TOURS
In the quest for outlying chateaux one is likely to forget that Tours
itself is very much worth while. Tours has been a city ever since France
had a history, and it fought against Caesar as far back as 52 B.C. It
took its name from the Gallic tribe of that section, the Turoni,
dwellers in those cliffs, I dare say, along the Loire.
Following the invasion of the Franks there came a line of counts who
ruled Touraine until the eleventh century. What the human aspect of this
delectable land was under their dominion is not very clear. The oldest
castle we have seen, Coudray, was not begun until the end of that
period. There are a thousand years behind it which seem filled mainly
with shields and battle axes, roving knights and fair ladies,
industrious dragons and the other properties of poetry. Yet there may
have been more prosaic things. Seedtime and harvest probably did not
fail.
Tours was beloved by French royalty. It was the capital of a province as
rich as it was beautiful. Among French provinces Touraine was always the
aristocrat. Its language has been kept pure. To this day the purest
French in the world is spoken at Tours. The mechanic who made some
repairs for me at the garage leaned on the mud guard, during a brief
intermission of that hottest of days, and told me about the purity of
the French at Tours; and if there was anything wrong with his own
locution my ear was not fine enough to detect it. To me it seemed as
limpid as something distilled. Imagine such a thing happening in--say
New Haven. Tours is still proud, still the aristocrat, still royal.
The Germans held Tours during the early months of 1871, but there is no
trace of their occupation now. It was a bad dream which Tours does not
care even to remember.[16]
Tours contains a fine cathedral, also the remains of what must have been
a still finer one--two noble towers, so widely separated by streets and
buildings that it is hard to imagine them ever having belonged to one
structure. They are a part of the business of Tours, now. Shops are
under them, lodgings in them. If they should tumble down they would
create havoc. I was so sure they would crumble that we did not go into
them; besides, it was very warm. The great church which connected these
towers was dedicated to St. Martin, the same who divided his cloak with
a beggar at Amiens and became Bishop of Tours in the fourth century. It
was destroyed once and magnificently rebuilt, but it will never be
rebuilt now. One of these old relics is called the Clock tower, the
other the tower of Charlemagne, because Luitgard, his third queen, was
buried beneath it.
The cathedral at the other end of town appears not to have suffered much
from the ravages of time and battle, though one of the towers was
undergoing some kind of repairs that required intricate and lofty
scaffolding. Most of the cathedrals are undergoing repairs, which is not
surprising when one remembers the dates of their beginnings. This one at
Tours was commenced in 1170 and the building continued during about four
hundred years. Joan of Arc worshiped in it when she was on her way to
Chinon and again when she had set out to relieve Orleans.
The face of the cathedral is indeed beautiful--"a jewel," said Henry IV,
"of which only the casket is wanting." It does not seem to us as
beautiful as Rouen, or Amiens, or Chartres, but its fluted truncated
towers are peculiarly its own and hardly less impressive.
The cathedral itself forms a casket for the real jewel--the tomb of the
two children of Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany, a little boy and
girl, exquisitely cut, resting side by side on a slab of black marble,
guarded at their head and feet by kneeling angels. Except the slab, the
tomb is in white marble carved with symbolic decorations. It is all so
delicate and conveys such a feeling of purity and tenderness that even
after four hundred years one cannot fail to feel something of the love
and sorrow that placed it there.
Tours is full of landmarks and localities, but the intense heat of the
end of June is not a good time for city sight-seeing. We went about a
little and glanced at this old street--such as Place Plumeran--and that
old chateau, like the Tour de Guise, now a barrack, and passed the
Theatre Municipal, and the house where Balzac was born, and stood
impressed and blinking before the great Palace of Justice, blazing in
the sun and made more brilliant, more dazzling by the intensely
red-legged soldiers that in couples and groups are always loitering
before it. I am convinced that to touch those red-hot trousers would
take the skin off one's fingers.
We might have examined Tours more carefully if we had been driving
instead of walking. I have spoken of the car being in the garage. We
cracked the leaf of a spring that day at Chinon, and then our tires, old
and worn after five thousand miles of loyal service, required
reenforcement. They really required new ones, but our plan was to get
home with these if we could. Besides, one cannot buy new tires in
American sizes without sending a special order to the factory--a matter
of delay. The little man at the hotel, who had more energy than anyone
should display in such hot weather, pumped one of our back tires until
the shoe burst at the rim. This was serious. I got a heavy canvas
lining, and the garageman patched and vulcanized and sold me a variety
of appliances. But I could foresee trouble if the heat continued.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] Tours during the World War became a great training camp, familiar
to thousands of American soldiers.