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.
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