Your business at Tours is to make excursions;and if you make them all,you will be very well occupied.
Touraine is rich in antiquities;and an hour's drive from the town in almost any direction will bring you to the knowledge of some curious fragment of domestic or ecclesiastical architecture,some turreted manor,some lonely tower,some gabled village,or historic site.Even,however,if you do everything,which was not my case,you cannot hope to relate everything,and,fortunately for you,the excursions divide themselves into the greater and the less.You may achieve most of the greater in a week or two;but a summer in Touraine (which,by the way must be a charming thing)would contain none too many days for the others.
If you come down to Tours from Paris,your best economy is to spend a few days at Blois,where a clumsy,but rather attractive little inn,on the edge of the river,will offer you a certain amount of that familiar and intermittent hospitality which a few weeks spent in the French provinces teaches you to regard as the highest attainable form of accommodation.Such an economy I was unable to practise.I could only go to Blois (from Tours)to spend the day;but this feat I accomplished twice over.It is a very sympathetic little town,as we say nowadays,and one might easily resign one's self to a week there.Seated on the north bank of the Loire,it presents a bright,clean face to the sun,and has that aspect of cheerful leisure which belongs to all white towns that reflect,themselves in shining waters.It is the waterfront only of Blois,however,that exhibits,this fresh complexion;the interior is of a proper brownness,as befits a signally historic city.The only disappointment I had there was the discovery that the castle,which is the special object of one's pilgrimage,does not overhang the river,as I had always allowed myself to understand.It overhangs the town,but it is scarcely visible from the stream.That peculiar good fortune is reserved for Amboise and Chaurnont.
The Chateau de Blois is one of the most beautiful and elaborate of all the old royal residences of this part of France,and I suppose it should have all the honors of my deion.As you cross its threshold,you step straight into the brilliant movement of the French Renaissance.But it is too rich to describe,I can only touch it here and there.It must be premised that in speaking of it as one sees it today,one speaks of a monument unsparingly restored.The work of restoration has been as ingenious as it is profuse,but it rather chills the imagination.This is perhaps almost the first thing you feel as you approach the castle from the streets of the town.These little streets,as they,leave the river,have pretensions to romantic steepness;one of them,indeed,which resolves itself into a high staircase with divergent wings (the escalier monumental),achieved this result so successfully as to remind me vaguely I hardly know why of the great slope of the Capitol,beside the Ara Coeli,at Rome.The view of that part of the castle which figures today as the back (it is the only aspect I had seen reproduced)exhibits the marks of restoration with the greatest assurance.The long facade,consisting only of balconied windows deeply recessed,erects itself on the summit of a considerable hill,which gives a fine,plunging movement to its foundations.The deep niches of the windows are all aglow with color.They have been repainted with red and blue,relieved with gold figures;and each of them looks more like the royal box at a theatre than like the aperture of a palace dark with memories.For all this,however,and in spite of the fact that,as in some others of the chateaux of Touraine,(always excepting the colossal Chambord,which is not in Touraine!)there is less vastness than one had expected,the least hospitable aspect of Blois is abundantly impressive.
Here,as elsewhere,lightness and grace are the keynote;and the recesses of the windows,with their happy proportions,their sculpture,and their color,are the empty frames of brilliant pictures.They need the figure of a Francis I.to complete them,or of a Diane de Poitiers,or even of a Henry III.The base of this exquisite structure emerges from a bed of light verdure,which has been allowed to mass itself there,and which contributes to the springing look of the walls;while on the right it joins the most modern portion of the castle,the building erected,on foundations of enormous height and solidity,in 1635,by Gaston d'Orleans.This fine,frigid mansion the proper view of it is from the court within is one of the masterpieces of Francois Mansard,whom.a kind providence did not allow to make over the whole palace in the superior manner of his superior age.This had been a part of Gaston's plan,he was a blunderer born,and this precious project was worthy of him.
This execution of it would surely have been one of the great misdeeds of history.Partially performed,the misdeed is not altogether to be regretted;for as one stands in the court of the castle,and lets one's eye wander from the splendid wing of Francis I.which is the last work of free and joyous invention to the ruled lines and blank spaces of the ponderous pavilion of Mansard,one makes one's reflections upon the advantage,in even the least personaI of the arts,of having something to say,and upon the stupidity of a taste which had ended by becoming an aggregation of negatives.Gaston's wing,taken by itself,has much of the bel air which was to belong to the architecture of Louis XIV.;but,taken in contrast to its flowering,laughing,living neighbor,it marks the difference between inspiration and calculation.We scarcely grudge it its place,however,for it adds a price to the rest of the chateau.
