Nevertheless, the Loire has its beauties. Madame de Staël, banished by Napoleon to fifty leagues’ distance from Paris, learned that on the banks of the Loire, exactly fifty leagues from Paris, there was a _château_ called, I believe, Chaumont. It was thither that she repaired, not wishing to aggravate her exile by a quarter of a league. I do not commiserate her. Chaumont is a dignified and lordly dwelling. The _château_ which must date from the Sixteenth Century, is fine in style; the towers are massive. The village at the foot of the wooded hill presents an aspect perhaps unique on the Loire, the precise aspect of a Rhine village--of a long frontage stretching along the edge of the water.
[Illustration: THE LOIRE]
Amboise is a pleasant, pretty town, half a league from Tours, crowned with a magnificent edifice, facing those three precious arches of the ancient bridge, which will disappear one of these days in some scheme of municipal improvement.
The ruin of the Abbey of Marmontiers is both great and beautiful. In particular there is, a few paces from the road, a structure of the Fifteenth Century--the most original I have seen: by its dimensions a house, by its machicoulis a fortress, by its belfry an _hôtel de ville_, by its pointed doorway a church. This structure sums up, and, as it were, renders visible to the eye, the species of hybrid and complex authority which in feudal times appertained to abbeys in general, and, in particular, to the Abbey of Marmontiers.
But the most picturesque and imposing feature of the Loire is an immense calcareous wall, mixed with sandstone, millstone, and potter’s clay, which skirts and banks up its right shore, and stretches itself out before the eye from Blois to Tours, with inexpressible variety and charm, now wild rock, now an English garden, covered with trees and flowers, crowned with ripening vines and smoking chimneys, perforated like a sponge, as full of life as an ant-hill.
Then there are deep caves which long ago hid the coiners who counterfeited the E. of the Tours mint, and flooded the province with spurious _sous_ of Tours. To-day the rude embrasures of these dens are filled with pretty window-frames coquettishly fitted into the rock, and from time to time one perceives through the glass the fantastic head-dress of some young girl occupied in packing aniseed, angelica, and coriander in boxes. The confectioners have replaced the coiners.
THE LOIRE
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The banks of the Loire, from Blois to Angers, have been high in favour with the two last branches of the royal race that occupied the throne before the House of Bourbon. This beautiful basin so richly deserves the honours paid to it by royalty that this is what one of our most elegant writers has said of it:
“There exists in France a province that has never been sufficiently admired. Perfumed like Italy, flowered like the banks of the Guadalquiver, and beautiful in addition with its individual physiognomy, and entirely French, having always been French, in contrast to our northern provinces, corrupted by German contact, and our southern provinces that have lived in concubinage with the Moors, Spaniards and all races that desired to;--this province pure, chaste, brave and loyal is Touraine! Historic France is there! Auvergne is Auvergne; Languedoc is only Languedoc, but Touraine is France; and for us the most national river of all is the Loire that waters Touraine. Hence, we should not be so astonished at the quantity of monuments found in the Departments that have taken the name and derivatives of the name of the Loire. At every step we take in this land of enchantment, we discover a picture the frame of which is a river or a tranquil oval sheet that reflects in its liquid depths a castle with its turrets, woods and springing waters. It was only natural that where royalty abode by preference and established its court for such a long period the great fortunes and distinctions of race and merit should group themselves and raise palaces there grand as themselves.”
Is it not incomprehensible that Royalty did not follow the advice given by Louis XI. indirectly to make Tours the capital of the kingdom? There, without much expenditure, the Loire could have been made accessible to trading vessels and to ships of war of light draught. There, the seat of government would have been secure from the surprise of an invasion. The northern strongholds would not then have demanded so much money for their fortifications, as costly to themselves as the sumptuousness of Versailles. If Louis XIV. had listened to the advice of Vauban, who wanted to build a residence for him at Mont Louis, between the Loire and the Cher, perhaps the Revolution of 1789 would not have occurred. Still, here and there, those lovely banks bear the marks of the royal affection. The castles of Chambord, Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux, Chaumont, Plessis-lez-Tours, all those which the mistresses of our kings, and the financiers and great lords built for themselves at Véretz, Azay-le-Rideau, Ussi, Villandri, Valençay, Chanteloup, Duretal (some of which have disappeared but the majority still exist) are admirable monuments that are redolent with the marvels of that epoch that is so ill comprehended by the literary sect of Mediævalists. Among all these castles, that of Blois is the one on which the magnificence of the Orleans and the Valois has set its most brilliant seal; and is the most interesting of all for the historian, the archæologist, and the Roman Catholic.
THE POTOMAC
ESTHER SINGLETON
The Potomac was an important river from the earliest period of the country’s history. Explorers followed its route to the interior of the country, and as early as 1784 The Potomac Company was chartered with Washington as its president for the purpose of connecting the Potomac Valley with the west by means of a canal for general land improvement. This was succeeded by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company, whose canal runs parallel with and near to the river all the way from Georgetown to Cumberland.
The first attempt to explore the Chesapeake Bay and its tributary rivers was made in 1608 by Captain John Smith, who speaks of the Patawomeke as six or seven miles broad and navigable for 140 miles. Another Indian name was Cohonguroton (River of Swans). No less than forty tribes of the warlike Algonquins lived upon its banks and held their councils at the point of land now occupied by the Arsenal.
In 1634, Henry Fleet with some of Calvert’s people visited the Falls of the Potomac; and early in the Seventeenth Century several tracts of land on the river banks were granted to settlers. Among these was one Francis Pope, gentleman, who in 1663 had four hundred acres laid out which he called Rome, on the east side of the Anacostian River and to the mouth of the Tiber, for so this little arm of the Potomac was called more than a century before Washington was founded, there being a tradition that on its banks would rise a capital greater than Rome. The Tiber has now disappeared beneath the streets of Washington, but it once flowed below the hill on which the Capitol now stands between forest-lined banks and was noted for its shad and herring.
The Potomac is formed by the junction of two rivers on the boundary between Maryland and West Virginia. The North Branch rises in the Western Alleghanies and the South Branch in the Central; and, flowing north-east, they unite about fifteen miles south-east of Cumberland. The Potomac thus forms an irregular boundary between Maryland and West Virginia and Maryland and Virginia throughout its entire course of four hundred miles. Its chief tributaries are the Shenandoah from Virginia and the Monocacy from Maryland. At Harper’s Ferry the Potomac breaks through the Blue Ridge meeting the Shenandoah--“Daughter of the Stars”--which has cut its way through the mist-wreathed mountains, laved the Luray Caverns and watered a lovely valley. These rivers winding around Loudon Heights, Bolivar Heights and Maryland Heights are picturesque in the highest degree, and the scenery is rendered more interesting by the associations with John Brown’s raid and capture and other thrilling incidents of the Civil War.
Twelve miles below is Point of Rocks and below this the Monocacy joins the main stream.
[Illustration: THE POTOMAC]
A number of falls mark its course through the mountains; and about fifteen miles above Washington it descends rapidly until it reaches Great Falls, at which point it breaks through the mountain in a channel narrowing to a hundred yards in width and bounded on the Virginia side by perpendicular rocks seventy feet high. Cedars, oaks, willows and other forest trees contribute beauty to this wild spot, where cherries and strawberries abound, and which is the haunt of the rattlesnake and other venomous reptiles. The water falls in a series of cascades. Not far from this point Cabin-John Bridge is reached, a bridge formed of large blocks of granite 420 feet long and twenty feet wide, which springs the chasm of Cabin-John Creek at a height of 101 feet in a single arch of 220 feet. This is the largest stone arch in the world, the second being the Grosvenor Bridge (with a span of 200 feet), over the Dee.