by Henry James

“ Women, indeed, are not priests; but priests are, more or less; women. They are not in the army, it may be said; but then they are the army. They are very formidable. In France one must count with the women. The drive back from Langeais to Tours was long, slow, cold; we had an occasional spatter of rain. But the road passes most of the way close to the Loire, and there was something in our jog-trot through the darkening land, beside the flowing, river, which it was very possible to enjoy. ”

“ It is true that at Langeais there is no great occasion to indulge in the tourist's weakness of dawdling; for the apartments, though they contain many curious odds and ends of, antiquity, are not of first-rate interest. They are cold and musty, indeed, with that touching smell of old furniture, as all apartments should be through which the insatiate American wanders in the rear of a bored domestic, pausing to stare at a faded tapestry or to read the name on the frame of some simpering portrait. ”

“ It rises, massive and perpendicular, out of the centre of the village to which it gives its name, and which it entirely dominates; so that, as you stand before it, in the crooked and empty street, there is no resource for you but to stare up at its heavy overhanging cornice and at the huge towers surmounted with extinguishers of slate. If you follow this street to the end, however, you encounter in abundance the usual embellishments of a French village: little ponds or tanks, with women on their knees on the brink, pounding and thumping a lump of saturated linen ”