I have mentioned the church of Saint Martin,which was for many years the sacred spot,the shrine of pilgrimage,of Tours.Originally the simple burialplace of the great apostle who in the fourth century Christianized Gaul,and who,in his day a brilliant missionary and worker of miracles,is chiefly known to modem fame as the worthy that cut his cloak in two at the gate of Amiens to share it with a beggar (tradition fails to say,I believe,what he did with the other half),the abbey of Saint Martin,through the Middle Ages,waxed rich and powerful,till it was known at last as one of the most luxurious religious houses in Christendom,with kings for its titular abbots (who,like Francis I.,sometimes turned and despoiled it)and a great treasure of precious things.
It passed,however,through many vicissitudes.Pillaged by the Normans in the ninth century and by the Huguenots in the sixteenth,it received its deathblow from the Revolution,which must have brought to bear upon it an energy of destruction proportionate to its mighty bulk.At the end of the last century a huge group of ruins alone remained,and what we see today may be called the ruin of a ruin.It is difficult to understand how so vast an ediface can have been so completely obliterated.Its site is given up to several ugly streets,and a pair of tall towers,separated by a space which speaks volumes as to the size of the church,and looking across the closepressed roofs to the happier spires of the cathedral,preserved for the modern world the memory of a great fortune,a great abuse,perhaps,and at all events a great penalty.One may believe that to this day a considerable part of the foundations of the great abbey is buried in the soil of Tours.The two surviving towers,which are dissimilar in shape,are enormous;with those of the cathedral they form the great landmarks of the town.One of them bears the name of the Tour de l'Horloge;the other,the socalled Tour Charlemagne,was erected (two centuries after her death)over the tomb of Luitgarde,wife of the great Emperor,who died at Tours in 800.I do not pretend to understand in what relation these very mighty and effectually detached masses of masonry stood to each other,but in their gray elevation and loneliness they are striking and suggestive today;holding their hoary heads far above the modern life of the town,and looking sad and conscious,as they had outlived all uses.I know not what is supposed to have become of the bones of the blessed saint during the various scenes of confusion in which they may have got mislaid;but a mystic connection with his wonderworking relics may be perceived in a strange little sanctuary on the left of the street,which opens in front of the Tour Charlemagne,the rugged base of which,by the way,inhabited like a cave,with a diminutive doorway,in which,as I passed,an old woman stood cleaning a pot,and a little dark window decorated with homely flowers,would be appreciated by a painter in search of "bits."The present shrine of Saint Martin is enclosed (provisionally,I suppose)in a very modem structure of timber,where in a dusky cellar,to which you descend by a wooden staircase adorned with votive tablets and paper roses,is placed a tabernacle surrounded by twinkling tapers and prostrate worshippers.Even this crepuscular vault,however,fails,I think,to attain solemnity;for the whole place is strangely vulgar and garish.The Catholic church,as churches go today,is certainly the most spectacular;but it must feel that it has a great fund of impressiveness to draw upon when it opens such sordid little shops of sanctity as this.It is impossible not to be struck with the grotesqueness of such an establishment,as the last link in the chain of a great ecclesiastical tradition.
In the same street,on the other side,a little below,is something better worth your visit than the shrine of Saint Martin.Knock at a high door in a white wall (there is a cross above it),and a freshfaced sister of the convent of the Petit Saint Martin will let you into the charming little cloister,or rather fragment of a cloister.Only one side of this exquisite structure remains,but the whole place is effective.
In front of the beautiful arcade,which is terribly bruised and obliterated,is one of those walks of interlaced tilleuls which are so frequent in Touraine,and into which the green light filters so softly through a lattice of clipped twigs.Beyond this is a garden,and beyond the garden are the other buildings of the Convent,where the placid sisters keep a school,a test,doubtless,of placidity.The imperfect arcade,which dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century (I know nothing of it but what is related in Mrs.
Pattison's "Rennaissance in France")is a truly enchanting piece of work;the cornice and the angles of the arches,being covered with the daintiest sculpture of arabesques,flowers,fruit,medallions,cherubs,griffins,all in the finest and most attenuated relief.It is like the chasing of a bracelet in stone.The taste,the fancy,the elegance,the refinement,are of those things which revive our standard of the exquisite.Such a piece of work is the purest flower of the French Renaissance;there is nothing more delicate in all Touraine.
