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.
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