"What makes the Loire most picturesque and grandiose

is this immense limestone wall, interwoven with sandstone, millstone, and potter’s clay,

which borders and encloses its right bank, unfolding before the eye from Blois to Tours

with an inexpressible variety and cheerfulness—

now a wild rock, now an English garden,

clad in trees and flowers, crowned with ripening vines and smoking chimneys,

pierced like a sponge, inhabited like an anthill."

Victor Hugo