LUYNES AND LANGEAIS
Below Tours, and before reaching Saumur, are a succession of panoramic
surprises which are only to be likened to those of our imagination, but
they are very real nevertheless.
As one leaves Tours by the road which skirts the right bank of the
Loire, he is once more impressed by the fact that the _cailloux de
Loire_ are the river's chief product, though fried fish, of a similar
variety to those found in the Seine, are found on the menus of all
roadside taverns and restaurants.
Still, the effect of the uncovered bed of the Loire, with its variegated
pebbles and mirror-like pools, is infinitely more picturesque than if it
were mud flats, and its tree-bordered banks are for ever opening great
alleyed vistas such as are only known in France.
The hills on either bank are not of the stupendous and magnificently
scenic order of those of the Seine above and below Rouen; but, such as
they are, they are of much the same composition, a soft talcy formation
which here serves admirably the purposes of cliff-dwellings for the
vineyard and wine-press workers, who form practically the sole
population of the Loire villages from Vouvray, just above Tours, to
Saumur far below.
On the hillsides are the vineyards themselves, growing out of the thin
layer of soil in shades of red and brown and golden, which no artist has
ever been able to copy, for no one has painted the rich colouring of a
vineyard in a manner at all approaching the original.
Not far below Tours, on the right bank, rise the towers and turrets of
the Chateau de Luynes, hanging perilously high above the lowland which
borders upon the river. An unpleasant tooting tram gives communication a
dozen times a day with Tours, but few, apparently, patronize it except
peasants with market-baskets, and vineyard workers going into town for a
jollification. It is perhaps just as well, for the fine little town of
Luynes, which takes its name from the chateau which has been the
residence of a Comte de Luynes since the days of Louis XIII., would be
quite spoiled if it were on the beaten track.
[Illustration: A VINEYARD OF VOUVRAY]
The brusque facade of the Chateau de Luynes makes a charming interior,
judging from the descriptions and drawings which are to be met with in
an elaborately prepared volume devoted to its history.
The stranger is allowed to enter within the gates of the courtyard,
beneath the grim coiffed towers; but he may visit only certain
apartments. He will, however, see enough to indicate that the edifice
was something more than a mere _maison de campagne_. All the attributes
of an important fortress are here, great, round, thickly built towers,
with but few exterior windows, and those high up from the ground. There
is nothing of luxurious elegance about it, and its aspect is forbidding,
though imposing.
The chateau belies its looks somewhat, for it was built only in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when, in most of its neighbours, the
more or less florid Renaissance was in vogue. A Renaissance structure in
stone and brick forms a part of that which faces on the interior court,
and is flanked by a fine octagonal "_tour d'escalier_."
From the terrace of the courtyard one gets an impressive view of the
Loire, which glides by two or more kilometres away, and of the towers
and roof-tops of Tours, and the vine-carpeted hills which stretch away
along the river's bank in either direction.
The chateau of Luynes is still in the possession of a Duc de Luynes,
through whose courtesy one may visit such of the apartments as his
servants are allowed to show. It is not so great an exhibition, nor so
good a one, as is to be had at Langeais; but it is satisfactory as far
as it goes, and, when it is supplemented by the walks and views which
are to be had on the plateau, upon which the grim-towered chateau sits,
the memory of it all becomes most pleasurable.
The former Ducs de Luynes were continually appearing in the historic
events of the later Renaissance period, but it was only with Louis
XIII., he who would have put France under the protection of the Virgin,
that the chatelain of Luynes came to a position of real power. Louis
made Albert, the Gascon, both Duc de Luynes and Connetable de France,
and thereby gave birth to a tyrant whom he hated and feared, as he did
his mother, his wife, and his minister, Richelieu.
[Illustration: _Mediaeval Stairway and the Chateau de Luynes_]
The site occupied by the chateau of Luynes is truly marvellous, though,
as a matter of fact, there is no great magnificence about the
proportions of the chateau itself. It is piled gracefully on the top
of a table-land which rises abruptly from the Loire and has a charmingly
quaint old town nestled confidingly below it, as if for protection.
One reaches the chateau by any one of a half-dozen methods, by the
highroad which bends around in hairpin curves until it reaches the
plateau above, by various paths across or around the vineyards of the
hillside, or by a quaintly cut mediaeval stairway, levelled and terraced
in the gravelly soil until it ends just beneath the frowning walls of
the chateau itself. From this point one gets quite the most imposing
aspect of the chateau to be had, its towers and turrets piercing the sky
high above the head, and carrying the mind back to the days when
civilization meant something more--or less--than it does to-day, with
the toot of a steam-tram down below on the river's bank and the midday
whistles of the factories of Tours rending one's ears the moment he
forgets the past and recalls the present.
To-day the Chateau de Luynes is modern, at least to the extent that it
is lived in, and has all the refinements of a modern civilization; but
one does not realize all this from an exterior contemplation, and only
as one strolls through the apartments publicly shown, and gets glimpses
of electrical conveniences and modern arrangements, does he wonder how
far different it may have been before all this came to pass.
Built in early Renaissance times, the chateau has all the peculiarities
of the feudal period, when window-openings were few and far between, and
high up above the level of the pavement. In feudal and warlike times
this often proved an admirable feature; but one would have thought that,
with the beginning of the Renaissance, a more ample provision would have
been made for the admission of sunshine.
The _chef-d'oeuvre_ of this really great architectural monument is
undoubtedly the facade of the beautiful fifteenth-century courtyard.
There is nothing even remotely feudal here, but a purely decorative
effect which is as charming in its way as is the exterior facade of
Azay-le-Rideau. "A poem," it has been called, "in weather-worn timber
and stone," and the simile could hardly be improved upon.
The town, too, or such of it as immediately adjoins the chateau, is
likewise charming and quaint, and sleepily indolent as far as any great
activity is concerned.
Luynes was the seat of a seigneurie until 1619, when it became a
possession of the Comte de Maille. Finally it came to Charles d'Albert,
known as "D'Albert de Luynes," a former page to Henri IV., who afterward
became the favourite and the Guardian of the Seals of Louis XIV.; and
thus the earlier foundation of Maille became known as Luynes.
Except for its old houses of wood and stone, its old wooden
market-house, and its tortuous streets of stairs, there are few features
here, except the chateau, which take rank as architectural monuments of
worth. The church is a modern structure, built after the Romanesque
manner and wholly without warmth and feeling.
From the height on which stands the chateau of Luynes one sees, as his
eye follows the course of the Loire to the southwestward, the gaunt,
unbeautiful "Pile" of Cinq-Mars. The origin of this singular square
tower, looking for all the world like a factory chimney or some great
ventilating-shaft, is lost far back in Carlovingian, or perhaps Roman,
times. It is a mystery to archaeologists and antiquarians, some claiming
it to be a military monument, others a beacon by land, and yet others
believing it to be of some religious significance.
At all events, all the explanations ignore the four _pyramidions_ of
its topmost course, and these, be it remarked, are quite the most
curious feature of the whole fabric.
To many the name of the little town of Cinq-Mars will suggest that of
the Marquis de Cinq-Mars, a court favourite of Louis XIII. It was the
ambitious but unhappy career at court of this young gallant which
ultimately resulted in his death on the scaffold, and in the razing, by
Richelieu, of his ancestral residence, the castle of Cinq-Mars, "to the
heights of infamy." The expression is a curious one, but history so
records it. All that is left to-day to remind one of the stronghold of
the D'Effiats of Cinq-Mars are its two crumbling gate-towers with an
arch between and a few fragmentary foundation walls which follow the
summit of the cliff behind "La Pile."
The little town of not more than a couple of thousand inhabitants
nestles in a bend of the Loire, where there is so great a breadth that
it looks like a long-drawn-out lake. The low hills, so characteristic of
these parts, stretch themselves on either bank, unbroken except where
some little streamlet forces its way by a gentle ravine through the
scrubby undergrowth. Oaks and firs and huge limestone cliffs jut out
from the top of the hillside on the right bank and shelter the town
which lies below.
[Illustration: _Ruins of Cinq-Mars_]
Cinq-Mars is a miniature metropolis, though not a very progressive one
at first sight; indeed, beyond its long main street and its houses,
which cluster about its grim, though beautiful, tenth and twelfth
century church, there are few signs of even provincial importance.
In reality Cinq-Mars is the centre of a large and important wine
industry, where you may hear discussed, at the _table d'hote_ of its not
very readily found little inn, the poor prices which the usually
abundant crop always brings. The native even bewails the fact that he is
not blessed with a poor season or two and then he would be able to sell
his fine vintages for something more than three sous a litre. By the
time it reaches Paris this _vin de Touraine_ of commerce has aggrandized
itself so that it commands two francs fifty centimes on the Boulevards,
and a franc fifty in the University quarter.
The fall of Henri Cinq-Mars was most pathetic, though no doubt moralists
will claim that because of his covetous ambitions he deserved nothing
better.
He went up to Paris from Touraine, a boy of twenty, and was presented to
the king, who was immediately impressed by his distinguished manners.
From infancy Cinq-Mars had been a lover of life in the open. He had
hunted the forests of Touraine, and had angled the waters of the Loire,
and thus he came to give a new zest to the already sad life of Louis
XIII. Honour after honour was piled upon him until he was made Grand
Seneschal of France and Master of the King's Horse, at which time he
dropped his natal patronymic and became known as "Monsieur le Grand."
Cinq-Mars fell madly in love with Marion Delorme and wished to make her
"Madame la Grande," but the dowager Marquise de Cinq-Mars would not hear
of it: Mlle. Marion Delorme, the Aspasia of her day, would be no honour
to the ancestral tree of the Effiats of Cinq-Mars.
Headstrong and wilful, one early morning, Monsieur le Grand and his
beloved, then only thirty, took coach from her hotel in the Rue des
Tournelles at Paris for the old family castle in Touraine, sitting high
on the hills above the feudal village which bore the name of Cinq-Mars.
In the chapel they were secretly married, and for eight days the
proverbial marriage-bell rang true. Their Nemesis appeared on the ninth
day in the person of the dowager, and Cinq-Mars told his mother that
the whole affair was simply a _passe temps_, and that Mlle. Delorme was
still Mlle. Delorme. His mother would not be deceived, however, and she
flew for succour to Richelieu, who himself was more than slightly
acquainted with the charms of the fair Marion.
This was Cinq-Mars's downfall. He advised the king "by fair means or
foul, let Richelieu die," and the king listened. A conspiracy was
formed, by Cinq-Mars and others, to do away with the cardinal, _and even
the king_, at whose death Gaston of Orleans was to be proclaimed regent
for his nephew, the infant Louis XIV.
The court went to Narbonne, on the Mediterranean, that it might be near
aid from Spain; all of which was a subterfuge of Cinq-Mars. The rest
moves quickly: Richelieu discovered the plot; Cinq-Mars attempted to
flee disguised as a Spaniard, was captured and brought as a prisoner to
the castle at Montpellier.
Richelieu had proved the more powerful of the two; but he was dying, and
this is the reason, perhaps, why he hurried matters. Cinq-Mars, "the
amiable criminal," went to the torture-chamber, and afterward to the
scaffold.
"Then," say the old chronicles, "Richelieu ordered that the feudal
castle of Cinq-Mars, in the valley of the Loire, should be blown up,
and the towers razed to the height of infamy."
From Cinq-Mars to Langeais, whose chateau is really one of the most
appealing sights of the Loire, the characteristics of the country are
topographically and economically the same; green hills slope,
vine-covered, to the river, with here and there a tiny rivulet flowing
into the greater stream.
As at Cinq-Mars, the chief commodity of Langeais is wine, rich, red wine
and pale amber, too, but all of it wine of a quality and at a price
which would make the city-dweller envious indeed.
There are two distinct chateaux at Langeais; at least, there is _the_
chateau, and just beyond the ornamental stone-carpet of its courtyard
are the ruins of one of the earliest donjons, or keeps, in all France.
It dates from the year 990, and was built by the celebrated Comte
d'Anjou, Foulques Nerra, "_un criminel devoye des hommes et de Dieu_,"
whose hobby, evidently, was building chateaux, as his "follies" in stone
are said to have encumbered the land in those old days.
Taken and retaken, dismantled and in part razed in the fifteenth
century, it gave place to the present chateau by the orders of Louis
XI.
[Illustration: _Chateau de Langeais_]
The Chateau de Langeais of to-day is a robust example of its kind; its
walls, flanked by great hooded towers, have a surrounding "_guette_," or
gallery, which served as a means of communication from one part of the
establishment to another and, in warlike times, allowed boiling oil or
melted lead, or whatever they may have used for the purpose, to be
poured down upon the heads of any besiegers who had the audacity to
attack it.
There is no glacis or moat, but the machicolations, sixty feet or more
up from the ground, must have afforded a well-nigh perfect means of
repelling a near attack.
Altogether Langeais is a redoubtable little chateau of the period, and
its aspect to-day has changed but very little. "It is the swan-song of
expiring feudalism," said the Abbe Bosseboeuf.
One gets a thrill of heroic emotion when he views its hardy walls for
the first time: "a mountain of stone, a heroic poem of Gothic art," it
has with reason been called.
Jean Bourre, the minister of Louis XI., built the present chateau about
1460. The chief events of its history were the drawing up within its
walls of the "common law" of Touraine, by the order of Charles VII., and
the marriage of Charles VIII. with Anne de Bretagne, on the 16th of
December, 1491.
The land belonged, in 1276, to Pierre de Brosse, the minister of
Philippe-le-Hardi; later, to Francois d'Orleans, son of the celebrated
_Batard_; to the Princesse de Conti, daughter of the Duc de Guise; to
the families Du Bellay and D'Effiats, Barons of Cinq-Mars; and, finally,
to the Duc de Luynes, in whose hands it remained up to the Revolution.
Honore de Balzac, who may well be called one of the historians of
Touraine, gave to one of his heroines the name of Langeais. To-day,
however, the family of Langeais does not exist, and, indeed, according
to the chronicles, never had any connection with either the donjon of
Foulques Nerra or the chateau of the fifteenth century. The present
owner is M. Jacques Siegfreid, who has admirably restored and furnished
it after the Gothic style of the middle ages.
The chateau of Langeais, like that of Chenonceaux, is occupied, as one
learns from a visit to its interior. A lackey of a superior order
receives you; you pay a franc for an admission ticket, and the lackey
conducts you through nearly, if not quite all, of the apartments. Where
the family goes during this process it is hard to say, but doubtless
they are willing to inconvenience themselves for the benefit of
"touring" humanity.
The interior, no less than the exterior, impresses one as being
something which has lived in the past, and yet exists to-day in all its
original glory, for the present proprietor, with the aid of an admirable
adviser, M. Lucien Roy, a Parisian architect, has produced a resemblance
of its former furnishings which, so far as it goes, is beyond criticism.
There is nothing of bareness about it, nor is there an over-luxuriant
interpolation of irrelevant things, such as a curator crowds into a
museum. In short, nothing more has been done than to attempt to
reconstitute a habitation of the fifteenth century. For seventeen years
the work has gone on, and there have been collected many authentic
furnishings contemporary with the fabric itself, great oaken beds,
tables, chairs, benches, tapestries, and other articles. In addition,
the decorations have been carried out after the same manner, copied in
many cases from contemporary pictures and prints.
To-day, the general aspect is that of a peaceful household, with all
recollections of feudal times banished for ever. All is tranquil,
respectable, and luxurious, and it would take a chronic faultfinder not
to be content with the manner with which these admirable restorations
and refurnishings have been carried out.
One notes particularly the infinite variety and appropriateness of the
tiling which goes to make up the floors of these great salons--modern
though it is. The great chimneypieces, however, are ancient, and have
not been retouched. Those in the Salle des Gardes and the Salle where
was celebrated the marriage of Charles VIII. and Anne de Bretagne, with
their ornamentation in the best of Gothic, are especially noteworthy.
This latter apartment is the chief attraction of the chateau and the
room of which the present dwellers in this charming monument of history
are naturally the most proud. To-day it forms the great dining-hall of
the establishment. Mementos of this marriage, so momentous for France,
are exceedingly numerous along the lower Loire, but this handsome room
quite leads them all. This marriage, and the goods and lands it brought
to the Crown, had but one stipulation connected with it, and that was
that the Duchesse Anne should be privileged to marry the elderly king's
successor, should she survive her royal husband.
[Illustration: ARMS OF LOUIS XII. AND ANNE DE BRETAGNE]
Louis XII. was not at all opposed to becoming the husband of la Duchesse
Anne after Charles VIII. had met his death on the tennis-court, because
this second marriage would for ever bind to France that great province
ruled by the gentle Anne.
In the Salle des Gardes are six valuable tapestries representing such
heroic figures as Caesar and Charlemagne, surrounded by their companions
in arms.
From the towers, on a clear day, one may see the pyramids of the
cathedral at Tours rising on the horizon to the northward. Below is the
Chateau de Villandry, where Philippe-Auguste met Henry II. of England to
conclude a memorable peace. To the right is Azay-le-Rideau, and to the
extreme right are the ruined towers of Cinq-Mars and its Pile. Nothing
could be more delicious on a bright summer's day than the view from the
ramparts of Langeais over the roof-tops of the charming little town in
the foreground.
Some time after the Revolution there was found, in the gardens of the
chateau, the remains of a _chapelle romaine_ which historians, who have
searched the annals of antiquity in Touraine, claim to have been the
chapel in honour of St. Sauveur which Foulques V., called le Jeune, one
of the five Counts of Anjou of that name, constructed upon his return
from his voyage to Palestine in the twelfth century. To-day it is
overgrown with a trellised grapevine and is practically not visible,
still it is another architectural monument of the first rank with which
the not very ample domain of the Chateau de Langeais is endowed.
From the courtyard the walls of the chateau take on a Renaissance
aspect; a tiny doorway beside the great gate is manifestly Renaissance;
so, too, are the polygonal towers, with their winding stairs, the
pignons and gables of the roof, and what carved stone there is in
evidence. Three stone stairways which mount by the slender _tourelles_
serve to communicate with the various floors to-day as they did in the
times of Charles VIII.
The courtyard itself, with its formal carpet design in stone, its shaded
walls, its stone seats, and its Roman sarcophagus, is a pleasant
retreat, but it has not the seclusion of the larger park, delightful
though it is.
Just before the drawbridge of the old chateau, that mediaeval gateway by
which one enters to-day, one sees the Maison de Rabelais, who is the
deity of Langeais and Chinon, as is Balzac that of Tours. It is a fine
old-time house of a certain amplitude and grandeur among its less
splendid fellows, now given over, on the ground floor, to a bakery and
pastry-shop. Enough is left of its original aspect, and the Renaissance
decorations of its facade are sufficiently well preserved to stamp it as
a worthy abode for the "Cure de Chinon," who lived here for some years.
Two other names in literature are connected with Langeais: Ronsard, the
poet, who lived here for a time, and Cesar-Alexis-Chichereau, Chevalier
de la Barre, who was a poet and a troubadour of repute.
The main street of Langeais is still flanked with good Gothic and
Renaissance houses, neither pretentious nor mean, but of that order
which sets off to great advantage the walls and towers and porches of
the chateau and the church. This street follows the ancient Roman
roadway which traversed the valley of the Loire through Gaul.
The river is here crossed by one of those too frequent, though useful,
suspension-bridges, with which the Loire abounds. The guide-books call
it _beau_, but it is not. One has to cross it to reach Azay-le-Rideau,
which lies ten kilometres or more away across the Indre.