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LA GRENADIERE
LA GRENADIERE HONORE DE BALZAC 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 the foot of the upper wall is almost hidden by the trees
that grow on the top of the lower upon which it lies. The view of the
river widens out before you at every step as you climb to the house.
At the end you come to a second gateway a Gothic archway covered with
simple ornament now crumbling into ruin and overgrown with
wildflowers--moss and ivy wallflowers and pellitory. Every stone wall
on the hillside is decked with this ineradicable plant-life which
springs up along the cracks afresh with new wreaths for every time of
year.
The worm-eaten gate gives into a little garden a strip of turf a few
trees and a wilderness of flowers and rose bushes--a garden won from
the rock on the highest terrace of all with the dark old balustrade
along its edge. Opposite the gateway a wooden summer-house stands
against the neighboring wall the posts are covered with jessamine and
honeysuckle vines and clematis.
The house itself stands in the middle of this highest garden above a
vine-covered flight of steps with an arched doorway beneath that
leads to vast cellars hollowed out in the rock. All about the dwelling
trellised vines and pomegranate-trees (the grenadiers which give the
name to the little close) are growing out in the open air. The front
of the house consists of two large windows on either side of a very
rustic-looking house door and three dormer windows in the roof--a
slate roof with two gables prodigiously high-pitched in proportion to
the low ground-floor. The house walls are washed with yellow color;
and door and first-floor shutters all the Venetian shutters of the
attic windows all are painted green.
Entering the house you find yourself in a little lobby with a crooked
staircase straight in front of you. It is a crazy wooden structure
the spiral balusters are brown with age and the steps themselves take
a new angle at every turn. The great old-fashioned paneled dining-
room floored with square white tiles from Chateau-Regnault is on
your right; to the left is the sitting-room equally large but here
the walls are not paneled; they have been covered instead with a
saffron-colored paper bordered with green. The walnut-wood rafters
are left visible and the intervening spaces filled with a kind of
white plaster.
The first story consists of two large whitewashed bedrooms with stone
chimney-pieces less elaborately carved than those in the rooms
beneath. Every door and window is on the south side of the house save
a single door to the north contrived behind the staircase to give
access to the vineyard. Against the western wall stands a
supplementary timber-framed structure all the woodwork exposed to the
weather being fledged with slates so that the walls are checkered
with bluish lines. This shed (for it is little more) is the kitchen of
the establishment. You can pass from it into the house without going
outside; but nevertheless it boasts an entrance door of its own and
a short flight of steps that brings you to a deep well and a very
rustical-looking pump half hidden by water-plants and savin bushes
and tall grasses. The kitchen is a modern addition proving beyond
doubt that La Grenadiere was originally nothing but a simple
vendangeoir--a vintage-house belonging to townsfolk in Tours from
which Saint-Cyr is separated by the vast river-bed of the Loire. The
owners only came over for the day for a picnic or at the vintage-
time sending provisions across in the morning and scarcely ever
spent the night there except during the grape harvest; but the English
settled down on Touraine like a cloud of locusts and La Grenadiere
must of course be completed if it was to find tenants. Luckily
however this recent appendage is hidden from sight by the first two
trees of a lime-tree avenue planted in a gully below the vineyards.
There are only two acres of vineyard at most the ground rising at the
back of the house so steeply that it is no very easy matter to
scramble up among the vines. The slope covered with green trailing
shoots ends within about five feet of the house wall in a ditch-like
passage always damp and cold and full of strong growing green things
fed by the drainage of the highly cultivated ground above for rainy
weather washes down the manure into the garden on the terrace.
A vinedresser's cottage also leans against the western gable and is
in some sort a continuation of the kitchen. Stone walls or espaliers
surround the property and all sorts of fruit-trees are planted among
the vines; in short not an inch of this precious soil is wasted. If
by chance man overlooks some dry cranny in the rocks Nature puts in a
fig-tree or sows wildflowers or strawberries in sheltered nooks among
the stones.
Nowhere else in all the world will you find a human dwelling so humble
and yet so imposing so rich in fruit and fragrant scents and wide
views of country. Here is a miniature Touraine in the heart of
Touraine--all its flowers and fruits and all the characteristic beauty
of the land are fully represented. Here are grapes of every district
figs and peaches and pears of every kind; melons are grown out of
doors as easily as licorice plants Spanish broom Italian oleanders
and jessamines from the Azores. The Loire lies at your feet. You look
down from the terrace upon the ever-changing river nearly two hundred
feet below; and in the evening the breeze brings a fresh scent of the
sea with the fragrance of far-off flowers gathered upon its way. Some
cloud wandering in space changing its color and form at every moment
as it crosses the pure blue of the sky can alter every detail in the
widespread wonderful landscape in a thousand ways from every point of
view. The eye embraces first of all the south bank of the Loire
stretching away as far as Amboise then Tours with its suburbs and
buildings and the Plessis rising out of the fertile plain; further
away between Vouvray and Saint-Symphorien you see a sort of crescent
of gray cliff full of sunny vineyards; the only limits to your view
are the low rich hills along the Cher a bluish line of horizon
broken by many a chateau and the wooded masses of many a park. Out to
the west you lose yourself in the immense river where vessels come
and go spreading their white sails to the winds which seldom fail
them in the wide Loire basin. A prince might build a summer palace at
La Grenadiere but certainly it will always be the home of a poet's
desire and the sweetest of retreats for two young lovers--for this
vintage house which belongs to a substantial burgess of Tours has
charms for every imagination for the humblest and dullest as well as
for the most impassioned and lofty. No one can dwell there without
feeling that happiness is in the air without a glimpse of all that is
meant by a peaceful life without care or ambition. There is that in
the air and the sound of the river that sets you dreaming; the sands
have a language and are joyous or dreary golden or wan; and the
owner of the vineyard may sit motionless amid perennial flowers and
tempting fruit and feel all the stir of the world about him.
If an Englishman takes the house for the summer he is asked a
thousand francs for six months the produce of the vineyard not
included. If the tenant wishes for the orchard fruit the rent is
doubled; for the vintage it is doubled again. What can La Grenadiere
be worth you wonder; La Grenadiere with its stone staircase its
beaten path and triple terrace its two acres of vineyard its
flowering roses about the balustrades its worn steps well-head
rampant clematis and cosmopolitan trees? It is idle to make a bid! La
Grenadiere will never be in the market; it was brought once and sold
but that was in 1690; and the owner parted with it for forty thousand
francs reluctant as any Arab of the desert to relinquish a favorite
horse. Since then it has remained in the same family its pride its
patrimonial jewel its Regent diamond. "While you behold you have and
hold" says the bard. And from La Grenadiere you behold three valleys
of Touraine and the cathedral towers aloft in air like a bit of
filigree work. How can one pay for such treasures? Could one ever pay
for the health recovered there under the linden-trees?
In the spring of one of the brightest years of the Restoration a lady
with her housekeeper and her two children (the oldest a boy thirteen
years old the youngest apparently about eight) came to Tours to look
for a house. She saw La Grenadiere and took it. Perhaps the distance
from the town was an inducement to live there.
She made a bedroom of the drawing-room gave the children the two
rooms above and the housekeeper slept in a closet behind the kitchen.
The dining-room was sitting-room and drawing-room all in one for the
little family. The house was furnished very simply but tastefully;
there was nothing superfluous in it and no trace of luxury. The
walnut-wood furniture chosen by the stranger lady was perfectly plain
and the whole charm of the house consisted in its neatness and harmony
with its surroundings.
It was rather difficult therefore to say whether the strange lady
(Mme. Willemsens as she styled herself) belonged to the upper middle
or higher classes or to an equivocal unclassified feminine species.
Her plain dress gave rise to the most contradictory suppositions but
her manners might be held to confirm those favorable to her. She had
not lived at Saint-Cyr moreover for very long before her reserve
excited the curiosity of idle people who always and especially in
the country watch anybody or anything that promises to bring some
interest into their narrow lives.
Mme. Willemsens was rather tall; she was thin and slender but
delicately shaped. She had pretty feet more remarkable for the grace
of her instep and ankle than for the more ordinary merit of
slenderness; her gloved hands too were shapely. There were flitting
patches of deep red in a pale face which must have been fresh and
softly colored once. Premature wrinkles had withered the delicately
modeled forehead beneath the coronet of soft well-set chestnut hair
invariably wound about her head in two plaits a girlish coiffure
which suited the melancholy face. There was a deceptive look of calm
in the dark eyes with the hollow shadowy circles about them;
sometimes when she was off her guard their expression told of secret
anguish. The oval of her face was somewhat long; but happiness and
health had perhaps filled and perfected the outlines. A forced smile
full of quiet sadness hovered continually on her pale lips; but when
the children who were always with her looked up at their mother or
asked one of the incessant idle questions which convey so much to a
mother's ears then the smile brightened and expressed the joys of a
mother's love. Her gait was slow and dignified. Her dress never
varied; evidently she had made up her mind to think no more of her
toilette and to forget a world by which she meant no doubt to be
forgotten. She wore a long black gown confined at the waist by a
watered-silk ribbon and by way of scarf a lawn handkerchief with a
broad hem the two ends passed carelessly through her waistband. The
instinct of dress showed itself in that she was daintily shod and
gray silk stockings carried out the suggestion of mourning in this
unvarying costume. Lastly she always wore a bonnet after the English
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