TOURS AND BLOIS
O much has been said and written of the Loire country during the past fifty years that the modern writer has very little ground left to him, unless it be to avoid calling it the “Garden of France.” Yet over-written as it may be, Touraine has not lost any of the charm and romance which must always attach to a wide sunny land, watered by a great river, and “peopled”—one might almost say—by châteaux, every one of which has set its mark upon French history. Certainly there is something very delightful, because so unlike anything else in France, in the endless vista of grey-green levels—here and there a group of slim shivering poplars or a flash of sunlight upon the wide waters of the Loire, which winds in and out of the flats like a great lazy shining serpent—flying sometimes into a sudden rage and flooding the land, or subsiding sulkily amongst high banks and stretches of dry sand.
It is these moods and tempers of the great river that prevent any navigation upon its waters; other smaller rivers—the Seine, for instance, and our own Thames—are alive with craft of every kind; but here, on the great boundary stream between north and south, which seems made for a waterway to the sea, no busy steamers ply up and down with the tide—no barges and market boats disturb the calm of its wide reaches. There never was, for its size, such an erratic and useless river; yet we can afford to forgive it, for the sake of the land which it waters and the cities on its banks.
The impression one carries away from Tours is one of wideness, and brightness, and sunshine—shaded by one or two ancient corners. It is above all things a town really lived in and appreciated by its inhabitants, many of whom are English. Tours is, or used to be, a famous educational centre, and for the sake of education, or economy, or both, whole families have migrated there, besides the unmistakably English students who have been grafted on to a family to learn French. And the river-side shows, if not a strenuously busy, at least a very sociable side of the town life, especially in the summer evenings, when the Tourangeaux, native and adopted, leave the white houses and busy streets, and use their river bank for a pleasant walk.
It is curious how in France each step towards the south seems to be a step further in French history. First there is Normandy, the land of the early Northern warriors, with the fierce blood untamed in their veins; then Maine and Anjou, recalling the days of our own Plantagenet kings, and the close connection of France with England; while Touraine brings back to us the craft of Louis XI. and the magnificence of François Ier. Tours itself, however, has never been content to lie fallow for long; ever since some Roman emperor transported it from the right bank of the Loire to the left, and made it the capital of Lugdunensis Tertia, the town has had an important part assigned to it, and has played out that part to the full. Though in old days Tours was only half of the place, the cité, the bourg, built round the tomb and shrine of Saint Martin and first called by his name, was of equal if not greater importance, from the many pilgrimages to the resting-place of the great saint. This is easily understood when one considers in what veneration Saint Martin was held by the Gauls and their descendants. Saint Gatianus, the first bishop of Tours, began the good work in the third century, but to Martin is due the subsequent spread of Christianity, not only in Touraine but all over France, so that he really shares with Saint Denis the honour of patron saint. Born of pagan parents in Pannonia, Martin became a catechumen at ten years old, and five years later was forced, much against his will, to enter the army. After his final conversion and baptism, however, he left it to become the eager disciple and co-worker of Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers; and in 371 he was consecrated Bishop of Tours. The legend of Martin’s conversion is well known (at any rate it may be found commemorated in the painted windows of churches all over France)—how the young soldier stationed outside the gate of Amiens shared his cloak with a passing beggar, and how the following night Christ appeared to him in a vision, making known to the angels of Heaven this thing done to Himself as to one of “the least of these.”
After Martin’s death at Candes his relics were brought to Tours, and in the fifth century Saint Perpetuus built a splendid basilica round the shrine. This church became the nucleus of the bourg of Martinopolis, known to the Middle Ages as Châteauneuf. Side by side with the church a monastery sprang up, and in the reign of Charlemagne the famous scholar Alcuin became abbot and founded there his school of theology. Late in the tenth century the basilica was destroyed by fire; two centuries later saw the completion of its successor, but this again, after suffering many evils from Huguenot and Revolutionist hands, disappeared under the First Empire to make a passage-way for the Rue des Halles. Two towers—the church originally had five—now look mournfully at one another across the busy, narrow street: the Tour de l’Horloge, square and solid, with a leaded roof capped by a small eighteenth-century dome, and the taller Tour Charlemagne, so called for the rather insufficient reason that Charlemagne buried his third wife, Luitgarde, beneath its base. These are the sole relics of the ancient culte of Saint Martin; though to his memory in latter days a new basilica has reared itself on the other side of the street.