Chapter 4

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 them-
selves 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 water-front only of Blois,
however, that exhibits, this fresh complexion; the in-
terior 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 description. 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 pre-
mised that in speaking of it as one sees it to-day,
one speaks of a monument unsparingly restored. The
work of restoration has been as ingenious as it is pro-
fuse, but it rather chills the imagination. This is
perhaps almost the first thing you feel as you ap-
proach