A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE
[Illustration]
Novels by
HENRY JAMES
_Six Shillings each_
THE AWKWARD AGE
THE TWO MAGICS
WHAT MAISIE KNEW
THE OTHER HOUSE
THE SPOILS OF POYNTON
EMBARRASSMENTS TERMINATIONS
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 21 Bedford Street, W.C.
[Illustration]
A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE
By HENRY JAMES
[Illustration]
WITH NINETY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEPH PENNELL
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1900
[Illustration]
Preface
_The notes presented in this volume were gathered, as will easily be
perceived, a number of years ago and on an expectation not at that time
answered by the event, and were then published in the United States. The
expectation had been that they should accompany a series of drawings,
and they themselves were altogether governed by the pictorial spirit.
They made, and they make in appearing now, after a considerable interval
and for the first time, in England, no pretension to any other; they are
impressions, immediate, easy, and consciously limited; if the written
word may ever play the part of brush or pencil, they are sketches on
"drawing-paper" and nothing more. From the moment the principle of
selection and expression, with a tourist, is not the delight of the eyes
and the play of fancy, it should be an energy in every way much larger;
there is no happy mean, in other words, I hold, between the sense and
the quest of the picture, and the surrender to it, and the sense and
the quest of the constitution, the inner springs of the subject--springs
and connections social, economic, historic._
_One must really choose, in other words, between the benefits of the
perception of surface--a perception, when fine, perhaps none of the most
frequent--and those of the perception of very complex underlying
matters. If these latter had had, for me, to be taken into account, my
pages would not have been collected. At the time of their original
appearance the series of illustrations to which it had been their policy
to cling for countenance and company failed them, after all, at the last
moment, through a circumstance not now on record; and they had suddenly
to begin to live their little life without assistance. That they have
seemed able in any degree still to prolong even so modest a career might
perhaps have served as a reason for leaving them undisturbed. In fact,
however, I have too much appreciated--for any renewal of
inconsistency--the opportunity of granting them at last, in an
association with Mr. Pennell's admirable drawings, the benefit they have
always lacked. The little book thus goes forth finally as the
picture-book it was designed to be. Text and illustrations are,
altogether and alike, things of the play of eye and hand and
fancy--views, head-pieces, tail-pieces; through the artist's work,
doubtless, in a much higher degree than the author's._
_But these are words enough on a minor point. Many things come back to
me on reading my pages over--such a world of reflection and emotion as I
can neither leave unmentioned nor yet, in this place, weigh them down
with the full expression of. Difficult indeed would be any full
expression for one who, deeply devoted always to the revelations of
France, finds himself, late in life, making of the sentiment no more
substantial, no more direct record than this mere revival of an
accident. Not one of these small chapters but suggests to me a regret
that I might not, first or last, have gone farther, penetrated deeper,
spoken oftener--closed, in short, more intimately with the great general
subject; and I mean, of course, not in such a form as the present, but
in many another, possible and impossible. It all comes back, doubtless,
this vision of missed occasions and delays overdone, to the general
truth that the observer, the enjoyer, may, before he knows it, be
practically too far_ in _for all that free testimony and pleasant, easy
talk that are incidental to the earlier or more detached stages of a
relation. There are relations that soon get beyond all merely showy
appearances of value for us. Their value becomes thus private and
practical, and is represented by the process--the quieter, mostly, the
better--of absorption and assimilation of what the relation has done for
us. For persons thus indebted to the genius of France--however, in its
innumerable ways, manifested--the profit to be gained, the lesson to be
learnt, is almost of itself occupation enough. They feel that they bear
witness by the intelligent use and application of their advantage, and
the consciousness of the artist is therefore readily a consciousness of
pious service. He may repeatedly have dreamt of some such happy
combination of mood and moment as shall launch him in a profession of
faith, a_ demonstration _of the interesting business; he may have had
inner glimpses of an explicit statement, and vaguely have sketched it to
himself as one of the most candid and charming ever drawn up; but time,
meanwhile, has passed, interruptions have done their dismal work, the
indirect tribute, too, has perhaps, behind the altar, grown and grown;
and the reflection has at all events established itself that honour is
more rendered by seeing and doing one's work in the light than by
brandishing the torch on the house-tops. Curiosity and admiration have
operated continually, but with as little waste as they could. The
drawback is only that in this case, to be handsomely consequent, one
would perhaps rather not have appeared to celebrate_ any _rites. The
moral of all of which is that those here embodied must pass, at the
best, but for what they are worth._
_H. J._
_August 9, 1900._
[Illustration]
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
Introductory 1
I. Tours 3
II. Tours: the Cathedral 12
III. Tours: Saint Martin 17
" Saint Julian 20
" Plessis-les-Tours 22
" Marmoutier 23
IV. Blois 26
V. Chambord 36
VI. Amboise 47
Chaumont 51
VII. Chenonceaux 54
VIII. Azay-le-Rideau 64
IX. Langeais 68
X. Loches 72
XI. Bourges 77
" The Cathedral 80
XII. Bourges: Jacques Coeur 86
XIII. Le Mans 94
XIV. Angers 101
XV. Nantes 107
XVI. La Rochelle 115
XVII. Poitiers 122
XVIII. Angoulême 130
Bordeaux 132
XIX. Toulouse 136
XX. Toulouse: the Capitol 141
XXI. Toulouse: Saint-Sernin 145
XXII. Carcassonne 150
XXIII. Carcassonne 157
XXIV. Narbonne 163
XXV. Montpellier 170
XXVI. The Pont du Gard 178
XXVII. Aigues-Mortes 183
XXVIII. Nîmes 188
XXIX. Tarascon 195
XXX. Arles 202
" The Theatre 205
XXXI. Arles: the Museum 209
XXXII. Les Baux 213
XXXIII. Avignon 223
" The Palace of the Popes 226
XXXIV. Villeneuve-lès-Avignon 230
XXXV. Vaucluse 235
XXXVI. Orange 243
XXXVII. Macon 249
XXXVIII. Bourg-en-Bresse 254
The Church at Brou 255
XXXIX. Beaune 262
XL. Dijon 267
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
List of Illustrations
Nîmes: the Garden (_Photogravure_) _Frontispiece_
Tours: the House of Balzac _To face page_ 8
Tours: the Cathedral (_Photogravure_) " 14
Tours: the Towers of St. Martin " 18
Blois (_Photogravure_) " 26
Blois: the Château " 28
Chambord " 38
Amboise: the Château " 48
Chenonceaux (_Photogravure_) " 56
Azay-le-Rideau " 64
Loches " 72
Loches: the Church " 74
Bourges: the House of Jacques Coeur (_Photogravure_) " 86
Bourges: Doorway, House of Jacques Coeur " 90
Bourges: the Cathedral (West Front) " 92
Le Mans: the Cathedral " 98
Angers: Old Timbered Houses " 104
La Rochelle " 118
La Rochelle: the Hôtel de Ville (_Photogravure_) " 120
Poitiers: Church of St. Radegonde (_Photogravure_) " 126
Bordeaux: the Quay (_Photogravure_) _To face page_ 134
Toulouse: St. Sernin (the Transept) " 146
Toulouse: the Garonne (_Photogravure_) " 148
Carcassonne " 158
Carcassonne (another View) " 160
Narbonne: the Washing Place " 166
Narbonne: the Cathedral and Hôtel de Ville (_Photogravure_) " 168
The Pont du Gard " 180
Aigues-Mortes " 186
Nîmes: the Cathedral " 190
Nîmes: the Amphitheatre " 192
Tarascon: the Castle " 198
Arles: St. Trophimus " 204
Arles: Ruins of the Roman Theatre " 206
Arles: Door of St. Trophimus " 210
Arles: the Cloisters (_Photogravure_) " 212
Avignon: the Church " 226
Vaucluse: Ruins of Castle " 240
Orange: the Theatre " 246
Lyons " 250
Brou: the Church (_Photogravure_) " 256
Beaune: the Hospital " 264
Dijon " 266
Dijon: the Park " 268
Courtyard, House of Jacques Coeur _Half-title_
Angers from the Bridge _Title-page_
Aigues-Mortes v
Isle-sur-Sorgues viii
Saint-Bénazet: the Broken Bridge ix
Villeneuve-lès-Avignon xi
Narbonne: the Fish Market xii
Avignon from Villeneuve xiii
Toulouse: Hôtel d'Assézat xvi
Nantes 1
Tours from the River 3
Langeais 3
Chaumont from the River 17
Blois 26
Chambord 36
Chaumont from the Bridge 47
Chenonceaux 54
Azay-le-Rideau 64
Langeais from the Loire 68
Loches 72
Bourges 77
Bourges: the Hôtel Lallemont 86
Le Mans 94
Angers: the Castle 101
Nantes: the Quay 107
La Rochelle: Tour de la Lanterne 115
Poitiers: the Cathedral 122
Bordeaux 130
Toulouse: the Cathedral 136
Toulouse: the Place de Capitol 141
Toulouse: Saint-Sernin 145
Carcassonne from the River 150
Carcassonne 157
Arles, Landscape near 163
Montpellier: the Aqueduct 170
The Pont du Gard 178
Aigues-Mortes 183
Nîmes: the Maison Carrée 188
Tarascon and Beaucaire 195
Provençal Landscape 202
Montmajeur 209
Les Baux 213
Villeneuve-lès-Avignon 218
Avignon 223
Vaucluse, Approach to 235
Orange: the Gateway 243
Valence 249
Macon 254
Macon: the Bridge 262
Beaune: the Hospital 267
[Illustration]
Introductory
Though the good city of Paris appears to be less in fashion than in
other days with those representatives of our race--not always, perhaps,
acknowledged as the soundest and stiffest--curious of foreign
opportunity and addicted to foreign sojourns, it probably none the less
remains true that such frequentations of France as may be said still to
flourish among us have as much as ever the wondrous capital, and the
wondrous capital alone, for their object. The taste for Paris, at all
events, is--or perhaps I should say was, alluding as I do, I fear, to a
vanished order--a taste by itself; singularly little bound up, of
necessity, with such an interest in the country at large as would be
implied by an equal devotion, in other countries, to other capitals.
Putting aside the economic inducement, which may always operate, and
limiting the matter to the question of free choice, it is sufficiently
striking that the free chooser would have to be very fond of England to
quarter himself in London, very fond of Germany to quarter himself in
Berlin, very fond of America to quarter himself in New York. It had, on
the other hand, been a common reflection for the author of these light
pages that the fondness for France (throughout the company of strangers
more or less qualified) was oddly apt to feed only on such grounds for
it as made shift to spread their surface between the Arc de Triomphe and
the Gymnase Theatre: as if there were no good things in the _doux pays_
that could not be harvested in that field. It matters little how the
assumption began to strike him as stupid, especially since he himself
had doubtless equally shared in the guilt of it. The light pages in
question are but the simple record of a small personal effort to shake
it off. He took, it must be confessed, no extraordinary measures; he
merely started, one rainy morning in mid-September, for the charming
little city of Tours, where he felt that he might as immediately as
anywhere else see it demonstrated that, though France might be Paris,
Paris was by no means France. The beauty of the demonstration--quite as
prompt as he could have desired--drew him considerably farther, and his
modest but eminently successful adventure begot, as aids to amused
remembrance, a few informal notes.
[Illustration]
Chapter i
[Tours]
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
humour 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 amiable cynicism. 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 abondantes et 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 splendour 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 a while 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 observed to run thin and expose all the crudities of
its channel--a great defect certainly in a river which is so much
depended upon to give an air to the places it waters. 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 dyke 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 wide river, as you follow a wide road, is excellent
company; it brightens 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 l'Univers; for it is not a secret to any
traveller to-day that the obligation to partake of a lukewarm dinner in
an overheated room is as imperative as it is detestable. For the rest,
at Tours there is a certain Rue Royale 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-humoured 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 saturated 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 endeavour. Balzac, in
the maturity of his vision, took in more of human life than any one,
since Shakspeare, 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 honour could
not be ancient and embrowned, 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
[Illustration: TOURS--THE HOUSE OF BALZAC]
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 Musée, a pair of edifices which directly
contemplate the river, and ornamented with marble images of François
Rabelais and René Descartes. The former, erected a few years since, is a
very honourable 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 wondrous French mind
has travelled; 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 François 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 anyone 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 commemorated in history that it
would take one too far to look up those which have been commemorated in
fiction. The most I did was to endeavour 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 the 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 grey 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.
[Illustration]
Chapter ii
[Tours: the Cathedral]
It is a very beautiful church of the second order of importance, with a
charming mouse-coloured 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
towards 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 chiselled
canopies. The blast of the great Revolution blew down most of the
statues in France, and the wind has never set very strongly towards
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 have a certain character. 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 at their feet, watch over them. Nothing could be more elegant 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 abbey-church 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 "Le Curé de
Tours" will perhaps remember that, as I have already mentioned, the
simple and childlike 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
grass-grown 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 out-house (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 farther
round the cathedral. You 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 fulfil all the conditions mentioned in
Balzac's description. The edifice in question, however, fulfils
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 farther 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, 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 small 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 _chanoine-gardien_ 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-colours.
[Illustration]
Chapter iii
[Tours: Saint Martin]
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
Christianised 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 death-blow 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 close-pressed 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
grey elevation and loneliness they are 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
[Illustration: TOURS--THE TOWERS OF ST. MARTIN]
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--whose immemorial base, by the way, inhabited like a cavern,
with a diminutive doorway where, 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 enclosed (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 worshippers. 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 sordid 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 cloister. Only one side
of this surpassing 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 relief. It is like the chasing of a bracelet
in stone. The taste, the fancy, the elegance, the refinement, are of the
order that straightens up again our drooping standard of distinction.
Such a piece of work is the purest flower of the French Renaissance;
there is nothing more delicate in all Touraine.
[Tours: Saint Julian]
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 worshipper entered, not
even an old man with a broom. I have always thought there be a sex in
fine buildings; and Saint Julian, with its noble nave, is of the gender
of the name of its patron.
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
Anglo-Saxon 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 that great and prompt chastener
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 Sir Walter; it is
an exceedingly picturesque old façade, 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 brickwork, 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 colours. 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.
[Tours: Plessis-les-Tours]
The Maison de Tristan, I say, may be visited for itself; but I hardly
know for what the remnants of Plessis-les-Tours may be investigated. 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 legendary frame of the grim portrait, and where
a strong odour of pigsties 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 stand
deep in historic dust. The red brick building, which looks like a small
factory, rises on the ruins of the favourite 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; in any case, the effect of it is to
accentuate strongly the fact (and through the most susceptible of our
senses) that there is no honour for the authors of great wrongs. The
dreadful Louis is reduced simply to an offence 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 silhouettes of the undistinguishable, which I have forgotten. You
need all your imagination, and even then you cannot make out that
Plessis was a castle of large extent, though the old woman, as your eye
wanders over the neighbouring _potagers_, discourses much of 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.
[Tours: Marmoutier]
A certain flatness of impression awaits you also, I think, at
Marmoutier, which is the other indispensable excursion in the near
neighbourhood 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 farther 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 you to a
garden-like enclosure, of great extent, from which you are further
introduced into an extraordinarily tidy little parlour, 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 instils
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 rare convenience of retaining in their faces, in spite of mortality,
every aspect of health. The abbey of Marmoutier, which sprang from the
grottos 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 furbished up, labelled 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 sets its so mechanical stamp 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 and wine and
succulent promise, 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.
[Illustration]
Chapter iv
[Blois]
Your business at Tours is to make excursions; and if you make them all
you will be always under arms. The land is a rich reliquary, 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, some scene of something. Yet even if you do everything--which
was not my case--you cannot hope to tell 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
[Illustration: BLOIS]
delectable thing) would hold 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 practise. I could only go to Blois (from
Tours) to spend the day; but this feat I accomplished twice over. It is
a very sympathetic little town, as we say nowadays, and a week there
would be sociable even without company. 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 fresh complexion; the interior is of a
proper brownness, as old sallow books are bound in vellum. The only
disappointment is perforce 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 is
scarcely visible from the stream. That peculiar good fortune is reserved
for Amboise and Chaumont.