From the courtyard the walls of the château take on a Renaissance aspect; a tiny doorway beside the great gate is manifestly Renaissance; so, too, are the polygonal towers, with their winding stairs, the pignons and gables of the roof, and what carved stone there is in evidence. Three stone stairways which mount by the slender tourelles serve to communicate with the various floors to-day as they did in the times of Charles VIII.
The courtyard itself, with its formal carpet design in stone, its shaded walls, its stone seats, and its Roman sarcophagus, is a pleasant retreat, but it has not the seclusion of the larger park, delightful though it is.
Just before the drawbridge of the old château, that mediæval gateway by which one enters to-day, one sees the Maison de Rabelais, who is the deity of Langeais and Chinon, as is Balzac that of Tours. It is a fine old-time house of a certain amplitude and grandeur among its less splendid fellows, now given over, on the ground floor, to a bakery and pastry-shop. Enough is left of its original aspect, and the Renaissance decorations of its façade are sufficiently well preserved to stamp it as a worthy abode for the "Curé de Chinon," who lived here for some years.
Two other names in literature are connected with Langeais: Ronsard, the poet, who lived here for a time, and César-Alexis-Chichereau, Chevalier de la Barre, who was a poet and a troubadour of repute.
The main street of Langeais is still flanked with good Gothic and Renaissance houses, neither pretentious nor mean, but of that order which sets off to great advantage the walls and towers and porches of the château and the church. This street follows the ancient Roman roadway which traversed the valley of the Loire through Gaul.
The river is here crossed by one of those too frequent, though useful, suspension-bridges, with which the Loire abounds. The guide-books call it beau, but it is not. One has to cross it to reach Azay-le-Rideau, which lies ten kilometres or more away across the Indre.
CHAPTER XII.
AZAY-LE-RIDEAU, USSÉ, AND CHINON
From Langeais, one's obvious route lies towards Chinon, via Azay-le-Rideau and Ussé. These latter are practically within the forest, though the Forêt de Chinon proper does not actually begin until one leaves Azay behind, when for twenty kilometres or more one of the most superb forest roads in France crosses many hills and dales until it finally descends into Chinon itself.
Like most forest roads in France, this highway is not flat; it rises and falls with a sheer that is sometimes precipitous, but always with a gravelled surface that gives little dust, and which absorbs water as the sand from the pounce-box of our forefathers dried up ink. This simile calls to mind the fact that in twentieth-century France the pounce-box is still in use, notably at wayside railway stations, where the agent writes you out your ticket and dries it off in a box, not of sand, but of sawdust.