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.