Below Nantes the Loire estuary has turned the surrounding country into a little Holland, where fisherfolk and their boats, with sails of red and blue, form charming symphonies of pale colour. In the _cabarets_ along its shores there is a strange medley of peasants, sea-farers, and fisher men and women. Not so cosmopolitan a crew as one sees in the harbourside _cabarets_ at Marseilles, or even Le Havre, but sufficiently strange to be a fascination to one who has just come down from the headwaters. The "Section Maritime," from Nantes to the sea, is a matter of some sixty kilometres. Here the boats increase in number and size. They are known as _gabares_, _chalands_, and _alléges_, and go down with the river-current and return on the incoming ebb, for here the river is tidal. Gray and green is the aspect at the Loire's source, and green and gray it still is, though of a decidedly different colour-value, at St. Nazaire, below Nantes, the real deep-water port of the Loire. By this time the river has amplified into a broad estuary which is lost in the incoming and outgoing tides of the Bay of Biscay. For nearly a thousand kilometres the Loire has wound its way gently and broadly through rocky escarpments, fertile plains, populous and luxurious towns,--all of it historic ground,--by stately châteaux and through vineyards and fruit orchards, with a placid grandeur. Now it becomes more or less prosaic and matter-of-fact, though in a way no less interesting, as it takes on some of the attributes of the outside world. This outline, then, approximates somewhat a portrait of the Loire. It is the result of many pilgrimages enthusiastically undertaken; a long contemplation of the charms of perhaps the most beautiful river in France, from its source to its mouth, at all seasons of the year. The riches and curios of the cities along its banks have been contemplated with pleasure, intermingled with a memory of many stirring scenes of the past, but it is its châteaux that make it famous. The story of the châteaux has been told before in hundreds of volumes, but only a personal view of them will bring home to one the manners and customs of one of the most luxurious periods of life in the France of other days. CHAPTER II. THE ORLÉANNAIS Of the many travelled English and Americans who go to Paris, how few visit the Loire valley with its glorious array of mediæval and Renaissance châteaux. No part of France, except Paris, is so accessible, and none is so comfortably travelled, whether by road or by rail. At Orleans one is at the very gateway of this splendid, bountiful region, the lower valley of the Loire. Here the river first takes on a complexion which previously it had lacked, for it is only when the Loire becomes the boundary-line between the north and the south that one comes to realize its full importance.