a group to listen to a poet’s latest _chanson_, while the activity of the courtyard, with its constant coming and going of russet and green-clad serving men, was stirred to a gayer aspect by the arrival or departure of a brilliant cavalcade of hunters with hawk and hound. =Château de Gaillon.=--One of the earliest of the castles that marked the transition from Gothic to Renaissance was the =Château de Gaillon=, which was built for a Tourainer, the Cardinal George of Amboise, not, however, in Touraine, but in the neighbourhood of =Rouen=. Only fragments of it remain which are now preserved in the École des Beaux Arts in Paris; but in its day it was a masterpiece of the Rouen School, which preceded that of Tours as a flourishing centre of art and letters. It much more nearly resembled in its lay-out the character of a fortified castle, having among other defensive details, a moat and drawbridge. =Château de Blois.=--Meanwhile, a surviving example of the transition and Early Renaissance, is the =Château de= =Blois=, the first of the Royal Palaces, begun by Charles XII and completed by Francis I. The earlier façade is still unmistakably Gothic; the arches of the colonnade are flat segments, characteristic of the latest period; the shafts of the columns are attached to piers that reinforce the upper walls and run into the cornice; the windows still have stone mullions and transoms, and the design and decorative detail of the dormer windows are purely Gothic.