little tale of "La Grenadiere" of
the view of the opposite side of

[Illustration: TOURS--THE HOUSE OF BALZAC]

the Loire as you have it from the square at the end of the Rue Royale--a
square that has some pretensions to grandeur, overlooked as it is by the
Hotel de Ville and the Musee, a pair of edifices which directly
contemplate the river, and ornamented with marble images of Francois
Rabelais and Rene Descartes. The former, erected a few years since, is a
very honourable production; the pedestal of the latter could, as a
matter of course, only be inscribed with the _Cogito ergo Sum_. The two
statues mark the two opposite poles to which the wondrous French mind
has travelled; and if there were an effigy of Balzac at Tours it ought
to stand midway between them. Not that he by any means always struck the
happy mean between the sensible and the metaphysical; but one may say of
him that half of his genius looks in one direction and half in the
other. The side that turns toward Francois Rabelais would be, on the
whole, the side that takes the sun. But there is no statue of Balzac at
Tours; there is only in one of the chambers of the melancholy museum a
rather clever, coarse bust. The description in "La Grenadiere" of which
I just spoke is too long to quote; neither have I space for anyone of
the brilliant attempts at landscape-painting which are woven into the
shimmering texture of "Le Lys dans la Vallee." The little manor of
Clochegourde, the residence of Madame de Mortsauf, the heroine of that
extraordinary work, was within a moderate walk of Tours, and the picture
in the novel is presumably a copy from an original which it would be
possible to-day to discover. I did not, however, even make the attempt.
There are so many chateaux in Touraine commemorated in history that it
would take one too far to look up those which have been commemorated in
fiction. The most I did was to endeavour to identify the former
residence of Mademoiselle Gamard, the sinister old maid of "Le Cure de
Tours." This terrible woman occupied a small house in the rear of the
cathedral, where I spent a whole morning in wondering rather stupidly
which house it could be. To reach the cathedral from the little _place_
where we stopped just now to look across at the Grenadiere, without, it
must be confessed, very vividly seeing it, you follow the quay to the
right and pass out of sight of the charming _coteau_ which, from beyond
the river, faces the town