CHAPTER IX.

LOCHES

Much may be written of Loches, of its storied past, of its present-day quaintness, and of its wealth of architectural monuments. Its church is certainly the most curious religious edifice in all France, judging from a cross-section of the vaults and walls. More than all else, however, Loches is associated in our minds with the memory of Agnes Sorel.

Within the walls of the old collegiate church the lovely mistress of Charles VII. was buried in 1450; but later her remains and tomb were removed to one of the towers of the ancient castle of Loches, where they now are. She had amply endowed the church, but they would no longer give shelter to her remains, so her bones were removed five hundred years later. The statue which surmounts her tomb, as seen to-day, represents the "gentille Agnes" in all her loveliness, with folded hands on breast, a kneeling angel at her head and a couchant lamb at her feet,--a reminder of her innocence, said Henry James, but surely he nodded when he said it. Lovely she was, and good in her way, but innocent she was not, as we have come to know the word.

It is fitting to recall that Charles VII. was not the only monarch who sang her praises, for it was Francois I. who, many years later, wrote those lines beginning:

"Gentille Agnes, plus de loz tu merites."

Whether one comes to Loches by road or by rail, the first impression is the same; he enters at once into a sleepy, old-world town which has practically nothing of modernity about it except the electric lights.

There is but one way to realize the immense wealth of architectural monuments centred at Loches, and that is to see the city for the first time, as, perhaps, Francois Premier saw it when he journeyed from Amboise, and came upon it from the heights of the forest of Loches. The city has not grown much since that day. Then it had three thousand eight hundred souls, and now it has five thousand.

Here, in the Foret de Loches, Henry II. of England built a monastery,--yet to be seen,--known as the Chartreuse du Liget, in repentance, or, perhaps, as a penance for the murder of Becket. Over the doorway of this monastery was graven:

ANGLORUM HENRICUS REX THOMAE COEDE CRUENTUS, LIGETICOS FUNDAT CARTUSIA MONAKOS.

To-day the monastery is the property of a M. de Marsay, and therefore not open to the public; but the Chapelle du Liget, near by, is a fine contemporary church of the thirteenth century, well worth the admiration too infrequently bestowed upon it.

The first view of Loches must really be much as it was in Francois's time, except, perhaps, that the roadway down from the forest has improved, as roads have all over France, and fruit-trees and vineyards planted out, which, however, in no way change the aspect when the town is first seen in the dim haze of an early November morning.

It is the sky-line _ensemble_ of the chateaux of the Renaissance period which is their most varied feature. No two are alike, and yet they are all wonderfully similar in that they cut the sky with turret, tower, and chimney in a way which suggests nothing as much as the architecture of fairy-land.

The artists who illustrated the old fairy-tale books and drew castles wherein dwelt beautiful maidens could nowhere have found more real inspiration than among the chateaux of the Loire, the Cher, and the Indre.

Loches is a veritable mediaeval town, and it is even more than that, for its history dates back into the earliest years of feudal times. Loches is one of those _soi-disant_ French towns not great enough to be a metropolis, and yet quite indifferent to the affairs of the outside world.

The only false notes are those sounded by the various hawkers and cadgers for the visitor's money, who have hired various old mediaeval structures, within the walls, and assure one that in the basement of their establishment there are fragments "recently discovered,"--this in English,--quite worth the price of admission which they charge you to peer about in a gloomy hole of a cellar, littered with empty wine-bottles and rubbish of all sorts.

All this is delightful enough to the simon-pure antiquarian; but even he likes to dig things out for himself, and the householders can't all expect to find _cachots_ in their sub-cellars or iron cages in their garrets unless they manufacture them.

The old town, in spite of its lack of modernity, is full of surprises and contrasts that must make it very livable to one who cares to spend a winter within its walls. He may walk about on the ramparts on sunny days; may fish in the Indre, below the mill; and, if he is an artist, he will find, within a comparatively small area, much more that is exceedingly "paintable" than is usually found in the fishing-villages of Brittany or on the sand-dunes of the Pas de Calais, "artist's sketching-grounds" which have been pretty well worked of late.

The history of Loches is so varied and vivid that it is easy to account for the many remains of feudal and Renaissance days now existing. The derivation of its name is in some doubt. Loches was unquestionably the Luccae of the Romans, but the Armorican Celts had the word _loc'h_, meaning much the same thing,--_un marais_,--which is also wonderfully like the _loch_ known to-day in the place-names of Scotland and the _lough_ of Ireland. Partisans may take their choice.

In the fifth century a monastery was founded here by St. Ours, which ultimately gave its name to the collegiate church which exists to-day. A chateau, or more probably a fortress, appeared in the sixth century. The city was occupied by the Franks in the seventh century, but by 630 it had become united with Aquitaine. Pepin sacked it in 742, and Charles le Chauve made it a seat of a hereditary government which, by alliance, passed to the house of Anjou in 886, to whom it belonged up to 1205. Jean-sans-Terre gave it to France in 1193. Richard Coeur de Lion apparently resented this, for he retook it in the year following. In 1204, Philippe-Auguste besieged Chinon and Loches simultaneously, and took the latter after a year, when he made it a fief, and gave it to Dreux de Mello, Constable of France, who in turn sold it to St. Louis.

The chateau of Loches became first a fortress, guarding the ancient Roman highway from the Blaisois to Aquitaine, then a prison, and then a royal residence, to which Charles VII. frequently repaired with Agnes Sorel, which calls up again the strangely contrasting influences of the two women whose names have gone down in history linked with that of Charles VII.

"Louis XI. aggrandized the chateau," says a French authority, "and perfected the prisons," whatever that may mean. He did, we know, build those terrible dungeons far down below the surface of the ground, where daylight never penetrated. They were perfect enough in all conscience as originally built, at least as perfect as the celebrated iron cage in which he imprisoned Cardinal Balue. The cage is not in its wonted place to-day, and only a ring in the wall indicates where it was once made fast.

Charles VIII. added the great round tower; but it was not completed until the reign of Louis XII. Francois I., in a not too friendly meeting, received Charles Quint here in 1539, just previous to his visit to Amboise. Marie de Medici, on escaping from Blois, stopped at the chateau at the invitation of the governor, the Duc d'Epernon, who sped her on her way, as joyfully as possible, to Angouleme.

The chateau itself is the chief attraction of interest, just as it is the chief feature of the landscape when viewed from afar. Of course it is understood that, when one speaks of the chateau at Loches, he refers to the collective chateaux which, in more or less fragmentary form, go to make up the edifice as it is to-day.

Whether we admire most the structure of Geoffrey Grise-Gonelle, the elegant edifice of the fifteenth century, or the additions of Charles VII., Louis XI., Charles VIII., Louis XII., or Henri III., we must conclude that to know this conglomerate structure intimately one must actually live with it. Nowhere in France--perhaps in no country--is there a chateau that suggests so stupendously the story of its past.

The chief and most remarkable features are undoubtedly the great rectangular keep or donjon, and the Tour Neuf or Tour Ronde. The first, in its immensity, quite rivals the best examples of the kind elsewhere, if it does not actually excel them in dimensions. It is, moreover, according to De Caumont, the most beautiful of all the donjons of France. As a state prison it confined Jean, Duc d'Alencon, Pierre de Breze, and Philippe de Savoie.

The Tour Ronde is a great cylinder flanked with dependencies which give it a more or less irregular form. It encloses the prison where were formerly kept the famous cages, the invention of Cardinal Balue, who himself became their first victim. The Tour Ronde is reminiscent of two great female figures in the mediaeval portrait gallery,--Agnes Sorel and Anne de Bretagne. The tomb of Agnes Sorel is here, and the Duchesse Anne made an oratory in this grim tower, from which she sent up her prayer for the success and unity of the political plans which inspired her marriage into the royal family of France. It is a daintily decorated chamber, with the queen's family device, the ermine with its twisted necklet, prominently displayed.

In the passage which conducts to the dungeons of this great round tower, one reads this ironical invitation: "_Entres, messieurs, ches le Roy Nostre Mestre_" (_O.F._).

That portion of the collective chateaux facing to the north is now occupied by the Sous-Prefecture, and is more after the manner of the residential chateaux of the Loire than of a fortress-stronghold or prison. Before this portion stands the famous chestnut-tree, planted, it is said, by Francois I., "and large enough to shelter the whole population of Loches beneath its foliage," says the same doubtful authority.

Under a fifteenth-century structure, called the Martelet, are the true dungeons of Loches. Here one is shown the cell occupied for nine years by the poor Ludovic Sforza, who died in 1510, from the mere joy of being liberated. More deeply hidden still is the famous Prison des Eveques of the era of Francois I. and the dungeon of Comte de St. Vallier, the father of the fascinating Diane, who herself was the means of securing his liberation by "fascinating the king," as one French writer puts it. This may be so. St. Vallier _was_ liberated, we know, and the susceptible Francois _was_ fascinated, though he soon tired of Diane and her charms. She had the perspicacity, however, to transfer her affections to his son, and so kept up a sort of family relationship.

Like the historic "prisoner of Gisors," the occupants of the dungeons at Loches whiled away their lonely hours by inscribing their sentiments upon the walls. Only one remains to-day, though fragmentary stone-carved letters and characters are to be seen here and there. He who wrote the following was certainly as cheerful as circumstances would allow:

"Malgre les ennuis d'une longue souffrance, Et le cruel destin dont je subis la loy, Il est encort des biens pour moy, Le tendre amour et la douce esperance."

Most of these formidable dungeons of Loches were prisons of state until well into the sixteenth century.

Beneath, or rather beside, the very walls of the chateau is the bizarre collegiate church of St. Ours. One says bizarre, simply because it is curious, and not because it is unchurchly in any sense of the word, for it is not. Its low nave is surmounted by an enormous tower with a stone spire, while there are two other pyramidal erections over the roof of the choir which make the whole look, not like an elephant, as a cynical Frenchman once wrote, but rather like a camel with two humps. This strange architectural anomaly is, in parts, almost pagan; certainly its font, a fragment of an ancient altar on which once burned a sacred fire, _is_ pagan.

There is a Romanesque porch of vast dimensions which is the real artistic expression of the fabric, dressed with extraordinary primitive sculptures of saints, demons, stryges, gnomes, and all manner of outre things. All these details, however, are chiselled with a masterly conception.

Behind this exterior vestibule the first bays of the nave form another, a sort of an inner vestibule, which carries out still further the unique arrangement of the whole edifice. This portion of the structure dates from a consecration of the year 965, which therefore classes it as of very early date,--indeed, few are earlier. Most of the church, however, is of the twelfth century, including another great pyramid which rises above the nave and the two smaller ones just behind the spire. The side-aisles of the nave were added between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, while only the stalls and the tabernacle are as recent as the sixteenth. The eastern end is triapsed, an unusual feature in France. From this one realizes, quite to the fullest extent possible, the antiquity and individuality of the Eglise de St. Ours at Loches.

The quaint Renaissance Hotel-de-Ville was built by the architect Jean Beaudoin (1535-1543), from sums raised, under letters patent from Francois I., by certain _octroi_ taxes. From the fact that through its lower story passes one of the old city entrances, it has come to be known also as the Porte Picoys. In every way it is a worthy example of Renaissance civic architecture.

In the Rue de Chateau is a remarkable Renaissance house, known as the Chancellerie, which dates from the reign of Henri II. It has most curious sculptures on its facade interspersed with the devices of royalty and the inscription:

IVSTITIA REGNO, PRUDENTIA NUTRISCO.

The Tour St. Antoine serves to-day as the city's belfry. It is all that remains of a church, demolished long since, which was built in 1519-30, in imitation of St. Gatien's of Tours. Doubtless it was base in many of its details, as is its more famous compeer at Tours; but, if the old tower which remains is any indication, it must have been an elaborate and imposing work of the late Gothic and early Renaissance era.

As a literary note, lovers of Dumas's romances will be interested in the fact that in the Hotel de la Couroirie at Loches a body of Protestants captured the celebrated Chicot, the jester of Henri III. and Henri IV.

Loches has a near neighbour in Beaulieu, which formerly possessed an ardent hatred for its more progressive and successful contemporary, Loches. Its very name has been perverted by local historians as coming from Bellilocus, "the place of war," and not "_le lieu d'un bel aspect_."

The abbey church at Beaulieu was built by the warlike Foulques Nerra (in 1008-12), who usually built fortresses and left church-building to monks and bishops. It is a remarkable Romanesque example, though, since the fifteenth century, it has been mostly in ruins. Foulques Nerra himself, whose countenance had "_la majeste de celui d'un ange_," found his last resting-place within its walls, which also sheltered much rich ornament, to-day greatly defaced, though that of the nave, which is still intact, is an evidence of its former worth.

The abbatial residence, still existent, has a curious exterior pulpit built into the wall, examples of which are not too frequent in France.

Agnes Sorel, the belle of belles, lived here for a time in a house near the Porte de Guigne, which bears a great stone _panonceau_, from which the armorial bearings have to-day disappeared. It is another notable monument to "the most graceful woman of her times," and without doubt has as much historic value as many another more popular shrine of history.

In connection with Agnes Sorel, who was so closely identified with Loches and Beaulieu, it is to be recalled that she was known to the chroniclers of her time as "_la dame de Beaute-sur-Marne_,"--a place which does not appear in the books of the modern geographers. It may be noted, too, that it was the encouragement of the "_belle des belles_" of Charles VII. that, in a way, contributed to that monarch's success in politics and arms, for her sway only began with Jeanne d'Arc's supplication at Gien and Chinon. Tradition has it, indeed, that it was the "gentille Agnes" who put the sword of victory in his hands when he set out on his campaign of reconquest. Thus does the Jeanne d'Arc legend receive a damaging blow.

The chateau of Sausac, an elegant edifice of the sixteenth century, completely restored in later days, is near by.