As might be expected, this domain of "La Briche" has given to the neighbouring farmers a lesson and an example, and little by little its influence has resulted in an increased activity among the neighbouring landholders, who formerly gave themselves over to "la chasse," and left the conduct of their farms to incompetent and more or less ignorant hirelings.
CHAPTER XIII.
ANJOU AND BRETAGNE
As one crosses the borderland from Touraine into Anjou, the whole aspect of things changes. It is as if one went from the era of the Renaissance back again into the days of the Gothic, not only in respect to architecture, but history and many of the conditions of every-day life as well.
Most of the characteristics of Anjou are without their like elsewhere, and opulent Anjou of ancient France has to-day a departmental etiquette in many things quite different from that of other sections.
A magnificent agricultural province, it has been further enriched by liberal proprietors; a land of aristocracy and the church, it has ever been to the fore in political and ecclesiastical matters; and to-day the spirit of industry and progress are nowhere more manifest than here in the ancient province of Anjou.
The Loire itself changes its complexion but little, and its entrance into Saumur, like its entrance into Tours, is made between banks that are tinged with the rainbow colours of the growing vine. What hills there are near by are burrowed, as swallows burrow in a cliff, by the workers of the vineyards, who make in the rock homes similar to those below Saumur, in the Vallée du Vendomois, and at Cinq-Mars near Tours.
Anjou has a marked style in architecture, known as Angevin, which few have properly placed in the gamut of architectural styles which run from the Byzantine to the Renaissance.
The Romanesque was being supplanted everywhere when the Angevin style came into being, as a compromise between the heavy, flat-roofed style of the south and the pointed sky-piercing gables of the north. All Europe was attempting to shake off the Romanesque influence, which had lasted until the twelfth century. Germany alone clung to the pure style, and, it is generally thought, improved it. The Angevin builders developed a species that was on the borderland between the Romanesque and the Gothic, though not by any means a mere transition type.
The chief cities of Anjou are not very great or numerous, Angers itself containing but slightly over fifty thousand souls. Cholet, of thirteen thousand inhabitants, is an important cloth-manufacturing centre, while Saumur carries on a great wine trade and was formerly the capital of a "petit gouvernement" of its own, and, like many other cities and towns of this and neighbouring provinces, was the scene of great strife during the wars of the Vendée.