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 some

thing sweet and bright, which suggests that it is sur-

rounded 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 responsibili-

ties of bigger places. It is truly the capital of its smil-

ing 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 him-

self 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, culi-

nary; 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 Pro-

vence; 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 charm-

ing 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 pre-

sented themselves as matters of good taste. The white

caps of the women glittered in the sunshire, and their

well-made sabots clicked cheerfully on the hard, clean

roads. Touraine is a land of old chateaux, - a gallery

of architectural specimens and of large hereditary pro-

perties. 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 ob-

serves so often in the wrinkled brown masks that sur-

mount 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 splen-

dor 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 Renais-

sance. The Loire gives a great "style" to a landscape

of which the features are not, as the phrase is, promi-

nent, and carries the eye to distances even more poetic

than the green horizons of Touraine. It is a very fit-

ful 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 ter-

races 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 over-

looks 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 con-

stantly keeps it company. A wide river, as you follow

a wide 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 Hotel 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 Cure de Tours," "one of

the finest monuments of French architecture." The

Palais de Justice was the seat of the Government of

Leon 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 check-

ered 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

walked toward the bridge on the right-hand _trottoir_

you can look up at the house, on the other side of

the way, in which Honore 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 the 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 in

felicitous 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 base

ment, 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 Vallee"

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 em-

browned, it should at least have been detached.

There is a charming description, in his little tale

of "La Grenadiere," 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 preten-

sions to grandeur, overlooked as it is by the Hotel de

Ville and the Musee, a pair of edifices which directly

contemplate the river, and ornamented with marble

images of Francois Rabelais and Rene Descartes.

The former, erected a few years since, is a very honor-

able production; the pedastal 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 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

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 Grenadiere," of which I just

spoke, is too long to quote; neither have I space for

any one of the brilliant attempts at landscape paint-

ing which are woven into the shimmering texture of

"Le Lys dans la Vallee." The little manor of Cloche-

gourde, 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 chateaux in

Touraine commemorated in history, that it would take

one too far to look up those which have been com-

memorated in fiction. The most I did was to endeavor

to identify the former residence of Mademoiselle

Gamard, the sinister old maid of "Le Cure 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 Grenadiere,

without, it must be confessed, very vividly seeing it,

you follow the quay to the right, and pass out of sight

of the charming _coteau_ which, from beyond the river,

faces the town, - a soft agglomeration of gardens, vine-

yards, scattered villas, gables and turrets of slate-

roofed chateaux, 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 mediaeval

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.