New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1870-04-07
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THE BONAPARTE TRIAL.

capital OF I0ufalne the garden OF rance. Just now
in state of feyerish excitement. Every hotel is
filled to OVERLOOKING with dodgers and the overflow
runs into all the empty houses il can find, and has
beds set up for itself in the deserted rooms, aud
cheerful fires built for itself in the frep places that
haven't seen the glow of freight for the last fifty
| or hundred, or it may be thousand years! For
| Tours is an DID, old place, and the inhabitants arc
grown fastidious and count nothing really old that
doesn't reckon its age by centuries and they talk as
| lightly and Familiarity about Louis Xl., and Charles
Martel, and st. Martin. and Tristan Pilermite and
Gregory of Tours as if these good folks had died
only last week. or, for that matter, hadn't
| died at all j! And. doubt. many Of
these hard featured, hale and hearty old men and
women meet in my walks about the streets. with
their skins the color of fine, old, leather-bottomed
chairs that have been good deal sat upon, are IN
state of halfdoubt as to whether these worthless who
played as great part in the history Of Tours, and OF
Touraine in general are not living somewhere yet.
| and like enough to come back one day and take mp
the game life where they left it, and shuttle the cards
for new deal. Whether they will come back again
in the flesh or no cannot tell but their ghosts a,c
not far off, think though freed by the spirit OF adj
ministraton, which here, as everywhere IN France.
is powerful to take refuge in the back streets and
sums leaving the Boulevard and the Rne Royale ior
their degenerate descendants to air their wealth and
city in France convenient handsome, spacious, we'll
| kept, well-governed, spritless, and dull. 70
see the real Tours, 'gve the Boulevard the eo-Ly.
handsome in the official sense, as it is, with ITS
double row Of trees grandy Oyerarching walk over
a mile long, the promenade on Sundays and all
| bright days of the whole town; leave the we'll
paved beautifully kept streets that parallel to
the Boulevard on either side, with their cherries
uninhabited- looking houses entered not by courts,
as in Paris, but in general directly from the side
walks as in Boston Philadelphia; leave. too, the
Rue Royale that cuts the Boulevard and the whole
town in halves, and streaks away to the horizon
North and South, eaping the Loire on a noble stone
bridge of fifteen arches and lined in It's whole
length, as it passes through the town, with shops
that would be handsome, perhaps, II one had not
seen Paris If you wish to see the old, old Tours
leave all this with glance, tits only cheap copy OF
Paris and walk about among the crooked, narrow
streets and poke into all the outlandsh alleys where
the houses oyerhang your head on either
hand. SO that from cornice to cornce Is only
step for hardy child, while higher
still, above the cOrnice line, always OF
stone these cornices, in the meanest houses.
the slated roofs sloped back in grand and gradual
lines, never curved, but straight, their weather
beaten faces set with dormer windows and quaint
hooded holes-one wonders if they are for AR oT
light and whether human beings are lodged IN these
crannies fit only for bats and owls Aud there are
gardens with a HE Straight blank with
ont projection, not moss-grown, but only stained
with time-walls that seem built to laugh siege t.
scorp and that could not be taken without scaiIns
ladders which yet guard no greater treasures imam
a few rows of musing cabbages, or somo
neglected garden walks that can hardly bi
distinguished from the neglected garden-bedS.
And in this oldest Tours can hardly walk step
,y;+ something that VIII STIR the
antiauarian in him. if he has that spirit sumbeiing
i'm his BOSOM for the ruins of the old architecture
civil and religious abound. Houses that look a. II
they themselves must have been the first structure
have bits of older houses built into their walls here
a doorway made of Roman sculptures, here what
look like the lambs and frieze of fireplace quietly
set in the outside of house, with the head OF Caesar
carved in bold relief upon it here, at a fork IN the
street, great block of marble, which proves To he
the richly nodded boss from neighborng church
now in ruins possibly from the great abbey of Saint
Martin which makes melancholy but still magnih-
cent feature of this venerable town. Windows, and
DOORS and whole houses, belonging to the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries and in place where You
least expect it, you come upon fountain that must
have been beautiful once, Il fountain OF sculptured
marble made in 1870 that would be beautiful still If
it in Italy, any land where climate is kindly
to structures of marble and stone. And then there ia
Cathedral, the most beautiful in the world, man
told me- to-day after Milan! However. his excuse
was that we were standing within it when
he said that and the interior of Milan
/ know is contrast, very striking. 10 its outside
emptiness and preteDse. But, neither IN ITS interior
nor its exterior, need the Cathedral of Tours feai
any comparison with Others of it size. 1t has been
greatly injured within by the whitewashers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but, thank
Heaven, it has not been injured by the
restorers of the nineteenth, not even 10y
the able restoration of Violet 10 Due.
With the exception of the great portal of the 'front.'
il remains exactly as time and the image-breaker,
have left 1t, and it makes Notre Dame de Paris
forgotten Close to it, separated from Tit 10y only
narrow street. is the palace of the Archbishop, and
looking in at the stately, but ugly, Renaissance
gate, see an immense cedar of Lebanon spreading
its dark, green layers of shade over the
lawn. and apparently making all other
trees unnecessary. Gladly would linger in the old
town, and wander hand-in-hand with the romance
and legend of the past with which its streets are
filled. For the whole air of this city and Of the
country round is redoent with the romantic history
of France. Not far away the little towns of Meung
and LOWS recall all lovers of Chaucer his earliest
work, the translation of the Roman dc la Rose by
William Of LOWS and Jean de Meung, and. close by
are Amboise and Blors. and not far of is Porters
where, as well as at Tours, Charles Marte hammered
the Saracens out of France. And IN Tours itself
Gregory of Tours wrote his history, the earliest made
of France and Saint Martin Bishop of Tours, he who
divided his cloak with the beggar, taught and
practced the Christianity that Saint Graten brought
here in the third century. On the old wall OF the
Cathedral behind the beautiful tomb Of the children
hal t,a fyn haar fla aat