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.
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