Part 17 (1/2)
At the Central Hotel of Tours, an excellent place of modest charges, we made our headquarters, and next morning, with little delay, set out for Chinon and incidental chateaux. ”Half the charm of the Loire,” says James, ”is that you can travel beside it.” He was obliged to travel very leisurely beside it when that was written; the ”flying carpet” had not then been invented, and James, with his deliberate locomotion, was sometimes unable to return to Tours for the night. I imagine he enjoyed it none the less for that, lazily watching the smooth water of the wide shallow stream, with never a craft heavier than a flat-bottomed hay boat; the wide white road, gay with scarlet poppies, and some tall purple flower, a kind of foxglove.
I do not remember that James makes mention of the cliff-dwellers along the Loire. Most of them live in houses that are older, I suspect, than the oldest chateau of Touraine. In the beginning there must have been in these cliffs natural caves occupied by our earliest troglodyte ancestors. In time, as mentality developed and, with it, imagination, the original shelters were shaped and enlarged by excavation, also new ones built, until these perpendicular banks facing the Loire became the dwelling place for hundreds, even thousands.
They are still numerously inhabited. The rooms or houses--some of them may be flats--range one above the other in stories, all up the face of the cliff, and there are smoke-places and little chimneys in the fields at the top. Such houses must have been here before the kings came to Touraine. Some of them look very ancient; some have crumbled in; some have been faced with stone or plaster. The cliff is honeycombed with them. Do their occupants have traditional rights from some vague time without date? Do they pay rent, and to whom? We might have found the answers to these questions had we cared to seek for them. It seemed better to content oneself with speculation. We did not visit the cliff-dwellers of the Loire.
Neither did we visit the chateau of Luynes or of Langeais. Luynes is a fine old feudal pile on a hilltop just below Tours, splendid from the road, but it had no compelling history and we agreed that closer view could not improve it. Besides, it was hot, sizzling, for a climb; so hot that one of our aging tubes popped presently, and Narcissa and I had to make repairs in a place where there was a world of poppies, but no shade for a mile. That was one of the reasons we did not visit Langeais.
Langeais was exactly on the road, but it had a hard, hot, forbidding look. Furthermore, our book said that it had been restored and converted into a museum, and added that its chief claim on history lay in the fact that Anne of Brittany was here married to Charles VIII in 1491. That fact was fine to realize from the outside, under the cool shadow of those gray walls. One could lose it among s.h.i.+ny restorations and stuffy museum tapestries.
The others presently noticed a pastry shop opposite the chateau and spoke of getting something extra for luncheon. While they were gone I discovered a cafe below the chateau and, being pretty dry, I slipped down there for a little seltzer, or something. The door was open, but the place was empty. There was the usual display of bottles, but not a soul was in sight. I knocked, then called, but n.o.body came. I called and knocked louder, but nothing happened. Then I noticed some pennies lying by an empty gla.s.s on the bar. The amount was small and I left them there. A side door was open and I looked out into a narrow pa.s.sage opening into a court at the back. I went out there, still signaling my distress. The sun was blazing and I was getting dryer every minute.
Finally a stout, smiling woman appeared, wiping her hands--from the washtub, I judge. She went with me into the cafe, gathered up the loose change on the counter, and set out refreshments. Then she explained that I could have helped myself and left the money. Langeais is an honest community.
Following down the Loire we came to a bridge, and, crossing to the other bank, presently found ourselves in a country where there were no visible houses at all. But there was shade, and we camped under it and I did some tire repairing while the others laid out the luncheon and set the little cooker going. Later we drowsed in the shade for an hour or more, with desultory talk of Joan, and of Anne of Brittany, and of the terrible Catherine de Medici, whose son the feeble Francis II had brought his young wife, Marie Stuart, the doomed Queen of Scots, to Chenonceaux for their honeymoon. It was strange to think that this was the environment of those half-romantic figures of history. Some of them, perhaps all, had pa.s.sed this very spot. And so many others! the Henrys, the Charleses, the Louises--the sovereigns and soldiers and court favorites for four hundred years. What a procession--the pageant of the Renaissance!
Chapter XXIV
CHINON, WHERE JOAN MET THE KING, AND AZAY
Chinon is not on the Loire, but on a tributary a little south of it, the Vienne, its ruined castle crowning the long hill or ridge above the town. Sometime during the afternoon we came to the outskirts of the ancient place and looked up to the wreck of battlements and towers where occurred that meeting which meant the liberation of France.
We left the car below and started to climb, then found there was a road, a great blessing, for the heat was intense. There is a village just above the castle, and we stopped there.
The chateau of Chinon to-day is the remains of what originally was three chateaux, built at different times, but so closely strung together that in ruin they are scarcely divided. The oldest, Coudray, was built in the tenth century and still shows three towers standing, in one of which Joan of Arc lived during her stay at Chinon. The middle chateau is not as old by a hundred years. It was built on the site of a Roman fort, and it was in one of its rooms, a fragment of which still remains, that Charles VII received the shepherd girl from Domremy. The chateau of St.
George was built in the twelfth century by Henry II of England, who died there in 1189. Though built two hundred years after Coudray, nothing of it survives but some foundations.
Chinon is a much more extensive ruin than we had expected. Even what remains to-day must be nearly a quarter of a mile in length, and its vast crumbling walls and towers make it strikingly picturesque. But its ruin is complete, none the less. Once through the entrance tower and you are under nothing but the sky, with your feet on the gra.s.s; there is no longer a shelter there, even for a fugitive king. You wander about, viewing it scarcely more than as a ruin, at first, a place for painting, for seclusion, for dreaming in the sun. Then all at once you are facing a wall in which, halfway up where once was the second story, there is a restored fireplace and a tablet which tells you that in this room Charles VII received Joan of Arc. It is not a room now; it is just a wall, a fragment, with vines matting its ruined edges.
You cross a stone footbridge to the tower where Joan lived, and that, too, is open to the sky, and bare and desolate. Once, beyond it, there was a little chapel where she prayed. There are other fragments and other towers, but they merely serve as a setting for those which the intimate presence of Joan made sacred.
The Maid did not go immediately to the castle on her arrival in Chinon.
She put up at an inn down in the town and waited the king's pleasure.
His paltering advisers kept him dallying, postponing his consent to see her, but through the favor of his mother-in-law, Yolande, Queen of Sicily, Joan and her suite were presently housed in the tower of Coudray. One wonders if the walls were as bare as now. It was old even then; it had been built five hundred years. But Queen Yolande would have seen to it that there were comforts, no doubt; some tapestries, perhaps, on the walls; a table, chairs, some covering for the stone floor.
Perhaps it was even luxurious.
The king was still unready to see Joan. She was only a stone's throw away, but the whisperings of his advisers kept her there, while a commission of priests went to Domremy to inquire as to her character.
When there were no further excuses for delay they contrived a trick--a deception. They persuaded the king to put another on the throne, one like him and in his royal dress, so that Joan might pay homage to this make-believe king, thus proving that she had no divine power or protection which would a.s.sist her in identifying the real one.
In the s.p.a.ce where now is only green gra.s.s and sky and a broken wall Charles VII and his court gathered to receive the shepherd girl who had come to restore his kingdom. It was evening and the great hall was lighted, and at one end of it was the throne with its imitation king, and I suppose at the other the fireplace with a blazing fire. Down the center of the room were the courtiers, formed in two ranks, facing so that Joan might pa.s.s between them to the throne. The occasion was one of great ceremony--Joan and her suite were welcomed with fine honors.
Banners waved, torches flared; trumpets blown at intervals marked the stages of her progress down the great hall; every show was made of paying her great honor--everything that would distract her and blind her to their trick.
Charles VII, dressed as a simple courtier, stood a little distance from the throne. Joan, advancing to within a few steps of the pretended king, raised her eyes. Then for a moment she stood silent, puzzled. They expected her to kneel and make obeisance, but a moment later she turned and, hurrying to the rightful Charles, dropped on her knees and gave him heartfelt salutation. She had never seen him and was without knowledge of his features. Her protectors, or her gifts, had not failed. It was perhaps the greatest moment in French history.