Old Touraine; the life and history of the famous chateâux of France . e were half frightened at the Ca-verne des Troglodytes. We might have heard thebaying of a Cerberus. . No Bacbuc was thereto throw us into a poetic frenzy, but the stones be-fore us, eloquent in their ruin, were enough to rousethe dullest of imaginations. This clifif that risessteeply above the waters of the Vienne at some littledistance from its banks was, like Amboise andLangeais, some four hundred years before Christ,the home of a Celtic tribe who drove out a stillearlier race; traces of these latter are perhaps tobe fou
Old Touraine; the life and history of the famous chateâux of France . e were half frightened at the Ca-verne des Troglodytes. We might have heard thebaying of a Cerberus. . No Bacbuc was thereto throw us into a poetic frenzy, but the stones be-fore us, eloquent in their ruin, were enough to rousethe dullest of imaginations. This clifif that risessteeply above the waters of the Vienne at some littledistance from its banks was, like Amboise andLangeais, some four hundred years before Christ,the home of a Celtic tribe who drove out a stillearlier race; traces of these latter are perhaps tobe found in the dolmen of great stones about twomiles to the east of Chinon, which may have markedthe burial-place of a chief. In the writings of Greg-ory of Tours Chinon is described as a castrum —the word he always uses for a Roman fort, and theRomans left their traces here as they have done innearly all the fortress cliffs which dominate theplains and rivers of Touraine; Roman funeral urnsand the remains of bodies have been found that had ^Ohe (jkateau of Cyhtnon. (Sh inon 63 been burnt within the ramparts, for the RomanEmpire had in those days been shaken to its baseby barbarian invasions; the Armorican Republichad just been joined by the men of Tours and An-jou, for whom a little later St. Mexme was per-forming miracles within the fort to keep at bay theforces of Aegidius. Soon after this must havebegun to grow that mass of buildings which wasstill standing in 1793, and whose outlines a map ofthat date has preserved for us. The oldest remainsof Gallo-Roman building are the enormous squaredblocks of stone lying in the shrubberies a littlefarther on from the entrance and rather to the sepulchral stone (still preserved within the cha-teau) was found among these remains of masonry,representing a man upright in a large tunic withwide sleeves; above it is the crescent-shaped signso often found in monuments of this period. Looking upwards at the whole line of buildingsfrom t
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpublishernewyo, bookyear1900
