Ride the Wind, Choose the Fire by Veronica Schwarz

Author:Veronica Schwarz [Schwarz, Veronica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Creativia
Published: 2019-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

Section 6: TOURS, JARGEAU, PATAY

24

Hastening Very Slowly

“Meet me in Tours,” Joan had said. I checked the map to find Tours. It’s in the opposite direction from Reims, which I had assumed would be our next stop. I headed south from Orléans to Tours. I noticed on the map that it was not all that far from Chinon. I began to feel we were going around in a circle.

Still, Tours today is a great place to visit. It’s even known as the Garden of France.” The people of Tours are credited with speaking the purest form of the French language in all of France. There are chateaux and castles in every direction. It was once the capital of France, but long before that it was home to the Gauls and later the Romans. It gets its name from the Gallic tribe of Turones. It was in Tours in 732 AD that Charles Martel stopped the tide of northward conquests by defeating the Islamic forces. Tours is as far as they got in their push north from Spain.

Tours is also the place where the Dauphin’s mistress, Agnes Sorelle, is buried. Her beautiful tomb has been moved from the church to one of the towers of the castle.

The dominant currency of Joan’s time, the livre tournois (the Tours pound), originated here, too.

I headed toward the great Cathedral of St Gatien, as Joan usually met me in cathedrals when possible. I passed the cedar tree that Napoleon Bonaparte had planted here and gazed up—and up—at the towering western front of the cathedral. The cathedral was here in Joan’s day, and I tried to imagine what it must have looked like to her. The lowest stages of the two towers would have been there, but the flamboyant upper sections were added some time later in the fifteenth century.

The site had been occupied by a chapel and a basilica and had been destroyed and rebuilt several times. An earlier cathedral had been burnt down in 1166 during a quarrel between—you guessed it—the English King Henry II and the French King Louis VII. The present-day cathedral was begun in 1170 and has been added to repeatedly over the centuries.

I sat in the back row of the cathedral and studied the stained-glass windows. They are among the most beautiful in France and date from medieval times. In one window, St Martin is shown reluctantly becoming the second Bishop of Tours. That is certainly the face of an unhappy man. Was the realism intended? No way of knowing. I was suddenly glad to be so unexpectedly in Tours. Reims could wait. I was enjoying the detour.

Joan, however, was not, as I was soon to learn. I heard her voice before she appeared beside me.

“I see you like the place,” she commented without greeting.

“I do, but why did you come here? Surely the thing to do after the victory at Orléans would be to crown the king in Reims.”

“Yes, that was my urgent desire at the time. I had to wait a while ‘til my wound healed, and then I went to meet up with the Dauphin.

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