The Project Gutenberg EBook of La Grenadiere, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: La Grenadiere

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Ellen Marriage

Release Date: August, 1998 [Etext #1428]
Posting Date: February 24, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LA GRENADIERE ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

LA GRENADIERE

By Honore De Balzac

Translated By Ellen Marriage

To D. W.

LA GRENADIERE

La Grenadiere is a little house on the right bank of the Loire as you go
down stream, about a mile below the bridge of Tours. At this point the
river, broad as a lake, and covered with scattered green islands, flows
between two lines of cliff, where country houses built uniformly of
white stone stand among their gardens and vineyards. The finest fruit
in the world ripens there with a southern exposure. The patient toil of
many generations has cut terraces in the cliff, so that the face of the
rock reflects the rays of the sun, and the produce of hot climates may
be grown out of doors in an artificially high temperature.

A church spire, rising out of one of the shallower dips in the line of
cliffs, marks the little village of Saint-Cyr, to which the scattered
houses all belong. And yet a little further the Choisille flows into the
Loire, through a fertile valley cut in the long low downs.

La Grenadiere itself, half-way up the hillside, and about a hundred
paces from the church, is one of those old-fashioned houses dating back
some two or three hundred years, which you find in every picturesque
spot in Touraine. A fissure in the rock affords convenient space for a
flight of steps descending gradually to the "dike"--the local name for
the embankment made at the foot of the cliffs to keep the Loire in its
bed, and serve as a causeway for the highroad from Paris to Nantes. At
the top of the steps a gate opens upon a narrow stony footpath between
two terraces, for here the soil is banked up, and walls are built
to prevent landslips. These earthworks, as it were, are crowned with
trellises and espaliers, so that the steep path that lies at t