Tourists Touring Tours
Tours, France
April 23, 2000
Balzac once said that the real Tourangeau will not leave in search of pleasure. From where he lives, he could only lose by any change. With such an endorsement, what better place to spend Easter Sunday?
Having heard Mass last night at the Vigil in Blois, we enjoyed a leisurely morning at our château, then made our way an hour west, to the heart of Touraine.
This traditional province carries the well-worn, and well-deserved, cliché as le jardin de la France. Cultivation is extensive, and deceives the eye by appearing easy.
The soil around Tours is fertile with vines, orchards, and vegetation. It is also rich in tragedy…and history – which is in some sense the same thing, only compiled in chronological order.
Touraine is what one noted visitor called “essentially France”, the home of Rabelais, Descartes, Balzac, and St Martin. It is a land of peasants and palaces, revolution and royalty. And of Charles Martel, who stopped the Infidel and saved Europe.
Spain was already lost, the Moors having captured it in 712. Twenty years later, they crossed the Pyrenees. Between here and Poitiers, the Moslems met Charles, Duke of Austrasia. There, the chances of war, and the grace of God, preserved the Faith of France. And of the West. At Tours, Charles the Duke became Carolus Marcellus, Charles the Hammer, a Father of Christendom.
We visited the Basilica that now covers the tomb of the saint who firmly attached Christianity to Gaul. At the behest of his father, Martin joined the army, but was too saintly for slaughter. He gave his martial pay to the poor, and the people of Tours eventually clamored for him to be their bishop.
Martin built a monastery nearby, and became a patron saint of France. The church by which he is now honored is a beautiful neo-Byzantine edifice, on the site of the original 4th century shrine that succumbed to the ravages and savages of Revolution.
A few blocks south of the river, and west of its oldest crossing, another holy house survived le déluge, and still stands. Its revolutionary scars are sacred testament to God’s Grace.
Henry James recorded that “it is a very beautiful church of the second order of importance”. The former description is an understatement. The latter says more about the other masterpieces that glorify France than it does about this one. But were it in even the smallest American city, tourists would travel for hours and miles to see Cathédrale Saint-Gatié de Tours. Today, we had to come only 45 minutes.
Construction commenced in the late 12th century, but did not conclude till the middle of the 16th. Despite that duration and an infusion of varying influences, the finished whole appears as a harmonious composite of its constituent parts.
The flamboyant twin spires are capped by distinctive domes, on which that of the single tower at Blois Cathedral is ostensibly based. They are Renaissance cherries on a Gothic sundae.
Surrounding the entry doors on the exquisite façade, and indenting four buttresses beside the great rose window, are niches several circles deep. They are marred only by missing Medieval statues, blown away by the impulsive force of Revolutionary gales.
We walked thru the center portal, and entered the ethereal. The ceiling soars, its ribbed vaults sheltering the distant nave from the heights of Heaven. The chancel is delicate in design, luminous in color, and astounding in appearance. To the side, and among the poignant treasures of this church, is the Italianate sarcophagus and statuary entombing two infant children of Charles VIII and Anne de Bretagne.
From the nave of Saint-Gatié, we proceeded to the open air sanctuary of Boulevard Béranger. A leafy promenade separates traffic and shades pedestrians on this lovely thoroughfare dividing Vieux-Tours from the Quartier Grammont-Prébendes. We strolled under its canopy of plane trees to the Palais de Justice, then toward le Pont Wilson, past the Hôtel de Ville and neoclassical Opera House, and to the beautiful Basilique St-Julien.
Like many churches in France, St-Julien is older than the structure we now see. Founded in the 6th century by St Gregory of Tours, it succumbed to the Normans in the 9th, to a conflict between Blésois and Anjou in the 11th, and a hurricane in the 13th.
The current Gothic gem rose on the ruins, retaining only the Romanesque foundations and transept walls of the original edifice. Miraculously, the 700 year-old building managed to survive the second world war, despite mush of the region around Rue Nationale being almost completely destroyed. Blessedly preserved was the remarkable village of Vieux-Tours, featuring rows of half-timbered Medieval structures surrounding the bustling Place Plumereau.
The Renaissance, for better or worse, lay only a few blocks away. At the southern end of le Pont Wilson is le Place Anatole France. There, in separate plots on either side of the road, are two sculpted giants of French philosophy, one in the cloak of a scientist, the other in the mask of a jester.
Their statues separated today by the Rue Nationale, Rene Descartes and François Rabelais stood in their time at opposite ends of the French mind. We stand at neither extreme. But today we were more than happy to float between them, appreciating the brilliance of both, yet knowing that neither held sway.
We then made our way toward the water, and basked in the soft breeze of a cool Easter evening. Under the bridge, the lazy Loire drifted slowly toward the sea. Overhead, the sun did the same, and would soon join the great river in its rendez-vous with the west.
JD
