the favourite residence of the dreadful
Louis. It is now occupied by a company of night-scavengers, whose huge
carts are drawn up in a row before it. I know not whether this be what
is called the irony of fate; in any case, the effect of it is to
accentuate strongly the fact (and through the most susceptible of our
senses) that there is no honour for the authors of great wrongs. The
dreadful Louis is reduced simply to an offence to the nostrils. The old
woman shows you a few fragments--several dark, damp, much-encumbered
vaults, denominated dungeons, and an old tower staircase in good
condition. There are the outlines of the old moat; there is also the
outline of the old guard-room, which is now a stable; and there are
other silhouettes of the undistinguishable, which I have forgotten. You
need all your imagination, and even then you cannot make out that
Plessis was a castle of large extent, though the old woman, as your eye
wanders over the neighbouring _potagers_, discourses much of the gardens
and the park. The place looks mean and flat; and as you drive away you
scarcely know whether to be glad or sorry that all those bristling
horrors have been reduced to the commonplace.

[Tours: Marmoutier]

A certain flatness of impression awaits you also, I think, at
Marmoutier, which is the other indispensable excursion in the near
neighbourhood of Tours. The remains of this famous abbey lie on the
other bank of the stream, about a mile and a half from the town. You
follow the edge of the big brown river; of a fine afternoon you will be
glad to go farther still. The abbey has gone the way of most abbeys; but
the place is a restoration as well as a ruin, inasmuch as the Sisters of
the Sacred Heart have erected a terribly modern convent here. A large
Gothic doorway, in a high fragment of ancient wall, admits you to a
garden-like enclosure, of great extent, from which you are further
introduced into an extraordinarily tidy little parlour, where two good
nuns sit at work. One of these came out with me and showed me over the
place--a very definite little woman, with pointed features, an intensely
distinct enunciation, and those pretty manners which (for whatever other
teachings it may be responsible) the Catholic Church so often instils
into its functionaries. I have never seen a woman who had got her lesson
better than this little trotting, murmuring, edifying nun. The interest
of Marmoutier to-day is not so much an interest of