From Orléans, south, one passes through a veritable wonderland of fascinating charms. Châteaux, monasteries, and great civic and ecclesiastical monuments pass quickly in turn.

Then comes Touraine which all love, the river meantime having grown no more swift or ample, nor any more sluggish or attenuated. It is simply the same characteristic flow which one has known before.

The landscape only is changing, while the fruits and flowers, and the trees and foliage are more luxuriant, and the great châteaux are more numerous, splendid, and imposing.

Of his well-beloved Touraine, Balzac wrote: "Do not ask me why I love Touraine; I love it not merely as one loves the cradle of his birth, nor as one loves an oasis in a desert, but as an artist loves his art."

Blois, with its bloody memories; Chaumont, splendid and retired; Chambord, magnificent, pompous, and bare; Amboise, with its great tower high above the river, follow in turn till the Loire makes its regal entrée into Tours. "What a spectacle it is," wrote Sterne in "Tristram Shandy," "for a traveller who journeys through Touraine at the time of the vintage."

And then comes the final step which brings the traveller to where the limpid waters of the Loire mingle with the salty ocean, and what a triumphant meeting it is!

[Coiffes of Amboise and Orléans]

Most of the cities of the Loire possess but one bridge, but Tours has three, and, as becomes a great provincial capital, sits enthroned upon the river-bank in mighty splendour.

The feudal towers of the Château de Luynes are almost opposite, and Cinq-Mars, with its pagan "pile" and the ruins of its feudal castle high upon a hill, points the way down-stream like a mariner's beacon. Langeais follows, and the Indre, the Cher, and the Vienne, all ample and historic rivers, go to swell the flood which passes under the bridges of Saumur, Ancenis, and Ponts de Cé.