RIDE TO LOCHES—AN ACCIDENT—THE CASTLE OF LOCHES—ITS HISTORY—THE CAGES OF LOUIS XI.—THEIR COST TO THE KING—AGNES OF SOREL—THE MISTRESSES OF FRENCH KINGS VERSUS THEIR QUEENS

Life is all sparkle to-day in this fair city of Tours, her people are evidently happy and we are not the least so as the car flies down the wide avenues, through her Champs-ÉlysÉes, and crossing the river, turns south-eastward through smiling meadows, where the sheep are grazing and the people wave at us as we pass. Some miles out on a long stretch of highway we are rapidly approaching a train of a dozen empty carts, each bearing a man and a woman, and, between the rattle of the carts and the clattering tongues of their occupants, I fancy the outer world and its sounds are completely drowned. However, we have a clear stretch to their left, can easily pass without danger, and are skimming onward with little thought of a catastrophe when, as we reach the last cart but one forward, it quietly draws out immediately across our track, evidently to allow the occupants to gossip with greater ease with those of the cart in front. Jean shuts off all power, puts on all breaks, we all shriek and horn and trumpet, to the utter confusion of the peasants, who drive in every direction save the right one, like a flock of chickens. There is no averting a collision, but we minimise as far as possible its danger and it results in nothing worse than a bent lamp as we bang into the tail-board of the cart, causing the old lady and gentleman therein to turn complete somersaults and land by the wayside,—reeds shaken by the winds, as it were,—but the winds of heaven were like unto a dead calm when compared with the clatter and shrieks which arose around us. I am afraid the remarks were personal, though the ancient dame who was dumped into the grass, when I told her her tongue was as long as her arm and had caused all the damage, looked at me in grand amaze and said—nothing. She knew that it was true and she knew also that the others would tell her that it was true after we had vanished. At least I think the unfortunates of her village will be safe from the organ for a day or so.

The day changes as we move onward, and under clouds and through a gloomy forest we near the towers of Loches,[2] the most remarkable relic extant of the darkest days of the Middle Ages, the favourite abode of Louis XI. Doubtless he had many times approached over this same road and down this way his victims must have passed, the most of them to disappear forever,—certainly Cardinal Balue came this way from Plessis-lÈs-Tours, to occupy a cage of his own designing for many years. The forest drops away, and off across a valley we obtain our first glimpse of the chÂteau, its great square towers rising dark and forbidding, while all around it clusters the ancient city with its convent, church, and palace. The panorama is not so fantastic as that of Carcassonne, there are not so many pinnacles, barbettes, and curious towers, it is not backed by a glowing sky, but the whole is somber, majestic, and gloomy,—a fitting appearance for a chÂteau with such history.

As we roll onward up its narrow streets, the clouds lower and we are forced to take refuge under cover; but the rain does not last long and shortly we come out again, leaving the church and palace to our left, and noting as we move onward that while Carcassonne possessed few, if any, private houses of the nobility, these streets present many even to-day. Interesting faÇades rise around us at every turn, but with the castle before us we do not pause until under the shadow of its great gateway. I know of nothing in Europe more impressive of its kind than this entrance to the ChÂteau of Loches. It is absolutely unchanged by the flight of years. The moat, the drawbridge, the low-browed heavy portal, with the great square donjon rising above, inspire me with a greater respect for the power of that old King Louis, and, as I clang the bell, I wonder whether I may come out again once these portals close behind me,—a question I put to the bright-eyed French woman who smilingly admits me and as smilingly assures me that I may indeed go hence.

Once inside, the great tower, which replaced an ancient Roman fortress in the eleventh century, rises one hundred and thirty feet before me in all its majesty. One does not see from here that it is but an empty shell, yet on entering it loses none of its impressiveness as one gazes upward through its vastness, noting where the floors were, and even from below descrying the many inscriptions carved by the weary prisoners of the King. I can distinctly see from here one deeply cut, "Help—God or man," which tells its own story.

In this donjon—except the floors—there is nothing which could be consumed by fire. Its walls are nine feet in thickness at their base and six at the summit. The interior shows a deep well which communicated by subterranean passages with all the feudal chÂteaux in the neighbourhood, and was used to re-victual the Castle in times of siege. That this great tower was the royal residence in feudal days can be seen by the divisions on the walls. Such prisoners as were here confined were of little importance as they possessed light and fresh air.

The little donjon adjoining the greater served as the residence of the Governor and communicated with the former tower by staircases in the thickness of the walls. It was in this section of the castle that history was made throughout so many centuries. We first hear of it when Foulques le Roux, Count of Anjou, acquired it by marriage in 879—but of all the lives lived out here before this date there is no tale remaining to us. It became the cradle of the Plantagenet race. John of England ceded the Castle to Philip Augustus in 1192, but Coeur de Lion on his return from captivity objecting, took it by storm; again it passed to France after a year's siege by Philip Augustus in 1205. Bells rang out for the wedding in this queer place of James V. of Scotland and Madeline of France, but that was after the days of Louis XI, and really nothing else holds the attention of the traveller here to-day save this King, sordid and devilishly horrible.

The great donjon does not contain the most famous and fearful of Louis's prisons. You must pass on to the right and enter the smaller towers to find the cages where he placed those high in his favour. Both in the round tower and the Martelet and every tower of the outer walls, you will find dungeon under dungeon, high up or far underground, where the sun never shines and where men learned to see in the black darkness, as the carvings and names testify, for, rest assured, Louis allowed no lights to his guests in Loches. Passing onward, the traveller enters the round tower built by Louis. It is still in very excellent condition. Here one finds all the original floors in place. Here are the guard-rooms and many prisons,—used as such by the town to-day,—amongst them the great conical chamber where hung the famous iron and wooden cage of Cardinal Balue—an invention of his own, in which for conspiracy with Charles le TÉmÉraire he spent eleven years, though some authorities state that it was but three. The tower is shaped like a vast cistern with a conical top, its walls are circular and there are slit-like apertures, through which the wind moans, and the sunlight could never come save in stray shafts, making the shadows deeper by contrast.

Down the passage yonder, which communicates underground with the great donjon, Louis and his Tristan entered to torment the Cardinal, swinging like a huge bird in his cage. The walls still show two holes in each side into which the beams supporting the cage, were inserted,—the chains from each corner thereof met in a ring at the top, which was fastened into the beams and turned on a pivot. The cage composed of wood, bound and riveted with iron, formed a cube four feet in size, wherein its occupant could neither lie down or stand up, and there the Cardinal spent eleven years exposed and yet confined. A singular refinement of torture that.

This cage in Loches, in which the historian Philippe de Comines was also confined, was very different from that in the Bastille,—the prison for fourteen years of the Bishop of Verdun. The expense account of the period holds the following item concerning that cage:

"For making a great wooden cage of heavy beams, joists, and rafters, measuring inside nine feet long by eight broad and seven high between the planks, mortised and bolted with great iron bolts, which has been fixed in a certain chamber of one of the towers of the Bastille St. Antoine, in which said cage, is put and kept, by command of our Lord the King, a prisoner that before inhabited an old, decayed, and worn-out cage. Used in making said new cage ninety-six horizontal beams and fifty-two perpendiculars, ten joists each eighteen feet long; employed in squaring, planing, and fitting all the said woodwork in the yard of the Bastille, nineteen carpenters for twenty days,—used in the cage two hundred and twenty great iron bolts nine feet long,—with plates and nuts for fastening of said bolts, the iron weighing three thousand seven hundred and thirty-five pounds,—besides eight heavy iron equiÈres, for fixing the said cage in its place with cramp-irons and nails weighing all together two hundred and eighteen pounds, without reckoning the iron for the trellis work of the windows of the chamber in which said cage has been placed, the iron bars of the door of the chamber and other articles. The whole amounts to three hundred and seventeen livres, five sol and seven deniers."

A great, cubical mass of masonry, iron, and woodwork, its windows so thickly latticed with bars of iron that no glass was visible,—its door, one large flat stone like a tomb,—a door for entrance only! "Our Lady!" exclaimed the King, "here is a cage out of all reason."

Therefore he curtailed expenses and space when he caused to be constructed the habitation for his Eminence of Balue, and then again there was exercise for the Cardinal as the cage was swung to and fro or whirled on its pivot at the bidding of Louis. What a picture! The great, gloomy, conical shaped prison, with the cage swinging to and fro, now in dense shadow and anon in the rift of sunlight shooting in through the slits in the wall,—the grotesque figure of the wretched old King crouching on the incline in yonder passage mumbling prayers before the leaden figures of the Virgin with which his greasy old hat is laden, and stopping now and then to command Tristan to "further agitate his Eminence." It is not reported that any remarks came from the Cardinal in the cage for he knew he had been guilty of treason and hope was not for him.

Cages would appear to have been the fad of King Louis. There were two in Loches, and one at the old palace of the Tournelles. The one in the Bastille was evidently too spacious (9 x 8 x 7 feet), and it was considered necessary to attach a ball to the ankle of the unfortunate Bishop of Verdun, who, it is also stated, was the originator of these cages and not Cardinal Balue. It was a distinction scarcely coveted, I fancy, to be confined in one of these "filets du Roi." The cages in Loches existed in perfect condition until the days of 1789, when they were destroyed and the wood given to the poor, but a relic of one still exists in the barred door through which you pass into the corridor just outside. That is the same door which shut in the Cardinal for so many years, and you feel like leaving one of your number—not your heir at law—on guard, to see that it does not do likewise for yourself. Knowing Louis, one is quite certain that these prisoners were not allowed to feel forgotten, as Louis XIV. probably forgot Matthioli, the Man of the Iron Mask, whose master, Charles of Mantua, was in Paris when he died in 1703. It is very doubtful whether master or captor would, at first, have remembered who the poor wretch was who was being dragged to his grave in the Cemetery of St. Paul whilst they feasted in the Luxembourg.

The Bastille witnessed few such horrors as those so common within the walls of Loches.

Passing up the corridor to lesser prisons, one comes to a chamber with a vast chimney where the question, ordinary and extraordinary, was applied, and where one still finds many of the instruments of torture. I know of no more gruesome spot on earth than this castle, unless it be those chambers at Nuremberg, where chamber after chamber is filled with every conceivable instrument of torture until one stands shuddering before the Iron Virgin. Still, after all, those chambers and their instruments meant a speedy death, but Louis knew that life, as he could dole it out here, was more horrible than any death.

It is a relief to mount a winding stair in the thickness of the walls and emerge into the free fresh air. The panorama over city and rolling country is charming, and my red auto down there at the portal re-assuring, but neither can hold us long from a renewed contemplation of this chÂteau.

Passing down into the court, we cross a grassy enclosure towards the walls, and the tower of the Martelet, where we descend ninety-six steps into prisons cut in the solid rock, passing four floors of them; the first was for ordinary prisoners and is of no interest, as there is too much sunlight and air. In the dungeon just below was imprisoned for ten years Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, a prisoner of Louis XII. in 1500. These walls are covered with carvings made during those ten years. There are many inscriptions and this carved face before us is said to be his portrait. Below is the name:

"Ludovico."

A sort of shadow of daylight penetrates through a small, heavily barred window in the wall twelve feet thick, and opposite this Ludovico deeply engraved in the stone a dial plate, which permitted him to know the passing of the hours.

Further downward in the rock you find another prison where Francis I. confined the father of Diane de Poitiers, whose hair whitened in a single night. This prison is more gloomy than the one above it. We find here the name of one of the officers in the Scotch guard of Louis XI., "Ebenezer Kelburn." In the centre of the chamber there is an oubliette to the darkness below. Down there are the fosses waiting for more victims, which in the days when this chamber above was used for the torture, were not slow in coming.

Pontbrillant, governor of Loches, who certainly knew all the secrets of the donjons found an iron door which, upon being forced open, led in to a long passage cut in the rock, which conducted to a chamber far under ground, where was seated upon a stone a gigantic man, holding his head in his hands. The admission of the air reduced him instantly to dust, and in like manner, there crumbled away a little coffer of wood which had enclosed some linen, very white and carefully folded. Who or what he had been was never known.

In the oubliette of the tower, is to be read an inscription which shows that the Revolution placed its seal upon Loches: "Without fear, we destroy the high walls, break the chains, and cause to disappear the tortures invented by the King, too weak to arrest a people moving to liberty.—1785"

Doubtless this fortress would repay weeks of research and yield up many a present unknown dungeon, each with its grizzly horror and tale of distress. Against modern artillery it would have little show, but in the Middle Ages it was almost impregnable.

The great donjon and inner sections surrounded by its immense wall, with many towers, is in its turn encompassed by a moat completely isolating the whole. The second line of fortifications established subsequently by Philip Augustus comprised also a moat "twenty-five metres in depth," and bastions flanked by round towers and "tours À bec."

On the top of the bastions which were a mile and a half in circuit was a road protected by double walls. One of its outer gates is called the "Gate of the Queen," because Maria de Medici entered there after her escape from Blois in 1619.

That there is so much of Loches standing to-day is probably due to the knowledge of the destroyers of 1793 that Louis, while he would hang a few of the people now and then, turned most of his attention to the upper classes. One was sure of good company if one went to the gibbet or to jail in those days of the fifteenth century.

Loches does not appear to have been inhabited often by royalty after the reign of Louis XII. when the usefulness of such fortresses passed away, but it stood in perfect condition until 1793, and what is left will endure while time lasts, an object of intense interest to all who behold it.

The clouds lower darker and darker as we move to leave this forbidding spot. The air is heavy as though laden with the sorrows of those who never left it, even after death; the winds sough through the ghostly trees, causing their branches to rattle against the walls of the great donjon like skeleton fingers,—and it is with a feeling of relief that we hear the outer portal clang behind us and know that we are outside. As I pause a moment, I can distinguish the sound of the foot-falls of my late guide, dying away fainter and fainter inside, and then silence deep and unbroken settles over the ChÂteau of Loches.

In the town there is a cathedral and a royal palace and the whole was at one time surrounded by a great outer wall.

Though the general effect is not so picturesque as Carcassonne, it is far more majestic, and its inspection amply repays all the time one can give while Carcassonne is a disappointment from the time one enters its inner portals.

There is another name, Agnes of Sorel, connected with Loches,—the only mortal who ever produced one manly act in the weak Charles VII. All the good of his reign appears to be traceable to her influence and it is easily believed that she could not be acceptable to the dark spirit of Louis XI. Insulted and driven from the Court, she died, many assert by poison from his agents. She left a large dower to the Church of St. Ours here, and there she was buried. In the succeeding reign, the monks, after having secured the inheritance, alleging scruples as to her life, requested permission to remove her remains, which Louis granted, provided the inheritance was returned. That placed a different light upon the matter and she rested in peace until the Revolution scattered her ashes to the winds. Her tomb now stands in one of the towers of the Royal Palace. If that face is a portrait, she had claim to some of the beauty attributed to her,—of her good influence over the weak king there is no doubt.

In the history of France, how insignificant a part her queens have generally played and how important that of many of these "lights o' love." One hears nothing of the Queen of this Charles VII., but how much of this Mistress Agnes. In the case of Louis XI. there would seem to have been no woman of importance though he had a queen—Did that figure of leather ever know passion or love?

With Louis XII. one does hear of the Queen, Anne of Brittany. But with Francis I. it is all Diane de Poitiers, and again the same Diane with his son Henry II. Poor little Francis II. knew none save his Queen, Mary of Scots, and it was not until after his death that Queen Catherine de Medici came to the front on the stage of France. With Henry IV. and all the Louis, save one, we hear much of the mistresses, little of the queens, unless there be a touch of wickedness, as with Maria de Medici. True, there was Anne of Austria, but she came forward only when a widow and as regent. It is difficult to remember even the names of the queens of Louis XIV. and XV., but none forget La ValliÈre, Montespan, Maintenon, Pompadour and du Barry,—women who had so greatly to do with hastening the downfall of the throne and producing the horrors of the Revolution, when again a queen comes into view and we stand with bowed heads as Marie Antoinette moves to her doom.

In all the long years from the time of Charles VII. until to-day there was but one of the royal favourites, his own Agnes of Sorel, who exerted her powers for good. As I stand in the old tower to-day gazing down upon her graven image, I quietly blow the dust away and leave a flower.

Louis XI. ended the feudal period by breaking the power of the independent barons and establishing that of royalty. The traveller from Orleans to Blois may notice to-day opposite Meung the heavy square masses of the Church of Notre Dame de ClÉry. There Louis XI. built his own grave and was wont to occupy it now and then during life, though he did not rest there for many years after his death as the tomb was destroyed by the Huguenots in 1563.

Entering our car, we are off and away, rattling through the narrow streets, and gliding out on to the wide high-road for Tours. It was near Tours at "Plessis-lÈs-Tours" that Louis XI. met the grim destroyer. I have before this fully described that ChÂteau, [3] and will pass it now.