The two great towers of Amboise with the inclined planes of brickwork, which wind upward in the midst instead of staircases, were the result of the work which Charles set on foot as a distraction of his grief.  These strange ascents had been partially restored by the Comte de Paris, the present owner of Amboise, before his exile stopt the work of repairing the chateau, and it is still possible to imagine the “charrettes, mullets, et litieres,” of which Du Bellay speaks, mounting from the low ground to the chambers above, or the Emperor Charles V., in later years, riding up with his royal host Francis I., always fond of display, amid such a blaze of flambeaux “that a man might see as clearly as at mid-day.”

These great towers and the exquisite little chapel were the work of the “excellent sculptors and artists from Naples” who, as Commines tells us, were brought back with the spoils of the Italian wars; for the young king “never thought of death” but only of collecting round him “all the beautiful things which he had seen and which had given him pleasure, from France or Italy or Flanders;” but death came upon him suddenly.  At the end of a garden walk, fringed with a mossy grove of limes that rises from the river bank, is the little doorway through which Charles VIII. was passing when he hit his head, never a very strong one, against the low stone arch, and died a few hours afterward.  The castle had been fortified before his time; he left it beautiful as well, and the traces of his work are those which are most striking at the present day....

Within the shadow of the lime trees on the terraced garden of Amboise is a small bust of Leonardo da Vinci, for it was near here he died.  His remains are laid in the beautiful chapel at the corner of the castle court, and the romantic story of his last moments at Fontainebleau becomes the sad reality of a tombstone covering ashes mostly unknown and certainly indistinguishable; “among which” as the epitaph painfully records, “are supposed to be the remains of Leonardo da Vinci.”  He had been brought to Paris a weak old man, by Francis, in pursuance of a certain fixt artistic policy, to which it may be noticed this forgotten and uncertain grave does but little credit.

To Francis I., rightly or wrongly, is given the glory of having naturalized in France the arts of Italy; to him is due the architecture built for ease and charm which turned the fortress into a beautiful habitation, which changed Chambord from a feudal stronghold to a country seat, and which left its traces at Amboise, as it did at Chaumont and at Blois.  He found in France the highest and most beautiful expression of the work of “the great unnamed race of master-masons,” he found the traditions of a national school of painting, the work of Fouquet and the Clouets, but for these he cared not; for him the only schools were those of Rome and Florence, and tho by encouraging their imitation he weakened the vital sincerity of French art, yet from his first exercise of royal power the consistency always somewhat lacking in his politics was shown clearly and firmly in his taste for art.