On the road to Chinon one passes through, or near, Huismes, which has nothing to stay one's march but a good twelfth-century church, which looks as though its doors were never opened. The Château de la Villaumère, of the fifteenth century, is near by, and of more than passing interest are the ruins of the Château de Bonneventure, built, it is said, by Charles VII. for Agnes Sorel, who, with all her faults, stands high in the esteem of most lovers of French history. At any rate this shrine of "_la belle des belles_" is worthy to rank with that containing her tomb at Loches. As one enters Chinon by road he meets with the usual steep decline into a river-valley, which separates one height from another. Generally this is the topographic formation throughout France, and Chinon, with its silent guardians, the fragments of three non-contemporary castles, all on the same site, is no exception. "We never went to Chinon," says Henry James, in his "Little Tour in France," written thirty or more years ago. "But one cannot do everything," he continues, "and I would rather have missed Chinon than Chenonceaux." A painter would have put it differently. Chenonceaux is all that fact and fancy have painted it, a gem in a perfect setting, and Chinon's three castles are but mere crumbling walls; but their environs form a _petit pays_ which will some day develop into an "artists' sketching-ground," in years to come, beside which Etretat, Moret, Pont Aven, Giverny, and Auvers will cease to be considered. At the base of the escarped rock on which sit the châteaux, or what is left of them, lies the town of Chinon, with its old houses in wood and stone and its great, gaunt, but beautiful churches. Before it flows the Vienne, one of the most romantically beautiful of all the secondary rivers of France. From the _castrum romanum_ of the emperors to the feudal conquest Chinon played its due part in the history of Touraine. There are those who claim that Chinon is a "_cité antédiluvienne_" and that it was founded by Cain, who after his crime fled from the paternal malediction and found a refuge here; and that its name, at first _Caynon_, became Chinon. Like the derivation of most ancient place-names, this claim involves a wide imagination and assuredly sounds unreasonable. _Caino_ may, with more likelihood, have been a Celtic word, meaning an excavation, and came to be adopted because of the subterranean quarries from which the stone was drawn for the building of the town. The annalists of the western empire give it as _Castrum-Caino_, and whether its origin dates from antediluvian times or not, it was a town in the very earliest days of the Christian era. The importance of Chinon's rôle in history and the beauty of its situation have inspired many writers to sing its praises. "... Chinon Petite ville, grand renom Assise sur pierre ancienne Au haute le bois, au bas la Vienne."