ine, travelling
on foot, and saying to myself as each old tower came in sight, "She is
there!"

Accordingly, of a Thursday morning I left Tours by the barrier of
Saint-Eloy, crossed the bridges of Saint-Sauveur, reached Poncher whose
every house I examined, and took the road to Chinon. For the first
time in my life I could sit down under a tree or walk fast or slow as
I pleased without being dictated to by any one. To a poor lad crushed
under all sorts of despotism (which more or less does weigh upon all
youth) the first employment of freedom, even though it be expended upon
nothing, lifts the soul with irrepressible buoyancy. Several reasons
combined to make that day one of enchantment. During my school years I
had never been taken to walk more than two or three miles from a city;
yet there remained in my mind among the earliest recollections of my
childhood that feeling for the beautiful which the scenery about Tours
inspires. Though quite untaught as to the poetry of such a landscape,
I was, unknown to myself, critical upon it, like those who imagine the
ideal of art without knowing anything of its practice.

To reach the chateau of Frapesle, foot-passengers, or those
on horseback, shorten the way by crossing the Charlemagne
moors,--uncultivated tracts of land lying on the summit of the plateau
which separates the valley of the Cher from that of the Indre, and over
which there is a cross-road leading to Champy. These moors are flat and
sandy, and for more than three miles are dreary enough until you reach,
through a clump of woods, the road to Sache, the name of the township
in which Frapesle stands. This road, which joins that of Chinon beyond
Ballan, skirts an undulating plain to the little hamlet of Artanne. Here
we come upon a valley, which begins at Montbazon, ends at the Loire,
and seems to rise and fall,--to bound, as it were,--beneath the chateaus
placed on its double hillsides,--a splendid emerald cup, in the depths
of which flow the serpentine lines of the river Indre. I gazed at this
scene with ineffable delight, for which the gloomy moor-land and the
fatigue of the sandy walk had prepared me.

"If that woman, the flower of her sex, does indeed inhabit this earth,
she is here, on this spot."

Thus musing, I leaned against a walnut-tree, beneath which I have rested
from that day to this whenever I return to my dear valley. Beneath that
tree, the confidant of my thoughts, I ask myself what changes there