VI
The city of Tours stands on a fertile plain of chalk some three hundred feet above sea level—a plain which is diversified by the frequent valleys of considerable rivers. There are the huge and turbid Loire, the winding Indre, the clear green Cher, so wide, and yet at ease in its pebbly bed; a little further off the Creuse and the Vienne. All are great bodies of water, which elsewhere give their names to whole departments. Most of these rivers are accompanied, on one side at least, some little way inland, by a steep rocky ridge of friable white tufa, whose natural caverns are frequently inhabited, enlarged, and made into comfortable dwellings by modern troglodytes. So easy to manipulate is the soft chalky stone! Therein dwell the thrifty peasants, as cosy as a weevil in a cheese. These earthy coteaux, or long level lines of low-banked hills, are peculiar, I think, to France, and common in every part of it: if they lie to the north, they are generally covered by a natural copsewood; if they slope to the south, well set to the sun, they form a perfect nursery for the vine. Near Ballan, the coteaux of the Cher grow an excellent red wine; the banks of the Loire produce the sparkling golden Vouvray; at Chinon, on the Indre, the vines give a claret celebrated in the south of France; Chinon, indeed, which lies a little south of Ballan, is the richest part of all the plain. It is the ample garden of France, beloved of Rabelais, and a land of rich dessert: wine and walnuts, grapes and almonds, plums and pears. If you pass in September, the orchards present a busy scene; the yellow Catherine plums are then in their perfection of mellow ripeness; they are gathered by hand with dainty care, laid to dry in the sun on wicker trays or hurdles, and baked several times in a baker’s oven before they issue thence in the shape of dried fruit for the table in winter: the famous “Pruneaux de Tours.” Not only the Catherine plum, chiefly grown for drying, but the delicious Reine Claude, golden hued and splashed with carmine, the Agen plum that’s red and blue, and the Golden Drop, abound in these orchards; for the hardy plum-tree, that will grow anywhere, demands for its perfection a land of wide airy valleys and low-lying southern slopes. The plum is made for Touraine, and Touraine for the plum; ’tis a happy marriage. In autumn, when the orchards drop with fruit; when the slopes are covered with the turning vine; when the laden pear-trees stand round the fields, which are high with maize and clover sown for fodder after early harvest; when every farmyard, in the angle of its wall, shows a huge heap of those great ribbed and golden gourds, large enough to contain the fairy coach of Cinderella, which feed man and beast with pumpkin-soup all winter; then the plain of Touraine, under its customary sky of sunny grey, has a beauty of its own, drawn from its great wide rivers, its rocky, cavernous cliffs, its smiling valleys, its pretty hills all clothed with oats, their round heads delicately outlined against the soft horizon, its great forests of Loches and Amboise, its rambling lanes sunk deep between two rows of pollard willows, its great, straight, white high-roads that the aspen flecks with shadow, and above all from that indescribable grace in the lie of the land which satisfies the eye with scant diversity. Arthur Young may declare it “a dead, flat, unpleasant country—a level of burnt russet meadow,” and affirm the landscape to be “more uninteresting than I could have thought it possible for the vicinity of a great river to be.” We will dare to differ. With Montaigne, we will cry shame on the Highlander, whose eye, too accustomed to his lochs and heather, fails to appreciate the melting beauty of Touraine. With Gilbert White, we’ll declare that the rounded forms of a chalk country make it seem more alive and breathing, as it were, than any other. For one season of the year at least, Touraine is beautiful!