The Motor Routes of France / To the Châteaux of Touraine, Biarritz, the Pyrenees, the Riviera, & the Rhone Valley

Twelve years later Henri received a mortal wound in the lists when tilting with Montgomery, Captain of the Scottish Guards, and his embittered widow, Catherine de Medici, at once forced Diane de Poitiers to exchange Chenonceaux for Chaumont. In 1559 Catherine received the boy-King, François II., with his Queen, Mary Stuart, at the château in the river. Mary came there from Amboise with the bloody scenes of the castle courtyard fresh in her memory.

While she had Chenonceaux, Catherine built upon the bridge erected by her rival Diane the gallery with a long banqueting-hall above, which makes so attractive a feature from the water-side. She died in 1601, and left the castle to her niece, the beautiful Françoise de Lorraine, Duchesse de Mercœur.

Having been a possession of the Bourbons, Chenonceaux was sold, in 1733, to Fermier Général Dupin, whose widow, Madame Dupin, entertained there most sumptuously for many years, and even survived the Revolution, dying in 1799, at the age of ninety-three. The Revolutionaries did no damage to the buildings, but required Madame Dupin to bring out all her securities, and the priceless pictures and portraits which had been accumulating in the château for three centuries, and all were burnt in a great bonfire.

The castle is now owned by M. Terry, a Cuban gentleman, who has spent large sums of money on its restoration.

Much of the beautiful furniture has always been in the castle, and the decorations bear the monogram of Henri II. and Diane de Poitiers. The blue-and-orange enamelled tiles on the floors of some of the rooms add to the feast of colour and detail.

BLÉRÉ,

to which one returns after seeing the castle, is an old but disappointing little town, for the bridge built by Henry II. of England in 1160, and in use until quite lately, has been replaced by a modern stone structure of no interest. The Church of St. Croix has a Romanesque apse with grotesque corbels. There are three parallel naves; the central one is fifteenth-century work, those north and south of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

From Bléré to Tours the road keeps near the Cher, and the scenery is pretty.

(70 KILOMETRES)

DISTANCES ALONG THE ROUTE

(Along the north bank of the Loire)

For the route from Briare to Cannes, see Sections XXIII., XXII., XXI., XX., XIX., and XVII.

CHARTRES TO TOURS DIRECT, 87½ MILES

(141 KILOMETRES)

By this road, which is on the whole level, one can shorten the distance to Biarritz by 61 miles, but it means omitting the fascinating Château Country.

SECTION VI

TOURS TO POITIERS, 76½ MILES
(124 KILOMETRES)

TOURS

is a large, cheerful, and busy manufacturing city, spread out between the Loire and the Cher, which take parallel courses close together. It stands on a level site, and has no conspicuous attractiveness beyond the few old buildings for which such a commercial centre could spare space. The manufactures include so many commodities that the list would be wearisome. One can hear, see, and smell the iron foundries, but the passing stranger might not be aware that the specialities of the city’s products are dried plums, potted meats, and white wines. The silk industry, formerly of great importance, has declined.

Tours was originally a Celtic town on the rising ground north of the Loire. The Romans preferred the present site, and called it Cæsarodunum. Christianity came there in the third century, and St. Martin, the third Bishop, became the apostle of the Gauls. The plundering Visigoths reached Tours in 473, but were driven out in 507 by Clovis. In the Middle Ages there were two towns side by side: the Roman city, surrounded by walls (of which there are no remains), and west of it Châteauneuf, of which the tomb of St. Martin had formed the nucleus. When the Normans reached Tours in

853, and again in 903, they were only able to plunder and destroy the newer town.

Henry II. of England, a descendant of the Counts of Tours, made Touraine a part of the English possessions in France, which it remained until 1242. Nearly all the Kings of France from Louis IX. to François I. resided at Tours.

The religious wars were disastrous to the city, which was half destroyed by Catholics and Huguenots, until 1589, when Henri IV. established peace. In 1870 the Germans bombarded Tours.

The Cathedral, dedicated to St. Gatien, first Bishop of Tours, was in 1166 burnt by fire through a quarrel between Louis VII. of France and Henry II. of England. The lower parts of two towers of the Norman building remain. The reconstruction commenced in 1225, and the latest work was done in 1547.

The choir, finished in 1265, is the work of Étienne de Montagne, and it contains glass of the same period.

The tomb of the children of Charles VIII. (died 1495 and 1496) is in the south transept, and the remains of the late fifteenth-century cloisters, with a Renaissance staircase, are interesting.

The Archevêché, or Archbishop’s residence, is

close to the cathedral. It is only in part of the fourteenth century, the rest having been rebuilt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The entrance of Ionic columns was constructed partly of materials of an Arc de Triomphe put up to the glory of Louis XIV., and demolished when the Rue Royale (or Nationale) was cut.

The Roman remains behind the cathedral consist chiefly of portions of the amphitheatre to be found in some cellars of houses in the Rue du Général Meunier and Rue Manceau. Other remains were destroyed in 1883.

The Tour de Guise, a round machicolated tower of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, is all that remains of the royal castle built by Henry II. of England about 1180. It is called ‘de Guise’ because it was the prison, after his father’s murder at Blois, of the Duc de Joinville, son of Henri, Duc de Guise.

St. Martin died at Candes about 400; his body was brought to Tours, and a modest oratory of wood erected above his tomb. In 472 a new edifice was consecrated; it was the most important work in the West erected after the fall of Rome and before Charlemagne. Clovis and his successors heaped benefits upon the monastery established near the church, and even carried in their expeditions the cope and relics of the saint. Having become one of the great Christian pilgrimages, by the eighth century the church was the centre of a new town, distinct from the old, as already mentioned.

Between 906 and 918 Martinopolis or Châteauneuf was surrounded by walls; in 997 the church was burnt. The next church lasted till 1175, when the third church was built. In 1562 it was ruined by the Huguenots, and in 1802, in order to make an opening for a street, everything was demolished except the two towers and a gallery of the little cloister.

The new Church of St. Martin. In 1860 excavations were carried out to discover the bones of St. Martin. These efforts were successful, and now an imposing new church with a huge dome has been built over his remains.

Tour de l’Horloge (or Du Trésor), built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is crowned with a small dome of the eighteenth century.

Tour Charlemagne, of the same period, is so called because at its base was the tomb of Luitgarde, third wife of Charlemagne, who died at Tours in 800.

Notre Dame la Riche, founded in the fourth century, and rebuilt in the fifteenth, was greatly destroyed by Huguenots in 1562, and restored recently.

The Priory St. Côme.—The remains near the bridge of St. Cyn include the church, belonging to the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, and the Romanesque refectory.

The Chapelle du Lycée is the ancient Church of the Minimes. The first stone laid by Marie de Medici in 1630.

St. Julien (Rue du Colbert) is the abbey church on the site of the church founded, it is said, by Clovis.

The fifth reconstruction took place between 1225 and 1259, after a fire. The building is a remarkable example of early ogee style. It was sold at the Revolution, when it became an hotel, but it has since been bought and restored. In the capitulary room, north of the choir, which has been used as a stable, Henri III., in March, 1589, convoked the Parlement de Paris, which met in Tours owing to the troubles of the League.

Église des Jacobins, on the quay, was built in 1260 at the expense of St. Louis. It is now converted to military uses.

St. Laurent (near the Tour de Guise) is a ruined church of the twelfth century.

The Bibliothèque, close to the bridge, is in the old Hôtel de Ville. It is rich in works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and has a precious collection of historical manuscripts, including the Bible of Charlemagne (coming from St. Martin), on which the Kings of France took their oath as honorary abbés and canons of the Church. There are also books of Charles V., Anne de Bretagne, and Henri III.

The Rue du Commerce leads to the old quarter, where those picturesque houses that still stand are to be found.

The Maison de Tristan l’Hermite (Rue Briçonnet) is wrongly so called. It is of the time of Charles VIII.

The way out of Tours to Loches is by the same straight road by which one entered, and soon after passing the turning to Bléré the straight road to Montbazon is passed at a fork where the way to Loches goes to the left.

A forest country with areas of cultivation is traversed. By the roadside will perhaps be seen a woman with a herd of goats, and the cart-horses have blue sheep-skins over their collars and red tassels on their heads.

The hamlet of St. Blaise, with an old tower on the left, is passed through as the road drops down to the Indre, crossing that river by two bridges, which lead to the village of Cormery. The parish church is an interesting building of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and near it is a stone Calvary.

By the river, on the left, stand the roofless refectory and cloisters of a Benedictine abbey, founded in the eighth century by Alcuin, Abbé of St. Martin, at Tours. The upper part of the fine Romanesque tower fell recently.

Beyond the ruins, and on the farther side of the river, is the little cruciform church of Truyes, also Romanesque.

The turning to the left in Cormery, immediately after the second bridge, goes along a beautiful portion of the Indre Valley, through Reignac and Azay-sur-Indre, where, if, instead of crossing the river, one goes on, the more direct route to Loches is joined a short distance beyond Chambourg.

On the direct road, although there are no villages, two very picturesque farms are passed on the left. One of them has three circular stone towers with old conical roofs, and the other a very good hexagonal turret.

After Chambourg hilly country begins, and in

a very short time one enters the interesting old town of

LOCHES

The streets are narrow and picturesque, for above the stone houses there generally frowns a dark machicolated gateway, or a portion of the old town walls which surround the raised site to which the medieval town was restricted.

Some changes are taking place within the walls, which are robbing the town of some of its tortuous ways and some of its glamour, and the hand of the restorer is beginning to appear on the gateways; but although the French idea of restoration is far too radical, the town will maintain its attractiveness for many years to come.

Loches (pronounced with a short o) has an interesting history, which is worth remembering, in connection with the many remains of the Middle Ages it possesses.

Under the Romans it was called Luccæ, and in the fifth century St. Ours founded a monastery, which was the nucleus of the town of to-day. It was defended by a château as early as the sixth century, and under Charles the Bold it became the seat of an hereditary Government. It passed by marriage to the House of Anjou, to which it belonged till 1205.

In the town walls there remain two fine gateways—the Porte des Cordeliers, at the north-east angle over the river, and the Porte Picoys, to the north-west, both of the fifteenth century. The Tour St. Antoine, with a Gothic base and upper portion dating from 1530, has been robbed of its church, and now serves as a clock tower.

The Hôtel de Ville, near the Porte Picoys, was built between 1535 and 1543 in the Renaissance style, and has just undergone restoration. Among the old houses, La Chancellerie, built in 1551, in the Rue du Château, is especially interesting.

The Château. A charge of a half-franc for the castle and a half-franc for the donjon is made, and a gratuity is expected by the girl who shows visitors over the Church of St. Ours.

At the imposing twelfth-century gateway between two towers a charming little girl meets visitors, and acts as a connecting-link between the guides to the three features of the castle: (1) the donjon, (2) the church, (3) the château. The concierge of the first, a comparatively young man, has the most extraordinary power of conveying an impression of the terrors of the prisons and dungeons which he shows. When with graphic gesture he shows the fate of prisoners who in the darkness of a rock-hewn cell stumbled headlong into a purposely prepared hole of great depth, murmuring under his breath ‘Très horrible!’ one feels a chilly sense of terror. The writer has seen many dungeons in the course of his wanderings, but those of Loches, coupled with the impressiveness of the admirable guide, are to him the most fear-inspiring and hopeless he has ever penetrated.

The Donjon was built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and consists of two rectangular buildings, one much larger than the other. The four floors of the larger one have all gone. It served as a prison for Jean, Duc d’Alençon, Pierre de Brézé (see Rouen), and Philippe de Savoie, and is said to have been built by Foulques Nerra.

The great cylindrical tower—the Tour Neuve—was built by Louis XI. in the fifteenth century, as a place where that cold-blooded breaker of the feudal power in France could safely bestow those whose lives could not be taken. In the Salle de Question there are gruesome instruments of torture, and in a circular room below the ground level is shown the place where Louis XI. ordered Cardinal Balue to be suspended in the cage of his own invention. The Cardinal, who was of humble origin, had been a favourite of the King, but met this awful fate by plotting against him.

In the dungeons of the Martelet there are horrible underground cells, and the large chamber in which Ludovic Sforza, Duke of Milan, passed nine years in confinement after his capture during Louis XII.’s war in Italy. On the walls are the inscriptions cut by the noble captive, and also a sundial on the spot where a ray of light entered through the one small funnel-shaped aperture. The prison of the bishops incarcerated by François I. is below, and on the walls are cut an altar and cross and other ecclesiastical designs. The cell in which the father of Diane de Poitiers—the Comte de Saint-Vallier—was imprisoned by François I. is also shown. Diane begged for, and eventually obtained, her father’s liberty.

From the top of one of the towers the guide points out the different features of the castle and town, and one gets a good idea of the position of both on the rocky little plateau above the Indre, which at this point divides itself into two, joining again a little below the town.

The remarkable Church of St. Ours is mainly a work of the twelfth century, in which period Prior Thomas Pactius, who died in 1168, built the two stone pyramids which form the unique roof of the nave.

In 965 the church of Geoffrey Grise-Gonelle, Count of Anjou, was consecrated, and the first bay of the nave forms the interior vestibule of the existing church; above rises a tower, whose upper part is octagonal, with a stone spire, and is not earlier than the twelfth century. The porch, also added in the twelfth century, contains a pagan altar, now in use for holy water.

The interesting crypt has early mural paintings, and the treasury contains the (or a) girdle of the Virgin.

The Château Royal, or Logis du Roi (now the Sous Préfecture), is at the north end of the castle enclosure. It was inhabited by Charles VII., Louis XI., Charles VIII., and Louis XII., and dates in its present condition from the first to the last of these princes.

The old chestnut-tree was planted, it is said, by François I. The guide shows the oratory of Anne de Bretagne, and also the tomb of Agnes Sorel, the beautiful mistress of Charles VII. The white marble figure rests on a black monument, with two kneeling angels at her head and two lambs at her feet. She died near Jumièges in 1450, and her tomb was erected in the choir of St. Ours. Louis XVI. gave the canons permission to remove it from the church.

From Loches to the main road near Dangé the road winds through a hilly country, and after Ligueil the surface is inclined to be rough. On leaving Loches one goes along the outside of the town wall in a south-westerly direction, and at the first fork one takes the turning going down to the right, with the village of Ciran given on the direction board. The kilometre stones on the left are marked Ligueil.

The road is often lined with closely trimmed poplars, and here and there are wooden crosses by the wayside turnings, and the cottages are of stone, with brown tiled roofs. The Château de St. Senoch, among trees on the left near Ciran, has a very Scottish appearance.

In Ligueil one turns to the left and takes the second turning to the right, marked Cussay. There are several houses of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the little town, and the Church of St. Martin, with a modern tower, dates from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and has a beautiful seventeenth-century altar-screen of gilded wood.

The road goes on through the village of Cussay, past woods with large birches near the road, up and down hill to the small town of La Haye-Descartes, where there is a restored Romanesque church of the eleventh and twelfth centuries on the right. A bronze statue to Descartes, the famous philosopher and mathematician, who was born in the town in 1596, in a house still standing, is passed on the left. Remains of the town wall can be seen, and the streets are full of half-timber and stone houses.

After crossing a railway and the River Creuse, there is a fork, where one goes to the left through a wooded up-and-down country, where the road gets to its worst phase before joining the national road within sight of Dangé.

A smooth run southwards on a broad, straight road above the Vienne soon brings the busy manufacturing town of

CHÂTELLERAULT

in sight. Its great industry is the manufacture of firearms, which has been established in the town since 1819. All the rifles in use in the French army are made in the town, and the daily output can, under pressure, reach 1,200, with between 5,000 and 6,000 workmen. The manufacture of cutlery, established some 500 years ago, flourished until the small-arms industry rather overshadowed it. The works are at the villages of Naintré and Cénon, south of the town. The Church of St. Jacques, in the broad main street, has a modern façade—a copy of that of Notre Dame at Poitiers—in front of a building of Romanesque and fourteenth-century work. Besides this building and a few old houses, the only feature of interest is the imposing bridge across the Vienne, passed over on leaving for Poitiers. It was commenced in 1525, and finished in 1609, and has two big towers at the west end.

The famous Battle of Tours, as it is generally known to the English, was fought at the junction of the Vienne and the Clain, about 5 kilometres south of Châtellerault (see map). It was in the year 732 when a great Saracen host, led by Abderahman, was marching northwards through Frankland, plundering and spreading desolation as they went. Before they reached the Loire, however, the Saracens were met by Charles Martel (or Charles of the Hammer), who had hurried from the Rhine with his army of Austrasians in time to forestall the invaders, and to win a most decisive victory. The beaten Saracens, numbering 80,000, according to Arab authorities, retreated to the Pyrenees, although Charles Martel made no attempt at pursuit. This battle has generally been considered one of the great decisive conflicts of the world, and the Mayor of the Palace, surnamed of the Hammer, has been regarded as the man who rolled back the Saracen power in Western Europe. In a scholarly article which appeared recently,[B] Mr. E. A. Foord produces a great deal of valuable evidence to show that the invasion of France from Spain would have been something of a much more serious character but for the heavy defeats inflicted on the forces of the Caliphate at Constantinople by Constantine IV. and in 718 by Leo III. Mr. Foord’s comments on the invasion of Frankland are most interesting:

An exceedingly interesting change in the architecture of the houses is noticeable in this portion of the route—the pitch of the roofs becomes very low, curved tiles take the place of flat ones, and the stone houses are often not stuccoed. It almost seems to suggest that Charles Martel’s victory prevented the Southern influence in architectural matters from coming farther north than the ground which the Saracens trod!

All the way to Poitiers from Châtellerault the River Clain and a railway are below the road on the left.

At La Tricherie, a small and picturesque village, the ruins of a twelfth-century castle stand out boldly above the road on the right. There is also a Romanesque church.

SECTION VII

POITIERS TO ANGOULÊME, 67¼ MILES
(108 KILOMETRES)

Poitiers is the historic capital of Poitou, a province of France, which, together with all the country between the Loire and the Pyrenees, was declared in the Treaty of Bretigny to belong to England as late as the year 1360, when Normandy had been an integral part of France for more than 150 years. The sovereignty of Edward III. being maintained by force of arms only, it was inevitable that his advancing age and the illness of the Black Prince should foreshadow the early loss of such unwieldy possessions. By 1372, when Bertrand du Guesclin, the Breton hero, had been made Constable of France, the English were rapidly losing their hold. In 1377 both Edward III. and his son were dead, and the whole of the country south of the Loire had returned to its natural rulers.

The situation of Poitiers on an extensive tabular area of rock occupying a bend of the Clain, and defended on the open side by the little River Boivre, is one that made it of immense importance in early times; and yet, unlike Périgueux, the town does not group itself into any romantic outlines from a distance. It is the individual buildings which make the charm of the town, and of these the chief are ecclesiastic. The Romanesque churches of Poitiers are, indeed, a magnet, which makes it difficult to drag oneself away. A few of the main events in the early history of the place may be mentioned before dealing with the architectural relics individually.

History.—Christianity was brought to Poitiers in the third century, and thoroughly established by St. Hilaire, a champion for Catholicism against Arianism.

During the religious wars of the sixteenth century the city was taken, turn by turn, by Catholics and Protestants.

The Churches of Poitiers.—Among the Romanesque churches Notre Dame-la-Grande makes the greatest impression, owing to its hoary west front, encrusted with the strange carving of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to which the building as a whole belongs. The life of the Virgin is shown in the lowest sculptures, and the other rows of figures represent the Apostles, St. Hilaire and St. Martin. On the right side the figures of two wrestlers appear to be in every way similar to those on the remarkable Norman font at Cowlam, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The gable above has a figure of Christ triumphant. It is interesting to notice that the lower parts of the walls seem to belong to an earlier church, possibly of the eighth or ninth century. The interior is covered with crude painting in herring-bone, zigzag, and striped patterns, giving a strange atmosphere to the church, almost suggesting that one was in Southern Spain.

The Cathedral of St. Pierre was largely built at the expense of Henry II. of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, all the principal work being completed before the death of Henry in 1189. It is therefore a Romanesque building, with the exception of the western façade, with its two low towers, and the north door, which were added in the thirteenth century, and are therefore Gothic. The exterior is disappointing on account of the restoration, which has robbed it of the charms of age. With only one exception—that of Notre Dame de la Roche, near Chevreuse—the choir-stalls are the oldest in France, dating from 1235 to 1257, and the stained glass includes some remarkable windows at the east end, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The most interesting is the one of the Crucifixion, which also shows Henry II. and Eleanor.

St. Hilaire-le-Grand was reconstructed in the tenth and eleventh centuries on the site of a Roman building. During the siege by Coligny in the Huguenot wars the tower was damaged so much that it eventually fell, crushing the façade and the west end of the nave. This nave, which has been restored with one bay less, is the only one in France with triple aisles, and the effect is that of five naves with two aisles, or even of seven naves. On the walls there are paintings attributed to the eleventh or thirteenth centuries, and in the southernmost aisle there is an Early Christian sarcophagus lid of the fourth or sixth century. St. Porchaire has retained its very beautiful tower, built at the end of the eleventh century. The three tiers of arcading, enriched with carved capitals, corbels, and mouldings, leave no surface unadorned. The church is otherwise a poor reconstruction of the sixteenth century, and is only interesting for the sixth-century sarcophagus of St. Porchaire under an altar.

St. Radegonde was founded in the sixth century as a mortuary chapel for the Queen, St. Radegonde, who fled from her fierce husband, Clotaire I., and took the veil in the Abbey of St. Croix, where she died in 587, and has ever afterwards been venerated as patroness of Poitiers, her tomb becoming a place of pilgrimage.

The chapel was made into a collegiate church, and was reconstructed in the eleventh century and consecrated in 1099. There is a beautiful Flamboyant west doorway, with empty niches, and the north and south entrances are of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

On the right of the nave is the Chapelle du Pas de Dieu, having an old tomb, with two statues, showing the apparition of Christ to St. Radegonde, the impression of Christ’s foot being left on a stone between the two figures.

The crypt in the centre of the church contains the tomb of St. Radegonde, an empty sarcophagus of black marble, reposing on a massive table of the twelfth century.

The Church of Montierneuf (= monastère neuf) belonged to an eleventh-century abbey. The Romanesque choir was altered in the thirteenth century, with the addition of a central apse, known as ‘La Lanterne.’ It was mutilated during the religious wars, and has since been badly restored, but retains some remarkable eleventh-century work.

The Temple of St. John (or Baptistère St. Jean)—concierge to be found at Atelier St. Jean-Baptiste, No. 7, Boulevard du Pont-Neuf—is perhaps the oldest Christian building in France, and is one of the chief relics of Roman Poitiers, having been built between A.D. 320 and 330. It is constructed of brick and stone, has straight-sided arches in the south end (the building is oblong, and faces north and south), and altogether an exceedingly Roman appearance. There is a low twelfth-century tower, and the interior is enriched with paintings of the same period. An interesting collection of Early Christian tombs found near the Pierre Levée, outside the town, is now kept inside the building.

Pierre Levée is the name given to a recumbent monolith resting on three supporting stones, which tilt up one end, two others having disappeared since the seventeenth century. It is a short distance beyond the Pont-Neuf, in the suburb called St. Saturnin, east of the River Clain, and although the stone bears a Gaulish inscription, it is not easy to give its age.

The Palais de Justice includes the ancient palace of the Dukes of Aquitaine and the Counts of Poitiers. The splendid hall, now the Salle des Pas-Perdus, has Romanesque and Gothic walls, with a similar wooden ceiling to that in the Palais de Justice at Rouen. The end wall, the work of Jean de Berry (died 1416), has three fireplaces with chimneys outside blocking the windows, which are filled with coloured glass. The keep, called the Tour Marbergeon, was built in the fifteenth century by Jean de Berry, and has four towers, ornamented with statues of the Counts of Poitiers.

The Château on the north side of the town was military, and not feudal. Its remains are of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, with two round towers.

At the lofty southern corner of the town, now occupied by the Parc de Blossac, there are remains of the ramparts.

The remains of the Roman amphitheatre were demolished in 1857, but fragments of a Roman aqueduct, called Les Arcs de Parigné, still stand a little to the south of the town.