The inns at Tours are in another quarter,and one of them,which is midway between the town and the station,is very good.It is worth mentioning for the fact that every one belonging to it is extraordinarily polite,so unnaturally polite as at first to excite your suspicion that the hotel has some hidden vice,so that the waiters and chambermaids are trying to pacify you in advance.There was one waiter in especial who was the most accomplished social being I have ever encountered;from morning till night he kept up an inarticulate murmur of urbanity,like the hum of a spinningtop.I may add that I discovered no dark secrets at the Hotel de l'Univers;for it is not a secret to any traveller today that the obligation to partake of a lukewarm dinner in an overheated room is as imperative as it is detestable.For the rest,at Tours,there is a certain Rue Royale which has pretensions to the monumental;it was constructed a hundred years ago,and the houses,all alike,have on a moderate scale a pompous eighteenthcentury look.It connects the Palais de Justice,the most important secular building in the town,with the long bridge which spans the Loire,the spacious,solid bridge pronounced by Balzac,in "Le Cure de Tours,""one of the finest monuments of French architecture."The Palais de Justice was the seat of the Government of Leon Gambetta in the autumn of 1870,after the dictator had been obliged to retire in his balloon from Paris,and before the Assembly was constituted at Bordeaux.The Germans occupied Tours during that terrible winter;it is astonishing,the number of places the Germans occupied.It is hardly too much to say that wherever one goes in,certain parts of France,one encounters two great historic facts:one is the Revolution;the other is the German invasion.
The traces of the Revolution remain in a hundred scars and bruises and mutilations,but the visible marks of the war of 1870have passed away.The country is so rich,so living,that she has been able to dress her wounds,to hold up her head,to smile again;so that the shadow of that darkness has ceased to rest upon her.But what you do not see you still may hear;and one remembers with a certain shudder that only a few short years ago this province,so intimately French,was under the heel of a foreign foe.To be intimately French was apparently not a safeguard;for so successful an invader it could only be a challenge.
Peace and plenty,however,have succeeded that episode;and among the gardens and vineyards of Touraine it seems,only a legend the more in a country of legends.
It was not,all the same,for the sake of this checkered story that I mentioned the Palais de Justice and the Rue Royale.The most interesting fact,to my mind,about the highstreet of Tours was that as you walked toward the bridge on the righthand trottoiryou can look up at the house,on the other side of the way,in which Honore de Balzac first saw the light.That violent and complicated genius was a child of the goodhumored and succulent Touraine.
There is something anomalous in the fact,though,if one thinks about it a little,one may discover certain correspondences between his character and that of his native province.Strenuous,laborious,constantly in felicitous in spite of his great successes,he suggests at times a very different set of influences.But he had his jovial,fullfeeding side,the side that comes out in the "Contes Drolatiques,"which are the romantic and epicurean chronicle of the old manors and abbeys of this region.And he was,moreover,the product of a soil into which a great deal of history had been trodden.Balzac was genuinely as well as affectedly monarchical,and he was saturated with,a sense of the past.Number 39Rue Royale of which the base ment,like all the basements in the Rue Royale,is occupied by a shop is not shown to the public;and I know not whether tradition designates the chamber in which the author of "Le Lys dans la Vallee"opened his eyes into a world in which he was to see and to imagine such extraordinary things.If this were the case,I would willingly have crossed its threshold;not for the sake of any relic of the great novelist which it may possibly contain,nor even for that of any mystic virtue which may be supposed to reside within its walls,but simply because to look at those four modest walls can hardly fail to give one a strong impression of the force of human endeavour.