Thus I started on the evening of 10 August in the grand uniform of a mounted National Guard. My first stop was at Blois; I wished to visit its bloodstained château, and I climbed the ladder-like streets which lead up to it. I hunted in vain for the equestrian statue of Louis XII. over the gateway, before which Madame de Nemours had stood weeping, craving vengeance for the murder of her two grandsons; I went into the courtyard, and admired that quadrangular enclosure built under four different reigns, each side showing a distinctly different style of architecture: the wing built by Louis XII., beautiful in its severe simplicity; that of François I., with its colonnades overloaded with ornamentation; Henri III.'s staircase, with carved open work; then, as a protest against the Gothic and Renaissance styles--against imagination and art, that is to say--the cold, tasteless building by Mansard, which the concierge kept pointing out to me persistently, amazed that anybody could admire anything but it in that marvellous courtyard! The rapidity with which I examined it, the kind of grimace that expressed itself involuntarily on my face by the unwonted curl of my lower lip, brought a smile of contempt to the honest fellow's lips, which I was not slow in justifying entirely, by refusing to believe his obstinate asseverations that a special spot was where the Duc de Guise was said to have been assassinated. True, I discovered, beyond reach of any doubt, at the other end of the apartment, which had been a dining hall, a secret staircase, by which the Duc de Guise had left the state room; the corridor which led to the king's private oratory; and everything, even to the very place where the duke must have fallen when Henri III., pale and imploring, lifted the tapestry curtain and asked in a whisper, "Messieurs, is it all over?" for it could only have been at that moment that the king caught sight of the blood flowing across the passage and saw that the soles of his slippers were soaked in it; then he came forward and gave the face of the poor dead body a kick with his heel,--just as the Duc de Guise in his turn had kicked the admiral on St. Bartholomew's Day,--then, drawing backward, as though alarmed at his courage, he said, "Good Lord! how tall he is! He looks taller lying down than upright, dead than alive!"[3] Meantime, while I was remembering these things, the concierge was tenaciously endeavouring to bring me round to his way of thinking. "But, monsieur, only you, and a big fair gentleman named M. Vitet, have ever disbelieved what I state," he said.