TOURS TO POITIERS, 76½ MILES
(124 KILOMETRES)
DISTANCES ALONG THE ROUTE
Kil. Miles.
=Tours= to Cormery =19= 11¾
=Cormery= to Loches (direct) =20= 12¼
[=Cormery= to Loches (by Reignac, Azay,
and Chambourg) =22= 13½]
=Loches= to Ligueil =18= 11¼
=Ligueil= to La Haye-Descartes =12= 7½
=La Haye-Descartes= to Châtellerault =22= 13½
=Châtellerault= to La Tricherie =14= 8½
=La Tricherie= to Poitiers =19= 11¾
NOTES FOR DRIVERS
=Cormery to Loches.=--The longer route has the best surface, and goes
through very pretty scenery.
=Loches to Châtellerault= is a rough road, with some short hills
after La Haye Descartes.
PLACES OF INTEREST ON THE ROUTE
=Tours.=--A large manufacturing town on the Loire and the Cher;
Cathedral Romanesque, thirteenth century, with coeval glass, latest
work sixteenth century; the Archevêché, fourteenth, seventeenth,
and eighteenth centuries; Tour de Guise, twelfth century; towers of
the monastery of St. Martin; Tour de l’Horloge and Tour
Charlemagne, both twelfth to thirteenth century; Churches of (1)
St. Martin, built 1860 above the spot where his remains were
discovered; (2) Notre Dame la Riche, fifteenth century; (3) Priory
of St. Côme, remains of twelfth and fifteenth centuries; (4)
Chapelle du Lycée, 1630; (5) St. Julien, 1225-1259; (6) Église des
Jacobins, 1260, used for military purposes; (7) St. Laurent, ruined
church of twelfth century; the Bibliothèque contains a Bible of
Charlemagne.
=Cormery.=--A picturesque village with interesting Romanesque church
and a ruined abbey by the River Indre.
=Loches.=--An exceedingly interesting and picturesque walled town;
two gateways of fifteenth century; extensive citadel enclosing the
unique twelfth-century Church of St. Ours, the donjon, with many
remarkable prisons cut out of the rock, and the Château Royal,
built in the fifteenth century.
=Ligueil.=--Village, with old houses and church from Romanesque to
Flamboyant.
=La Haye-Descartes.=--A small town with old timber-framed houses, a
restored Romanesque church, and a statue to Descartes.
=Châtellerault.=--Large town making the whole of the small-arms for
the French army; Church of St. Jacques has a modern front, hiding
the twelfth and fourteenth century building behind; bridge guarded
by two large towers, built 1525 to 1609; battle of Tours fought at
junction of the Clain and the Vienne, just south of Châtellerault
(see map).
=La Tricherie.=--A picturesque village with a ruined castle and a
church, both of the twelfth century.
TOURS
is a large, cheerful, and busy manufacturing city, spread out between
the Loire and the Cher, which take parallel courses close together. It
stands on a level site, and has no conspicuous attractiveness beyond the
few old buildings for which such a commercial centre could spare space.
The manufactures include so many commodities that the list would be
wearisome. One can hear, see, and smell the iron foundries, but the
passing stranger might not be aware that the specialities of the city’s
products are dried plums, potted meats, and white wines. The silk
industry, formerly of great importance, has declined.
Tours was originally a Celtic town on the rising ground north of the
Loire. The Romans preferred the present site, and called it
_Cæsarodunum_. Christianity came there in the third century, and St.
Martin, the third Bishop, became the apostle of the Gauls. The
plundering Visigoths reached Tours in 473, but were driven out in 507 by
Clovis. In the Middle Ages there were two towns side by side: the Roman
city, surrounded by walls (of which there are no remains), and west of
it Châteauneuf, of which the tomb of St. Martin had formed the nucleus.
When the Normans reached Tours in
[Illustration: TOWN PLAN NO. 10.--TOURS.]
853, and again in 903, they were only able to plunder and destroy the
newer town.
Henry II. of England, a descendant of the Counts of Tours, made Touraine
a part of the English possessions in France, which it remained until
1242. Nearly all the Kings of France from Louis IX. to François I.
resided at Tours.
The religious wars were disastrous to the city, which was half destroyed
by Catholics and Huguenots, until 1589, when Henri IV. established
peace. In 1870 the Germans bombarded Tours.
The Cathedral, dedicated to St. Gatien, first Bishop of Tours, was in
1166 burnt by fire through a quarrel between Louis VII. of France and
Henry II. of England. The lower parts of two towers of the Norman
building remain. The reconstruction commenced in 1225, and the latest
work was done in 1547.
The choir, finished in 1265, is the work of Étienne de Montagne, and it
contains glass of the same period.
The tomb of the children of Charles VIII. (died 1495 and 1496) is in the
south transept, and the remains of the late fifteenth-century cloisters,
with a Renaissance staircase, are interesting.
_The Archevêché_, or Archbishop’s residence, is
[Illustration: OLD GABLED HOUSES IN THE RUE DU CHANGE AT TOURS.
The overhanging storys are supported by richly carved brackets.]
close to the cathedral. It is only in part of the fourteenth century,
the rest having been rebuilt in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. The entrance of Ionic columns was constructed partly of
materials of an Arc de Triomphe put up to the glory of Louis XIV., and
demolished when the Rue Royale (or Nationale) was cut.
_The Roman remains_ behind the cathedral consist chiefly of portions of
the amphitheatre to be found in some cellars of houses in the Rue du
Général Meunier and Rue Manceau. Other remains were destroyed in 1883.
_The Tour de Guise_, a round machicolated tower of the twelfth and
fifteenth centuries, is all that remains of the royal castle built by
Henry II. of England about 1180. It is called ‘de Guise’ because it was
the prison, after his father’s murder at Blois, of the Duc de Joinville,
son of Henri, Duc de Guise.
St. Martin died at Candes about 400; his body was brought to Tours, and
a modest oratory of wood erected above his tomb. In 472 a new edifice
was consecrated; it was the most important work in the West erected
after the fall of Rome and before Charlemagne. Clovis and his successors
heaped benefits upon the monastery established near the church, and
even carried in their expeditions the cope and relics of the saint.
Having become one of the great Christian pilgrimages, by the eighth
century the church was the centre of a new town, distinct from the old,
as already mentioned.
Between 906 and 918 Martinopolis or Châteauneuf was surrounded by walls;
in 997 the church was burnt. The next church lasted till 1175, when the
third church was built. In 1562 it was ruined by the Huguenots, and in
1802, in order to make an opening for a street, everything was
demolished except the two towers and a gallery of the little cloister.
_The new Church of St. Martin._ In 1860 excavations were carried out to
discover the bones of St. Martin. These efforts were successful, and now
an imposing new church with a huge dome has been built over his remains.
_Tour de l’Horloge_ (_or Du Trésor_), built in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, is crowned with a small dome of the eighteenth
century.
_Tour Charlemagne_, of the same period, is so called because at its base
was the tomb of Luitgarde, third wife of Charlemagne, who died at Tours
in 800.
_Notre Dame la Riche_, founded in the fourth century, and rebuilt in
the fifteenth, was greatly destroyed by Huguenots in 1562, and restored
recently.
_The Priory St. Côme._--The remains near the bridge of St. Cyn include
the church, belonging to the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, and the
Romanesque refectory.
_The Chapelle du Lycée_ is the ancient Church of the Minimes. The first
stone laid by Marie de Medici in 1630.
_St. Julien_ (Rue du Colbert) is the abbey church on the site of the
church founded, it is said, by Clovis.
The fifth reconstruction took place between 1225 and 1259, after a fire.
The building is a remarkable example of early ogee style. It was sold at
the Revolution, when it became an hotel, but it has since been bought
and restored. In the capitulary room, north of the choir, which has been
used as a stable, Henri III., in March, 1589, convoked the Parlement de
Paris, which met in Tours owing to the troubles of the League.
_Église des Jacobins_, on the quay, was built in 1260 at the expense of
St. Louis. It is now converted to military uses.
_St. Laurent_ (near the Tour de Guise) is a ruined church of the twelfth
century.
_The Bibliothèque_, close to the bridge, is in the old Hôtel de Ville.
It is rich in works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and has
a precious collection of historical manuscripts, including the Bible of
Charlemagne (coming from St. Martin), on which the Kings of France took
their oath as honorary abbés and canons of the Church. There are also
books of Charles V., Anne de Bretagne, and Henri III.
_The Rue du Commerce_ leads to the old quarter, where those picturesque
houses that still stand are to be found.
_The Maison de Tristan l’Hermite_ (Rue Briçonnet) is wrongly so called.
It is of the time of Charles VIII.
The way out of Tours to Loches is by the same straight road by which one
entered, and soon after passing the turning to Bléré the straight road
to Montbazon is passed at a fork where the way to Loches goes to the
left.
A forest country with areas of cultivation is traversed. By the roadside
will perhaps be seen a woman with a herd of goats, and the cart-horses
have blue sheep-skins over their collars and red tassels on their heads.
The hamlet of St. Blaise, with an old tower on the left, is passed
through as the road drops down to the Indre, crossing that river by two
bridges, which lead to the village of Cormery. The parish church is an
interesting building of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries,
and near it is a stone Calvary.
By the river, on the left, stand the roofless refectory and cloisters of
a Benedictine abbey, founded in the eighth century by Alcuin, Abbé of
St. Martin, at Tours. The upper part of the fine Romanesque tower fell
recently.
Beyond the ruins, and on the farther side of the river, is the little
cruciform church of Truyes, also Romanesque.
The turning to the left in Cormery, immediately after the second bridge,
goes along a beautiful portion of the Indre Valley, through Reignac and
Azay-sur-Indre, where, if, instead of crossing the river, one goes on,
the more direct route to Loches is joined a short distance beyond
Chambourg.
On the direct road, although there are no villages, two very picturesque
farms are passed on the left. One of them has three circular stone
towers with old conical roofs, and the other a very good hexagonal
turret.
After Chambourg hilly country begins, and in
[Illustration: No. 7. TOURS TO POITIERS.]
a very short time one enters the interesting old town of
LOCHES
The streets are narrow and picturesque, for above the stone houses there
generally frowns a dark machicolated gateway, or a portion of the old
town walls which surround the raised site to which the medieval town was
restricted.
Some changes are taking place within the walls, which are robbing the
town of some of its tortuous ways and some of its glamour, and the hand
of the restorer is beginning to appear on the gateways; but although the
French idea of restoration is far too radical, the town will maintain
its attractiveness for many years to come.
Loches (pronounced with a short _o_) has an interesting history, which
is worth remembering, in connection with the many remains of the Middle
Ages it possesses.
Under the Romans it was called _Luccæ_, and in the fifth century St.
Ours founded a monastery, which was the nucleus of the town of to-day.
It was defended by a château as early as the sixth century, and under
Charles the Bold it became the seat of an hereditary Government. It
passed by marriage to the House of Anjou, to which it belonged till
1205.
1193. John (of England) gave it to France while Richard I. was
crusading.
1194. Richard retook it.
1204. Retaken by Philippe Auguste, who gave it to Dreux de Mello,
Constable of France.
Later on it became a State prison and a royal residence.
Charles VII. came there with Agnes Sorel, who was buried in the
Church of St. Ours.
Louis XI. (1461-1483) enlarged and perfected the prisons.
In the town walls there remain two fine gateways--the Porte des
Cordeliers, at the north-east angle over the river, and the Porte
Picoys, to the north-west, both of the fifteenth century. The Tour St.
Antoine, with a Gothic base and upper portion dating from 1530, has been
robbed of its church, and now serves as a clock tower.
The Hôtel de Ville, near the Porte Picoys, was built between 1535 and
1543 in the Renaissance style, and has just undergone restoration. Among
the old houses, La Chancellerie, built in 1551, in the Rue du Château,
is especially interesting.
[Illustration: THE STREET OF NARVATE, A TYPICAL BASQUE VILLAGE. (_Page
207._)]
The Château. _A charge of a half-franc for the castle and a half-franc
for the donjon is made, and a gratuity is expected by the girl who shows
visitors over the Church of St. Ours._
At the imposing twelfth-century gateway between two towers a charming
little girl meets visitors, and acts as a connecting-link between the
guides to the three features of the castle: (1) the donjon, (2) the
church, (3) the château. The concierge of the first, a comparatively
young man, has the most extraordinary power of conveying an impression
of the terrors of the prisons and dungeons which he shows. When with
graphic gesture he shows the fate of prisoners who in the darkness of a
rock-hewn cell stumbled headlong into a purposely prepared hole of great
depth, murmuring under his breath ‘Très horrible!’ one feels a chilly
sense of terror. The writer has seen many dungeons in the course of his
wanderings, but those of Loches, coupled with the impressiveness of the
admirable guide, are to him the most fear-inspiring and hopeless he has
ever penetrated.
The Donjon was built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and consists
of two rectangular buildings, one much larger than the other. The four
floors of the larger one have all gone. It served as a prison for Jean,
Duc d’Alençon, Pierre de Brézé (see Rouen), and Philippe de Savoie, and
is said to have been built by Foulques Nerra.
The great cylindrical tower--the Tour Neuve--was built by Louis XI. in
the fifteenth century, as a place where that cold-blooded breaker of the
feudal power in France could safely bestow those whose lives could not
be taken. In the Salle de Question there are gruesome instruments of
torture, and in a circular room below the ground level is shown the
place where Louis XI. ordered Cardinal Balue to be suspended in the cage
of his own invention. The Cardinal, who was of humble origin, had been a
favourite of the King, but met this awful fate by plotting against him.
In the dungeons of the Martelet there are horrible underground cells,
and the large chamber in which Ludovic Sforza, Duke of Milan, passed
nine years in confinement after his capture during Louis XII.’s war in
Italy. On the walls are the inscriptions cut by the noble captive, and
also a sundial on the spot where a ray of light entered through the one
small funnel-shaped aperture. The prison of the bishops incarcerated by
François I. is below, and on the walls are cut an altar and cross and
other ecclesiastical designs. The cell in which the father of Diane de
Poitiers--the Comte de Saint-Vallier--was imprisoned by François I. is
also shown. Diane begged for, and eventually obtained, her father’s
liberty.
From the top of one of the towers the guide points out the different
features of the castle and town, and one gets a good idea of the
position of both on the rocky little plateau above the Indre, which at
this point divides itself into two, joining again a little below the
town.
The remarkable Church of St. Ours is mainly a work of the twelfth
century, in which period Prior Thomas Pactius, who died in 1168, built
the two stone pyramids which form the unique roof of the nave.
In 965 the church of Geoffrey Grise-Gonelle, Count of Anjou, was
consecrated, and the first bay of the nave forms the interior vestibule
of the existing church; above rises a tower, whose upper part is
octagonal, with a stone spire, and is not earlier than the twelfth
century. The porch, also added in the twelfth century, contains a pagan
altar, now in use for holy water.
The interesting crypt has early mural paintings, and the treasury
contains the (or a) girdle of the Virgin.
The Château Royal, or Logis du Roi (now the Sous Préfecture), is at the
north end of the castle enclosure. It was inhabited by Charles VII.,
Louis XI., Charles VIII., and Louis XII., and dates in its present
condition from the first to the last of these princes.
The old chestnut-tree was planted, it is said, by François I. The guide
shows the oratory of Anne de Bretagne, and also the tomb of Agnes Sorel,
the beautiful mistress of Charles VII. The white marble figure rests on
a black monument, with two kneeling angels at her head and two lambs at
her feet. She died near Jumièges in 1450, and her tomb was erected in
the choir of St. Ours. Louis XVI. gave the canons permission to remove
it from the church.
From Loches to the main road near Dangé the road winds through a hilly
country, and after Ligueil the surface is inclined to be rough. On
leaving Loches one goes along the outside of the town wall in a
south-westerly direction, and at the first fork one takes the turning
going down to the right, with the village of Ciran given on the
direction board. The kilometre stones on the left are marked Ligueil.
The road is often lined with closely trimmed poplars, and here and
there are wooden crosses by the wayside turnings, and the cottages are
of stone, with brown tiled roofs. The Château de St. Senoch, among trees
on the left near Ciran, has a very Scottish appearance.
In Ligueil one turns to the left and takes the second turning to the
right, marked Cussay. There are several houses of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries in the little town, and the Church of St. Martin,
with a modern tower, dates from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries,
and has a beautiful seventeenth-century altar-screen of gilded wood.
The road goes on through the village of Cussay, past woods with large
birches near the road, up and down hill to the small town of La
Haye-Descartes, where there is a restored Romanesque church of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries on the right. A bronze statue to
Descartes, the famous philosopher and mathematician, who was born in the
town in 1596, in a house still standing, is passed on the left. Remains
of the town wall can be seen, and the streets are full of half-timber
and stone houses.
After crossing a railway and the River Creuse, there is a fork, where
one goes to the left through a wooded up-and-down country, where the
road gets to its worst phase before joining the national road within
sight of Dangé.
A smooth run southwards on a broad, straight road above the Vienne soon
brings the busy manufacturing town of
CHÂTELLERAULT
in sight. Its great industry is the manufacture of firearms, which has
been established in the town since 1819. All the rifles in use in the
French army are made in the town, and the daily output can, under
pressure, reach 1,200, with between 5,000 and 6,000 workmen. The
manufacture of cutlery, established some 500 years ago, flourished until
the small-arms industry rather overshadowed it. The works are at the
villages of Naintré and Cénon, south of the town. The Church of St.
Jacques, in the broad main street, has a modern façade--a copy of that
of Notre Dame at Poitiers--in front of a building of Romanesque and
fourteenth-century work. Besides this building and a few old houses, the
only feature of interest is the imposing bridge across the Vienne,
passed over on leaving for Poitiers. It was commenced in 1525, and
finished in 1609, and has two big towers at the west end.
The famous Battle of Tours, as it is generally known to the English, was
fought at the junction of the Vienne and the Clain, about 5 kilometres
south of Châtellerault (see map). It was in the year 732 when a great
Saracen host, led by Abderahman, was marching northwards through
Frankland, plundering and spreading desolation as they went. Before they
reached the Loire, however, the Saracens were met by Charles Martel (or
Charles of the Hammer), who had hurried from the Rhine with his army of
Austrasians in time to forestall the invaders, and to win a most
decisive victory. The beaten Saracens, numbering 80,000, according to
Arab authorities, retreated to the Pyrenees, although Charles Martel
made no attempt at pursuit. This battle has generally been considered
one of the great decisive conflicts of the world, and the Mayor of the
Palace, surnamed of the Hammer, has been regarded as the man who rolled
back the Saracen power in Western Europe. In a scholarly article which
appeared recently,[B] Mr. E. A. Foord produces a great deal of valuable
evidence to show that the invasion of France from Spain would have been
something of a much more serious character but for the heavy defeats
inflicted on the forces of the Caliphate at Constantinople by
Constantine IV. and in 718 by Leo III. Mr. Foord’s comments on the
invasion of Frankland are most interesting:
‘Upon the whole, the evidence goes to show that, whatever the
projects of the Saracen leaders, the army itself was composed of
indifferent material, probably wild hordes of plunderers from
Barbary.... At the same time, it cannot be said that the evidence
is decisive. The army was certainly large, and a long course of
pillage will demoralize the best of troops, as the campaign of
Jena, among others, conclusively showed.... I am, upon the whole,
disposed to think that, while for the army in general the campaign
was merely a gigantic plundering excursion, the leader himself
probably had definite designs of conquest, which were rendered
nugatory by the inferior quality of the forces which he had at his
command.... I do not believe that the Franks, even under Charles
Martel, could have resisted a really serious invasion made by the
regular troops of the Caliphate; but they were able, though not
without difficulty, to turn back Abderahman’s heterogeneous host.’
An exceedingly interesting change in the architecture of the houses is
noticeable in this portion of the route--the pitch of the roofs becomes
very low, curved tiles take the place of flat ones, and the stone houses
are often not stuccoed. It almost seems to suggest that Charles Martel’s
victory prevented the Southern influence in architectural matters from
coming farther north than the ground which the Saracens trod!
All the way to Poitiers from Châtellerault the River Clain and a railway
are below the road on the left.
At La Tricherie, a small and picturesque village, the ruins of a
twelfth-century castle stand out boldly above the road on the right.
There is also a Romanesque church.