En Province

I.

THE COUNTRY OF THE LOIRE.

WE good Americans — I say it without presumption —are too apt to think that France is Paris, just as we are accused of being too apt to think that Paris is the celestial city. This is by no means the case, fortunately for those persons who take an interest in modern Gaul, and yet are still left vaguely unsatisfied by that epitome of civilization which stretches from the Arc de Triomphe to the Gymnase theatre. It had already been revealed to the author of these light pages that there are many good things in the doux pays de France of which you get no hint in a walk between those ornaments of the capital ; but the truth had been revealed only in quick-flashing glimpses, and he was conscious of a desire to look it well in the face. To this end he started one rainy morning, in mid - September, for the charming little city of Tours, from which point it seemed possible to make a variety of fruitful excursions. His excursions resolved themselves ultimately into a journey through several provinces, a journey which had its dull moments (as one may defy any journey not to have), but which enabled him to feel that his proposition was demonstrated. France may be Paris, but Paris is not France ; that was perfectly evident on the return to the capital. I must not speak, however, as if I had discovered the provinces. They were discovered, or at least revealed, by Balzac, if by any one, and are now easily accessible to visitors.

It is true, I met no visitors, or only one or two, whom it was pleasant to meet. Throughout my little tour, I was almost the only tourist. That is perhaps one reason why it was so agreeable.

I.

I am ashamed to begin with saying that Touraine is the garden of France ; that remark has long ago lost its bloom. The town of Tours, however, has something sweet and bright, which suggests that it is surrounded by a land of fruits. It is a very agreeable little city ; few towns of its size are more ripe, more complete, or I should suppose in better humor with themselves and less disposed to envy the responsibilities of bigger places. It is truly the capital of its smiling province, a region of easy abundance, of good living, of genial, comfortable, optimistic, rather indolent, opinions. Balzac says in one of his tales that the real Tourangeau will not make an effort, or displace himself even, to go in search of a pleasure ; and it is not difficult to understand the sources of this genial indifference. He must have a vague conviction that he can only lose by almost any change. Fortune has been kind to him: he lives in a temperate, reasonable, sociable climate, on the banks of a river which, it is true, sometimes floods the country around it, but of which the ravages appear to be so easily repaired that its aggressions may perhaps be regarded (in a region where so many good things are certain) merely as an occasion for healthy suspense. He is surrounded by fine old traditions, religious, social, architectural, culinary ; and he may have the satisfaction of feeling that he is French to the core. No part of his admirable country is more characteristically national. Normandy is Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Provence ; but Touraine is essentially France. It is the land of Rabelais, of Descartes, of Balzac, of good books and good company, as well as good dinners and good houses. George Sand has somewhere a charming passage about the mildness, the convenient quality, of the physical conditions of central France: “son climat souple et chaud, ses pluies abondante set courtes.” In the autumn of 1882, the rains perhaps were less short than abundant; but when the days were fine it was impossible that anything in the way of weather could be more charming. The vineyards and orchards looked rich in the fresh, gay light; cultivation was everywhere, but everywhere it seemed to be easy. There was no visible poverty ; thrift and success presented themselves as matters of good taste. The white caps of the women glittered in the sunshine, and their well-made sabots clicked cheerfully on the hard, clean roads. Touraine is a land of old châteaux — a gallery of architectural specimens and of large hereditary properties. The peasantry have less of the luxury of ownership than in most other parts of France ; though they have enough of it to give them quite their share of that shrewdly conservative look which, in the little chaffering place of the market-town, the stranger observes so often in the wrinkled brown masks that surmount the agricultural blouse. This is moreover the heart of the old French monarchy, and as that monarchy was splendid and picturesque, a reflection of the splendor still glitters in the current of the Loire. Some of the most striking events of French history have occurred on the banks of that river, and the soil it waters bloomed for awhile with the flowering of the Renaissance. The Loire gives a great style to a landscape of which the features are not, as the phrase is, prominent, and carries the eye to distances even more poetic than the green horizons of Touraine. It is a very fitful stream, and is sometimes seen to run thin and expose all the crudities of its channel; a great defect certainly in a river which has such serious artistic responsibilities. But I speak of it as I saw it last, full, tranquil, powerful, bending in large, slow curves, and sending back half the light of the sky. Nothing can be finer than the view of its course which you get from the battlements and terraces of Amboise. As I looked down on it from that elevation one lovely Sunday morning, through a mild glitter of autumn sunshine, it seemed the very model of a generous, beneficent stream. The most charming part of Tours is naturally the shaded quay that overlooks it, and looks across too at the friendly faubourg of Saint Symphorien and at the terraced heights which rise above this. Indeed, throughout Touraine it is half the charm of the Loire that you can travel beside it. The great dike which protects it, or protects the country from it, from Blois to Angers, is an admirable road ; and on the other side, as well, the highway constantly keeps it company. A great river, as you follow a great road, is excellent company ; it heightens and shortens the way. The inns at Tours are in another quarter, and one of them, which is midway between the town and the station, is very good. It is worth mentioning for the fact that every one belonging to it is extraordinarily polite — so unnaturally polite as (at first) to excite your suspicion that the hotel has some hidden vice, so that the waiters and chambermaids are trying to pacify you in advance. There was one waiter in especial who was the most accomplished social being I have ever encountered ; from morning till night he kept up an inarticulate murmur of urbanity, like the hum of a spinning top.

I may add that I discovered no dark secrets at the Hôtel de I’Univers ; for it is not a secret to any traveler to-day that the obligation to partake of a lukewarm dinner in an over-heated room is as imperative as it is detestable. There is a certain Rue Royale at Tours which has pretensions to the monumental; it was constructed a hundred years ago, and the houses, all alike, have on a moderate scale a pompous eighteenth-century look. It connects the Palais de Justice, the most important secular building in the town, with the long bridge which spans the Loire — the spacious, solid bridge pronounced by Balzac, in Le Curé de Tours, “ one of the finest monuments of French architecture.” The Palais de Justice was the seat of the government of Léon Gambetta in the autumn of 1870, after the dictator had been obliged to retire in his balloon from Paris, and before the Assembly was constituted at Bordeaux. The Germans occupied Tours during that terrible winter; it is astonishing, the number of places the Germans occupied. It is hardly too much to say that wherever one goes in certain parts of France, one encounters two great historic facts : one is the Revolution, the other is the German invasion. The traces of the Revolution remain, in a hundred scars and bruises and mutilations ; but the visible marks of the war of 1870 have passed away. The country is so rich, so living, that she has been able to dress her wounds, to hold up her head, to smile again; so that the shadow of that darkness has ceased to rest upon her. But what you do not see you still may hear, and one remembers with a certain shudder that only a few short years ago this province, so intimately French, was under the heel of a foreign foe. To be intimately French was apparently not a safeguard ; for so successful an invader it could only be a challenge. Peace and plenty, however, have succeeded that episode ; and among the gardens and vineyards of Touraine it seems only a legend the more in a country of legends. It was not, all the same, for the sake of this chequered story that I mentioned the Palais de Justice and the Rue Royale. The most interesting fact, to my mind, about the High Street of Tours was that as you walk toward the bridge on the right-hand trottoir you can look up at the house, on the other side of the way, in which Honoré de Balzac first saw the light. That violent and complicated genius was a child of the good-humored and succulent Touraine. There is something anomalous in this fact, though if one thinks about it a little one may discover certain correspondences between his character and that of his native province. Strenuous, laborious, constantly infelicitous in spite of his great successes, he suggests at times a very different set of influences. But he had his jovial, full-feeding side —the side that comes out in the Contes Drolatiques, which are the romantic and epicurean chronicle of the old manors and abbeys of this region. And he was moreover the product of a soil into which a great deal of history had been trodden. Balzac was genuinely as well as affectedly monarchical, and he was impregnated with a sense of the past. Number 39 Rue Royale, of which the basement, like all the basements in the Rue Royale, is occupied by a shop, is not shown to the public, and I know not whether tradition designates the chamber in which the author of Le Lys dans la Vallée opened his eyes into a world in which he was to see, and to imagine, such extraordinary things. If this were the case, I would willingly have crossed its threshold ; not for the sake of any relic of the great novelist which it may possibly contain, nor even for that of any mystic virtue which may be supposed to reside within its walls; but simply because to look at those four modest walls can hardly fail to give one a strong impression of the force of human endeavor. Balzac, in the maturity of his vision, took in more of human life than any one, since Shakespeare, who has attempted to tell us stories about it; and the very small scene on which his consciousness dawned is one end of the immense scale that he traversed. I confess it shocked me a little to find that he was born in a house “ in a row,” a house moreover which at the date of his birth must have been only about twenty years old. All that is contradictory. If the tenement selected for this honor could not be ancient and picturesque, it should at least have been detached. There is a charming description in his little tale of La Grenadière of the view of the opposite side of the Loire as you have it from the square at the end of the Rue Royale, — a square that has some pretensions to grandeur, overlooked as it is by the Hôtel de Ville and the Musee, a pair of edifices which directly contemplate the river, and ornamented with marble images of Francois Rabelais and René Descaites. The former, erected a few years since, is a very honorable production ; the pedestal of the latter could as a matter of course only be inscribed with the Cogito, ergo Sum. The two statues mark the two opposite poles to which the brilliant French mind has traveled, and if there were an effigy of Balzac at Tours, it ought to stand midway between them. Not that he by any means always struck the happy mean between the sensible and the metaphysical; but one may say of him that half of his genius looks in one direction and half in the other. The side that turns toward Francois Rabelais would be on the whole the side that takes the sun. But there is no statue of Balzac at Tours ; there is only, in one of the chambers of the melancholy museum, a rather clever, coarse bust. The description in La Grenadière, of which I just spoke, is too long to quote ; neither have I space for any one of the brilliant attempts at landscape-painting which are woven into the shimmering texture of Le Lys dans la Vallée. The little manor of Clochegourde, the residence of Madame de Mortsauf, the heroine of that extraordinary work, was within a moderate walk of Tours, and the picture in the novel is presumably a copy from an original which it would be possible to-day to discover. I did not, however, even make the attempt. There are so many châteaux in Touraine that have been commemorated in history, that it would take one too far to look up those that have been commemorated in fiction. The most I did was to endeavor to identify the former residence of Mademoiselle Gamard, the sinister old maid of Le Curé de Tours. This terrible woman occupied a small house in the rear of the cathedral, where I spent a whole morning in wondering rather stupidly which house it could be. To reach the cathedral from the little place where we stopped just now to look across at La Grenadière, without, it must be confessed, very vividly seeing it, you follow the quay to the right and pass out of sight of the charming côteau which, from beyond the river, faces the town — a soft agglomeration of gardens, vineyards, scattered villas, gables and turrets of slate-roofed châteaux, terraces with gray balustrades, moss-grown walls draped in scarlet Virginia creeper. You turn into the town again beside a great military barrack which is ornamented with a rugged mediæval tower, a relic of the ancient fortifications, known to the Tourangeaux of to-day as the Tour de Guise. The young Prince of Joinville, son of that Duke of Guise who was murdered by the order of Henry II. at Blois, was, after the death of his father, confined here for more than two years, but made his escape one summer evening in 1591, under the nose of his keepers, with a gallant audacity which has attached the memory of the exploit to his sullen-looking prison. Tours has a garrison of five regiments, and the little red-legged soldiers light up the town. You see them stroll upon the clean, uncommercial quay, where there are no signs of navigation, not even by oar, no barrels nor bales, no loading nor unloading, no masts against the sky nor booming of steam in the air. The most active business that goes on there is that patient and fruitless angling in which the French, as the votaries of art for art, excel all other people. The little soldiers, weighed down by the contents of their enormous pockets, pass with respect from one of these masters of the rod to the other, as he sits soaking an indefinite bait in the large, indifferent stream. After you turn your back to the quay you have only to go a little way before you reach the cathedral.

II.

It is a very beautiful church of the second order of importance, with a charming mouse-colored complexion and a pair of fantastic towers. There is a commodious little square in front of it, from which you may look up at its very ornamental face ; but for purposes of frank admiration the sides and the rear are perhaps not sufficiently detached. The cathedral of Tours, which is dedicated to Saint Gatianus, took a long time to build. Begun in 1170, it was finished only in the first half of the sixteenth century; but the ages and the weather have interfused so well the tone of the different parts that it presents, at first, at least, no striking incongruities, and looks even exceptionally harmonious and complete. There are many grander cathedrals, but there are probably few more pleasing, and this effect of delicacy and grace is at its best toward the close of a quiet afternoon, when the densely decorated towers, rising above the little Place de l'Archevêché, lift their curious lanterns into the slanting light, and offer a multitudinous perch to troops of circling pigeons. The whole front, at such a time, has an appearance of great richness, although the niches which surround the three high doors (with recesses deep enough for several circles of sculpture) and indent the four great buttresses that ascend beside the huge rose-window, carry no figures beneath their little chiseled canopies. The blast of the great Revolution blew down most of the statues in France, and the wind has never set very strongly toward putting them up again. The embossed and crocketed cupolas which crown the towers of Saint Gatien are not very pure in taste ; but, like a good many impurities, they are decidedly picturesque. The interior has a stately slimness with which no fault is to be found, and which in the choir, rich in early glass and surrounded by a broad passage, becomes very bold and noble. Its principal treasure, perhaps, is the charming little tomb of the two children (who died young) of Charles VIII. and Anne of Brittany, in white marble, embossed with symbolic dolphins and exquisite arabesques. The little boy and girl lie side by side on a slab of black marble, and a pair of small kneeling angels, both at their head and their feet, watch over them. Nothing could be more perfect than this monument, which is the work of Michel Colomb, one of the earlier glories of the French Renaissance ; it is really a lesson in good taste. Originally placed in the great abbeychurch of Saint Martin, which was for so many ages the holy place of Tours, it happily survived the devastation to which that edifice, already sadly shattered by the wars of religion and successive profanations, finally succumbed in 1797. In 1815, the tomb found an asylum in a quiet corner of the cathedral. I ought, perhaps, to be ashamed to acknowledge that I found the profane name of Balzac capable of adding an interest even to this venerable sanctuary. Those who have read the terrible little story of the Curé de Tours will perhaps remember that, as I have already mentioned, the simple and child-like old Abbé Birotteau, victim of the infernal machinations of the Abbé Troubert and Mademoiselle Gamard, had his quarters in the house of that lady (she had a specialty of letting lodgings to priests), which stood on the north side of the cathedral, so close under its walls that the supporting pillar of one of the great flying buttresses was planted in the spinster’s garden. If you wander round behind the church, in search of this more than historic habitation, you will have occasion to see that

the side and rear of Saint Gatien make a delectable and curious figure. A narrow lane passes beside the high wall which conceals from sight the palace of the archbishop, and beneath the flying buttresses, the far-projecting gargoyles and the fine south porch of the church. It terminates in a little, dead grassgrown square, entitled the Place Grégoire de Tours. All this part of the exterior of the cathedral is very brown, ancient, gothic, grotesque ; Balzac calls the whole place “ a desert of stone.” A battered and gabled wing, or outhouse (as it appears to be), of the hidden palace, with a queer old stone pulpit jutting out from it, looks down on this melancholy spot, on the other side of which is a seminary for young priests, one of whom issues from a door in a quiet corner, and, holding it open a moment behind him, shows a glimpse of a sunny garden, where you may fancy other black young figures strolling up and down. Mademoiselle Gamard’s house, where she took her two abbés to board, and basely conspired with one against the other, is still further round the cathedral. Yon cannot quite put your hand upon it to-day, for the dwelling of which you say to yourself that it must have been Mademoiselle Gamard’s does not fulfill all the conditions mentioned in Balzac’s description. The edifice in question, however, fulfills conditions enough; in particular, its little court offers hospitality to the big buttress of the church. Another buttress, corresponding with this (the two, between them, sustain the gable of the north transept), is planted in the small cloister, of which the door on the further side of the little soundless Rue de la Psalette, where nothing seems ever to pass, opens opposite to that of Mademoiselle Gamard. There is a very genial old sacristan at Tours, who introduced me to this cloister from the church. It is very small and solitary, and much mutilated, but it nestles with a kind of wasted friendliness beneath the big walls of the cathedral. Its lower arcades have been closed, and it has a little plot of garden in the middle, with fruit-trees which I should imagine to be too much overshadowed. In one corner is a remarkably picturesque turret, the cage of a winding staircase which ascends (no great distance) to an upper gallery, where an old priest, the chanoinegardien of the church, was walking to and fro with his breviary. The turret, the gallery, and even the chanoine-gardien, belonged, that sweet September morning, to the class of objects that are dear to painters in water-colors.

III.

I have mentioned the church of Saint Martin, which was for many years the sacred spot, the shrine of pilgrimage, of Tours. Originally the simple burial place of the great apostle who, in the fourth century, christianized Gaul, and who, in his day a brilliant missionary and worker of miracles, is chiefly known to modern fame as the worthy that cut his cloak in two at the gate of Amiens to share it with a beggar (tradition fails to say, I believe, what he did with the other half), the Abbey of Saint Martin, through the Middle Ages, waxed rich and powerful, till it was known at last as one of the most luxurious religious houses in Christendom, with kings for its titular abbots (who, like Francis I., sometimes turned and despoiled it), and a great treasure of precious things. It passed, however, through many vicissitudes. Pillaged by the Normans in the ninth century and by the Huguenots in the sixteenth, it received its deathblow from the Revolution, which must have brought to bear upon it an energy of destruction proportionate to its mighty bulk. At the end of the last century a huge group of ruins alone remained, and what we see to-day may be called the ruin of a ruin. It is difficult to understand how so vast an edifice can have been so completely obliterated. Its site is given up to several ugly streets, and a pair of tall towers, separated by a space which speaks volumes as to the size of the church, and looking across the closepressed roofs to the happier spires of the cathedral, preserve for the modern world the memory of a great fortune, a great abuse, perhaps, and at all events a great penalty. One may believe that to this day a considerable part of the foundations of the great abbey is buried in the soil of Tours. The two surviving towers, which are dissimilar in shape, are enormous ; with those of the cathedral they form the great landmarks of the town. One of them bears the name of the Tour de l’Horloge; the other, the so-called Tour Charlemagne, was erected (two centuries after her death) over the tomb of Luitgarde, wife of the great Emperor, who died at Tours in 800. I do not pretend to understand in what relation these very mighty and effectually detached masses of masonry stood to each other ; but in their gray elevation and loneliness they are very striking and suggestive to-day, holding their hoary heads far above the modern life of the town, and looking sad and conscious, as they had outlived all uses.

I know not what is supposed to have become of the bones of the blessed saint during the various scenes of confusion in which they may have got mislaid; but a mystic connection with his wonder working relics may be perceived in a strange little sanctuary on the left of the street, which opens in front of the Tour Charlemagne — the rugged base of which, by the way, inhabited like a cave, with a diminutive doorway, in which, as I passed, an old woman stood cleaning a pot, and a little dark window decorated with homely flowers, would be appreciated by a painter in search of “ bits.” The present shrine of Saint Martin is inclosed (provisionally, I suppose) in a very modern structure of timber, where, in a dusky cellar, to which you descend by a wooden staircase adorned with votive tablets and paper roses, is placed a tabernacle surrounded by twinkling tapers and prostrate worshipers. Even this crepuscular vault, however, fails, I think, to attain solemnity, for the whole place is strangely vulgar and garish. The Catholic church, as churches go to-day, is certainly the most spectacular ; but it must feel that it has a great fund of impressiveness to draw upon when it opens such queer little shops of sanctity as this. It is impossible not to be struck with the grotesqueness of such an establishment, as the last link in the chain of a great ecclesiastical tradition. In the same street, on the other side, a little below, is something better worth your visit than the shrine of Saint Martin. Knock at a high door in a white wall (there is a cross above it), and a fresh-faced sister of the convent of the Petit Saint Martin will let you into the charming little cloister, or rather fragment of a cloister. Only one side of this exquisite structure remains, but the whole place is effective. In front of the beautiful arcade, which is terribly bruised and obliterated, is one of those walks of interlaced tilleuls which are so frequent in Touraine, and into which the green light filters so softly through a lattice of clipped twigs. Beyond this is a garden, and beyond the garden are the other buildings of the convent, where the placid sisters keep a school — a test, doubtless, of placidity. The imperfect arcade, which dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century (I know nothing of it but what is related in Mrs. Pattison’s Renaissance in France), is a truly enchanting piece of work ; the cornice and the angles of the arches being covered with the daintiest sculpture of arabesques, flowers, fruit, medallions, cherubs, griffins, all in the finest and most attenuated chiseling. It is like the chasing of a bracelet in stone. The taste, the fancy, the elegance, the refinement, bring tears to the

eyes ; such a piece of work is the purest flower of the French Renaissance ; it is one of the most delicate things in all Touraine. There is another fine thing at Tours which is not particularly delicate, but which makes a great impression — the very interesting old church of Saint Julian, lurking in a crooked corner, at the right of the Rue Royale, near the point at which this indifferent thoroughfare emerges—with its little cry of admiration — on the bank of the Loire. Saint Julian stands to-day in a kind of neglected hollow, where it is much shut in by houses; but in the year 1225, when the edifice was begun, the site was doubtless, as the architects say, more eligible. At present, indeed, when once you have caught a glimpse of the stout, serious Romanesque tower, which is not high, but strong, you feel that the building has something to say, and that you must stop to listen to it. Within, it has a vast and splendid nave, of immense height — the nave of a cathedral, with a shallow choir and transepts, and some admirable old glass. I spent half an hour there one morning — listening to what the church had to say — in perfect solitude. Not a worshiper entered, not even an old man with a broom. I have always thought there is a sex in fine buildings; and Saint Julian, with its noble nave, is of the masculine gender. It was that same morning, I think, that I went in search of the old houses of Tours; for the town contains several goodly specimens of the domestic architecture of the past. The dwelling to which the average AngloSaxon will most promptly direct his steps, and the only one I have space to mention, is the so-called Maison de Tristan l’Hermite, — a gentleman whom the readers of Quentin Durward will not have forgotten — the hangman in ordinary to the great King Louis XI. Unfortunately the house of Tristan is not the house of Tristan at all ; this illusion has been cruelly dispelled. There are no illusions left, at all, in the good city of Tours, with regard to Louis XI. His terrible castle of Plessis, the picture of which sends a shiver through the youthful reader of Scott, has been reduced to suburban insignificance; and the residence of his triste compère — on the front of which a festooned rope figures as a motive for decoration — is observed to have been erected in the succeeding century. The Maison de Tristan may be visited for itself, however, if not for Walter Scott; it is an exceedingly picturesque old facade, to which you pick your way through a narrow and tortuous street — a street terminating a little beyond it in the walk beside the river. An elegant gothic doorway is let into the rusty-red brick-work, and strange little beasts crouch at the angles of the windows, which are surmounted by a tall graduated gable, pierced with a small orifice, where the large surface of brick, lifted out of the shadow of the street, looks yellow and faded. The whole thing is disfigured and decayed ; but it is a capital subject for a sketch in colors. Only I must wish the sketcher better luck — or a better temper — than my own. If he ring the bell to be admitted to see the court, which I believe is more sketchable still, let him have patience to wait till the bell is answered. He can do the outside while they are coming. The Maison de Tristan, I say, may be visited for itself; but I hardly know what the remnants of Plessis-lesTours may be visited for. To reach them you wander through crooked suburban lanes, down the course of the Loire, to a rough, undesirable, incongruous spot, where a small, crude building of red brick is pointed out to you by your cabman (if you happen to drive) as the romantic abode of a superstitious king, and where a strong odor of pig-sties and other unclean things so prostrates you for the moment that you have no energy to protest against this obvious fiction. You enter a yard encumbered with rubbish and a defiant dog, and an old woman emerges from a shabby lodge and assures you that you are indeed in an historic place. The red brick building, which looks like a small factory, rises on the ruins of the favorite residence of the dreadful Louis. it is now occupied by a company of night-scavengers, whose huge carts are drawn up in a row before it. I know not whether this be what is called the irony of fate ; at any rate, the effect of it is to accentuate strongly the fact (and through the most susceptible of our senses) that there is no honor for the authors of great wrongs. The dreadful Louis is reduced simply to an offense to the nostrils. The old woman shows you a few fragments—several dark, damp, much encumbered vaults, denominated dungeons, and an old tower staircase, in good condition. There are the outlines of the old moat; there is also the outline of the old guard-room, which is now a stable ; and there are other vague outlines and confused masses, which I have forgotten. You need all your imagination, and even then you can make out that Plessis was a castle of large extent, though the old woman, as your eye wanders over the neighboring potagers, talks a good deal about the gardens and the park. The place looks mean and flat, and as you drive away you scarcely know whether to be glad or sorry that all those bristling horrors have been reduced to the commonplace. A certain flatness of impression awaits you also, I think, at Marmoutier, which is the other indispensable excursion in the near neighborhood of Tours. The remains of this famous abbey lie on the other bank of the stream, about a mile and a half from the town. You follow the edge of the big brown river; of a fine afternoon you will be glad to go further still. The abbey has gone the way of most abbeys, but the place is a restoration as well as a ruin, inasmuch as the sisters of the Sacred Heart have erected a terribly modern convent here. A large gothic doorway, in a high fragment of ancient wall, admits yon to a garden-like inclosure, of great extent, from which you are further introduced into an extraordinarily tidy little parlor, where two good nuns sit at work. One of these came out with me, and showed me over the place — a very definite little woman, with pointed features, an intensely distinct enunciation, and those pretty manners which (for whatever other teachings it may be responsible) the Catholic church so often instills into its functionaries. I have never seen a woman who had got her lesson better than this little trotting, murmuring, edifying nun. The interest of Marmoutier to-day is not so much an interest of vision, so to speak, as an interest of reflection — that is, if you choose to reflect (for instance) upon the wondrous legend of the seven sleepers (you may see where they lie in a row), who lived together — they were brothers and cousins — in primitive piety, in the sanctuary constructed by the blessed Saint Martin (emulous of his precursor, Saint Gatianus), in the face of the hillside that overhung the Loire, and who, twenty-five years after his death, yielded up their seven souls at the same moment, and enjoyed the curious privilege of retaining in their faces, in spite of this process, the rosy tints of life. The abbey of Marmoutier, which sprung from the grottoes in the cliff to which Saint Gatianus and Saint Martin retired to pray, was therefore the creation of the latter worthy, as the other great abbey, in the town proper, was the monument of his repose. The cliff is still there, and a winding staircase, in the latest taste, enables you conveniently to explore its recesses. These sacred niches are scooped out of the rock, and will give you an impression if you cannot do without one. You will feel them to be sufficiently venerable when you learn that the particular pigeon-hole of Saint Gatianus, the first Christian missionary to Gaul, dates from the third century. They have been dealt with as the Catholic church deals with most of such places to-day : polished and furnished up, labeled and ticketed — edited, with notes, in short, like an old book. The process is a mistake. The early editions had more sanctity. The modern buildings (of the Sacred Heart), on which you look down from these points of vantage, are in the vulgar taste which seems doomed to stamp itself on all new Catholic work; but there was nevertheless a great sweetness in the scene. The afternoon was lovely, and it was flushing to a close. The large garden stretched beneath us, blooming with fruit and wine and succulent vegetables, and beyond it flowed the shining river. The air was still, the shadows were long, and the place, after all, was full of memories, most of which might pass for virtuous. It certainly was better than Plessis-les-Tours.

IV.

Your business at Tours is to make excursions, and if you make them all you will be very well occupied. Touraine is rich in antiquities, and an hour’s drive from the town in almost any direction will bring you to the knowledge of some curious fragment of domestic or ecclesiastical architecture, some turreted manor, some lonely tower, some gabled village or historic site. Even, however, if you do everything — which was not my case — you cannot hope to relate everything, and fortunately for you the excursions divide themselves into the greater and the less. You may achieve most of the greater in a week or two ; but a summer in Touraine — which, by the way, must be a charming thing—would contain none too many days for the others. If you come down to Tours from Paris, your best economy is to spend a few days at Blois, where a clumsy but rather attractive little inn, on the edge of the river, will offer you a certain amount of that familiar and intermittent hospitality which a few weeks spent in the French provinces teaches you to regard as the highest attainable form of accommodation. Such an economy I was unable to practice ; I could only go to Blois (from Tours) to spend the day ; but this feat I accomplished twice over. It is a very sympapathetic little town, as we say nowadays, and one might easily resign one’s self to a week there. Seated on the north bank of the Loire, it presents a bright, clean face to the sun, and has that aspect of cheerful leisure which belongs to all white towns that reflect themselves in shining waters. It is the water-front only of Blois, however, that exhibits this lucid complexion ; the interior is of a proper brownness, as befits a signally historic city. The only disappointment I had there was the discovery that the castle, which is the special object of one’s pilgrimage, does not overhang the river, as I had always allowed myself to understand. It overhangs the town, but it is scarcely visible from the river. That peculiar good fortune is reserved for Amboise and Chaumont. The Château de Blois is one of the most beautiful and elaborate of all the old royal residences of this part of France, and I suppose it should have all the honors of my description. As you cross its threshold you step straight into the brilliant movement of the French Renaissance. But it is too rich to describe — I can only touch it here and there. It must be premised that in speaking of it as one sees it to-day, one speaks of a monument completely restored. The work of restoration has been as skillful as it is profuse ; but it rather chills the imagination. This is perhaps almost the first thing you feel as you approach the castle from the streets of the town. These little streets, as they leave the river, have pretensions to romantic steepness ; one of them, in-

deed, which resolves itself into a high staircase, with divergent wings — the escalier monumental—achieved this result so successfully as to remind me vaguely — I hardly know why — of the great slope of the Capitol, beside the Ara Cœli, at Rome. The view of that part of the castle which figures to-day as the back (it is the only aspect I had seen reproduced) exhibits the marks of restoration in the most vivid way. The long facade, consisting only of balconied windows, deeply recessed, erects itself on the summit of a considerable hill, which gives a fine, plunging movement to its foundations. The deep niches of the windows are all aglow with color; they have been repainted with red and blue, relieved with gold figures, and each of them looks more like the royal box at a theatre than like the aperture of a palace dark with memories. For all this, however, and in spite of the fact that, as in some others of the châteaux of Touraine (always excepting the colossal Chambord which is not in Touraine !), there is less vastness than one had expected, the least hospitable aspect of Blois is abundantly impressive. Here, as elsewhere, lightness and grace are the keynote ; and the recesses of the windows, with their happy proportions, their sculpture and their color, are the empty frames of brilliant pictures. They need the figure of a Francis I. to complete them — or of a Diane de Poitiers, or even of a Henry III. The base of this exquisite wing emerges from a bed of light verdure, which has been allowed to mass itself there and which contributes to the springing look of the walls ; while on the right it joins the most modern portion of the castle, the building constructed, on foundations of enormous height and solidity, in 1635, by Gaston d'Orléans. This fine frigid mansion —the proper view of it is from the court within — is one of the masterpieces of Francois Mansard, whom a kind providence did not allow to make over the whole palace in the superior manner of his superior age. This had been a part of Gaston’s plan — he was a blunderer born, and this precious project was worthy of him. This execution of it would surely have been one of the great misdeeds of history. Partially performed, the misdeed is not altogether to be regretted, for as one stands in the court of the castle and lets one’s eye wander from the splendid wing of Francis I., which is the last word of free and joyous invention, to the ruled lines and blank spaces of the ponderous erection of Mansard, one makes one’s reflections upon the advantage, in even the least personal of the arts, of having something to say, and upon the stupidity of a taste which had ended by becoming an aggregation of negatives. Gaston’s wing, taken by itself, has much of the bel air which was to belong to the architecture of Louis XIV. ; but taken in contrast to its flowering, laughing, living neighbor, it marks the difference between inspiration and calculation. We scarcely grudge it its place, however, for it adds a price to the rest of the château. We have entered the court, by the way, by jumping over the walls. The more orthodox method is to follow a modern terrace, which leads to the left, from the side of the château that I began by speaking of, and passes round, ascending, to a little square on a considerably higher level, which is not, like the very modern square on which the back (as I have called it) looks out, a thoroughfare. This small, empty place, oblong in form, at once bright and quiet, with a certain grass-grown look, offers an excellent setting to the entrance-front of the palace, the wing of Louis XII. The restoration here has been lavish; but it was no more than a just reaction against the injuries, still more lavish, by which the unfortunate building had long been overwhelmed. It had fallen into a state of ruinous neglect, relieved only

by the misuse proceeding from successive generations of soldiers, for whom its charming chambers served as barrackroom. Whitewashed, mutilated, dishonored, the castle of Blois may be said to have escaped simply with its life. This is the history of Amboise as well, and is to a certain extent the history of Chambord. Delightful, at any rate was the refreshed facade of Louis XII., as I stood and looked at it one bright September morning. In that soft, clear, merry light of Touraine, everything shows, everything speaks. Charming are the taste, the happy proportions, the color of this beautiful front, to which the new feeling for a purely domestic architecture — an architecture of security and tranquillity, in which art could indulge itself — gave an air of youth and gladness. It is true that for a long time to come the castle of Blois was neither very safe nor very quiet; but its dangers came from within, from the evil passions of its inhabitants, and not from siege or invasion. The front of Louis XII. is of red brick, crossed here and there with purple; and the purple state of the high roof, relieved with chimneys beautifully treated and with the embroidered caps of pinnacles and arches, with the porcupine of Louis, the ermine and the festooned rope which formed the devices of Anne of Brittany — the tone of this rich-looking roof carries out the mild glow of the wall. The wide, fair windows look as if they had expanded to let in the rosy dawn of the Renaissance. Charming, for that matter, are the windows of all the châteaux of Touraine, with their squareness corrected (as it is not in the Tudor architecture) by the curve of the upper corners, which makes this line look— above the expressive aperture — like a penciled eyebrow. The low door of this front is crowned by a high, deep niche, in which, under a splendid canopy, stiffly astride of a stiffly-draped charger, sits in profile an image of the good King Louis. Good as he had been, the father of his people as he was called (I believe he remitted several taxes), he was not good enough to pass muster at the Revolution, and the effigy I have just described is no more than a reproduction of the primitive statue, demolished at that period. Pass beneath it, into the court, and the sixteenth century closes round you; it is a pardonable flight of fancy to say that the expressive faces of an age in which human passions lay very near the surface seem to look out at you from the windows, from the balconies, from the thick foliage of the sculpture. The portion of the wing of Louis XII. that looks toward the court is supported on a deep arcade. On your right is the wing erected by Francis I., the reverse of the mass of building which you see on approaching the castle. This exquisite, this extravagant, this transcendent piece of architecture is the most joyous utterance of the French Renaissance. It is covered with an embroidery of sculpture in which every detail is worthy of the hand of a goldsmith. In the middle of it, or rather a little to the left, rises the famous winding staircase which even the ages which most misused it must vaguely have admired. It forms a kind of chiseled cylinder, with wide interstices, so that the stairs are open to the air. Every inch of this structure, of its balconies, its pillars, its great central columns, is wrought over with lovely images, strange and ingenious devices, prime among which is the great heraldic salamander of Francis I. The salamander is everywhere at Blois — over the chimneys, over the doors, on the walls; this whole division of the castle bears the stamp of that eminently pictorial prince. The running cornice along the top of the front is like an unfolded, an elongated, bracelet. The windows of the attic are like shrines for saints. The gargoyles, the medallions, the statuettes, the festoons, are like the

elaboration of some precious cabinet rather than the details of a building exposed to the weather and to the ages. In the interior there is a profusion of restoration, and it is all restoration in color. This has been, evidently, a work of great science and research, but it will easily strike you as overdone. The universal freshness is a discord, a false note ; it seems to light up the dusky past with an unnatural glare. Begun in the reign of Louis Philippe, this terrible process — the more terrible always the more you admit that it has been necessary — has been carried so far that there is now scarcely a square inch of the interior that has the color of the past upon it. It is true that the place had been so coated over with modern abuse that something was needed to keep it alive ; it is only, perhaps, a pity that the restorers, not content with saving its life, should have undertaken to restore its youth. The love of consistency, in such a business, is a dangerous lure. All the old apartments have been rechristened, as it were ; the geography of the castle has been reëstablished. The guard-rooms, the bed-rooms, the closets, the oratories, have recovered their identity. Every spot connected with the murder of the Duke of Guise is pointed out by a small, shrill boy who takes you from room to room, and who has learned his lesson in perfection. The place is full of Catherine de’ Medici, of Henry III., of memories, of ghosts, of echoes, of possible evocations and revivals. It is covered with crimson and gold; the fireplaces and the ceilings are magnificent; they look like expensive “sets ” at the grand opera. I should have mentioned that below, in the court, the front of the wing of Gaston d’Orléans faces you as you enter, so that the place is a course of French history. Inferior in beauty and grace to the other portions of the castle, the wing is yet a nobler monument than the memory of Gaston deserves. The second of the sons of Henry IV., who was no more fortunate as a father than as a husband, younger brother of Louis XIII., and father of the great Mademoiselle, the most celebrated, most ambitious, most self-complacent and most unsuccessful fille à marier in French history, passed in enforced retirement at the castle of Blois the close of a life of clumsy intrigues against Cardinal Richelieu, in which his rashness was only equaled by his pusillanimity and his ill-luck by his inaccessibility to correction, and which, after so many follies and shames, was properly summed up in the project, begun but not completed, of demolishing the beautiful habitation of his exile in order to erect a better one. With Gaston d'Orléans, however, who lived there without dignity, the history of the Château de Blois declines. Its interesting period is that of the wars of religion. It was the chief residence of Henry III., and the scene of the principal events of his weak, violent, immoral reign. It has been restored more than enough, as I have said, by architects and decorators ; the visitor, as he moves through its empty rooms, which are at once brilliant and ill-lighted (they have not been refurnished), undertakes a little restoration of his own. His imagination helps itself from the things that remain ; he tries to see the life of the sixteenth century in its form and dress — its turbulence, its passions, its loves and hates, its treacheries, falsities, touches of faith, its latitude of personal development, its presentation of the whole nature, its nobleness of costume, charm of speech, splendor of taste, unequaled picturesqueness. The picture is full of movement, of contrasted light and darkness, full altogether of abominations. Mixed up with them all is the great name of religion, so that the drama wants nothing to make it complete. What episode was ever more perfect — looked at as a dramatic occurrence — than the murder of the Duke of Guise ? The insolent

prosperity of the victim; the weakness, the vices, the terrors, of the author of the deed; the perfect execution of the plot; the accumulation of horror in what followed it, give it, as a crime, a kind of immortal solidity. But we must not take the Château de Blois too hard ; I went there, after all, by way of entertainment. If among these sinister memories, your visit should threaten to prove a tragedy, there is an excellent way of removing the impression. You may treat yourself, at Blois, to a very cheerful afterpiece. There is a charming industry practiced there, and practiced in charming conditions. Follow the bright little quay, down the river, till you get quite out of the town —reach the point where the road beside the Loire becomes sinuous and attractive, turns the corner of diminutive headlands, and makes you wonder what is beyond. Let not your curiosity induce you, however, to pass by a modest white villa which overlooks the stream, inclosed in a fresh little court; for here dwells an artist — an artist in faience. There is no sort of sign, and the place looks peculiarly private. But if you ring at the gate, you will not be turned away. You will, on the contrary, be ushered upstairs, into a parlor — there is nothing resembling a shop — encumbered with specimens of remarkably handsome pottery. The work is of the best, a careful reproduction of old forms, colors, devices ; and the master of the establishment is one of those completely artistic types that are often found in France. His reception is as friendly as his work is ingenious, and I think it is not too much to say that you like the work the better because he has produced it. His vases, cups and jars, lamps, platters, plaques, with their deep, strong hues, their innumerable figures, their family likeness and wide variations, are scattered through his occupied rooms; they serve at once as his stock-in-trade and as household ornament. As we all know, this is an age of prose, of machinery, of wholesale production, of coarse and hasty processes. But one brings away from the establishment of the very intelligent M. Ulysse the sense of a less eager activity and a greater search for perfection. Heh has but a few workmen, and he gives them plenty of time. The place makes a little vignette, leaves an impression: the quiet white house, in its garden, on the road by the wide clear river, without the smoke, the bustle, the ugliness, of so much of our modern industry. It ought to gratify Mr. Ruskin.

Henry James.