images of Francois Rabelais and Rene Descartes.
The former, erected a few years since, is a very honor-
able production; the pedastal of the latter could, as
a matter of course, only be inscribed with the _Cogito
ergo Sum._ The two statues mark the two opposite
poles to which the brilliant French mind has travelled;
and if there were an effigy of Balzac at Tours, it ought
to stand midway between them. Not that he, by any
means always struck the happy mean between the
sensible and the metaphysical; but one may say of
him that half of his genius looks in one direction
and half in the other. The side that turns toward
Francois Rabelais would be, on the whole, the side
that takes the sun. But there is no statue of Balzac
at Tours; there is only, in one of the chambers of
the melancholy museum, a rather clever, coarse bust.
The description in "La Grenadiere," of which I just
spoke, is too long to quote; neither have I space for
any one of the brilliant attempts at landscape paint-
ing which are woven into the shimmering texture of
"Le Lys dans la Vallee." The little manor of Cloche-
gourde, the residence of Madame de Mortsauf, the
heroine of that extraordinary work, was within a
moderate walk of Tours, and the picture in the novel is
presumably a copy from an original which it would be
possible to-day to discover. I did not, however, even
make the attempt. There are so many chateaux in
Touraine commemorated in history, that it would take
one too far to look up those which have been com-
memorated in fiction. The most I did was to endeavor