Balzac,in the maturity of his vision,took in more of human life than any one,since Shakspeare,who has attempted to tell us stories about it;and the very small scene on which his consciousness dawned is one end of the immense scale that he traversed.I confess it shocked me a little to find that he was born in a house "in a row,"a house,moreover,which at the date of his birth must have been only about twenty years old.All that is contradictory.If the tenement selected for this honour could not be ancient and embrowned,it should at least have been detached.
There is a charming deion,in his little tale of "La Grenadiere,"of the view of the opposite side of 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 honorable production;the pedastal 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 brilliant 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 deion in "La Grenadiere,"of which I just spoke,is too long to quote;neither have I space for any one 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 today 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 endeavor 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,a soft agglomeration of gardens,vineyards,scattered villas,gables and turrets of slateroofed chateaux,terraces with gray balustrades,mossgrown walls draped in scarlet Virginiacreeper.You turn into the town again beside a great military barrack which is ornamented with a rugged mediaeval tower,a relic of the ancient fortifications,known to the Tourangeaux of today as the Tour de Guise.
The young Prince of Joinville,son of that Duke of Guise who was murdered by the order of Henry II.at Blois,was,after the death of his father,confined here for more than two years,but made his escape one summer evening in 1591,under the nose of his keepers,with a gallant audacity which has attached the memory of the exploit to his sullenlooking prison.Tours has a garrison of five regiments,and the little redlegged soldiers light up the town.You see them stroll upon the clean,uncommercial quay,where there are no signs of navigation,not even by oar,no barrels nor bales,no loading nor unloading,no masts against the sky nor booming of steam in the air.The most active business that goes on there is that patient and fruitless angling in,which the French,as the votaries of art for art,excel all other people.The little soldiers,weighed down by the contents of their enormous pockets,pass with respect from one of these masters of the rod to the other,as he sits soaking an indefinite bait in the large,indifferent stream.After you turn your back to the quay you have only to go a little way before you reach the cathedral.