La Grenadiere | Page 4

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