It is fitting to recall that Charles VII. was not the only monarch who sang her praises, for it was François I. who, many years later, wrote those lines beginning:
"Gentille Agnes, plus de loz tu mérites."
Whether one comes to Loches by road or by rail, the first impression is the same; he enters at once into a sleepy, old-world town which has practically nothing of modernity about it except the electric lights.
There is but one way to realize the immense wealth of architectural monuments centred at Loches, and that is to see the city for the first time, as, perhaps, François Premier saw it when he journeyed from Amboise, and came upon it from the heights of the forest of Loches. The city has not grown much since that day. Then it had three thousand eight hundred souls, and now it has five thousand.
Here, in the Forêt de Loches, Henry II. of England built a monastery,—yet to be seen,—known as the Chartreuse du Liget, in repentance, or, perhaps, as a penance for the murder of Becket. Over the doorway of this monastery was graven:
ANGLORUM HENRICUS REX
THOMÆ CŒDE CRUENTUS,
LIGETICOS FUNDAT CARTUSIA MONAKOS.
To-day the monastery is the property of a M. de Marsay, and therefore not open to the public; but the Chapelle du Liget, near by, is a fine contemporary church of the thirteenth century, well worth the admiration too infrequently bestowed upon it.
The first view of Loches must really be much as it was in François's time, except, perhaps, that the roadway down from the forest has improved, as roads have all over France, and fruit-trees and vineyards planted out, which, however, in no way change the aspect when the town is first seen in the dim haze of an early November morning.
It is the sky-line ensemble of the châteaux of the Renaissance period which is their most varied feature. No two are alike, and yet they are all wonderfully similar in that they cut the sky with turret, tower, and chimney in a way which suggests nothing as much as the architecture of fairy-land.
The artists who illustrated the old fairy-tale books and drew castles wherein dwelt beautiful maidens could nowhere have found more real inspiration than among the châteaux of the Loire, the Cher, and the Indre.