第24章

The consequence of my leaving to the last my little mention of Loches is that space and opportunity fail me;and yet a brief and hurried account of that extraordinary spot would after all be in best agreement with my visit.We snatched a fearful joy,my companion and I,the afternoon we took the train for Loches.

The weather this time had been terribly against us:

again and again a day that promised fair became hopelessly foul after lunch.At last we determined that if we could not make this excursion in the sunshine,we would make it with the aid of our umbrellas.We grasped them firmly and started for the station,where we were detained an unconscionable time by the evolutions,outside,of certain trains laden with liberated (and exhilarated)cons,who,their term of service ended,were about to be restored to civil life.The trains in Touraine are provoking;they serve as little as possible for excursions.If they convey you one way at the right hour,it is on the condition of bringing you back at the wrong;they either allow you far too little time to examine the castle or the ruin,or they leave you planted in front of it for periods that outlast curiosity.They are perverse,capricious,exasperating.It was a question of our having but an hour or two at Loches,and we could ill afford to sacrifice to accidents.One of the accidents,however,was that the rain stopped before we got there,leaving behind it a moist mildness of temperature and a cool and lowering sky,which were in perfect agreement with the gray old city.Loches is certainly one of the greatest impressions of the traveller in central France,the largest cluster of curious things that presents itself to his sight.It rises above the valley of the Indre,the charming stream set in meadows and sedges,which wanders through the province of Berry and through many of the novels of Madame George Sand;lifting from the summit of a hill,which it covers to the base,a confusion of terraces,ramparts,towers,and spires.Having but little time,as I say,we scaled the hill amain,and wandered briskly through this labyrinth of antiquities.The rain had decidedly stopped,and save that we had our train on our minds,we saw Loches to the best advantage.We enjoyed that sensation with which the conscientious tourist is or ought to be well acquainted,and for which,at any rate,he has a formula in his roughandready language.We "experienced,"as they say,(most odious of verbs!)an "agreeable disappointment."We were surprised and delighted;we had not suspected that Loches was so good.

I hardly know what is best there:the strange and impressive little collegial church,with its romanesque atrium or narthex,its doorways covered with primitive sculpture of the richest kind,its treasure of a socalled pagan altar,embossed with fighting warriors,its three pyramidal domes,so unexpected,so sinister,which Ihave not met elsewhere,in church architecture;or the huge square keep,of the eleventh century,the most clifflike tower I remember,whose immeasurable thickness I did not penetrate;or the subterranean mysteries of two other less striking but not less historic dungeons,into which a terribly imperative little cicerone introduced us,with the aid of downward ladders,ropes,torches,warnings,extended hands;and,many,fearful anecdotes,all in impervious darkness.These horrible prisons of Loches,at an incredible distance below the daylight,were a favorite resource of Louis XI.,and were for the most part,I believe,constructed by him.