| The half-timbered houses and bulging stairway towers around place Plumereau, to the west of rue Nationale, have been carefully restored as the city's showpiece, particularly the Écoles des Langues Vivantes on rue Briconnet, with its wonderful sculpted dogs, drunks, frogs and monsters. West of rue Bretonneau, around place Robert-Picou, modern artisans' workshops cluster between medieval dwellings. The area has changed rapidly since the war, transformed from semi-slum to the most fashionable and expensive part of town. These days, the hordes of restaurants, bars, cafés and clubs are causing the wealthy to move out in search of quieter accommodation. Off rue Briconnet, at 7 rue du Mûrier, the Musée du Gemmail (April to mid-Oct Tues–Sun 10am–noon & 2–6pm; mid-Oct to March Sat & Sun 10am–noon & 2–6pm; €4.60) is dedicated to an obscure, locally invented modern art form that uses fragments of backlit stained glass as a medium. Although some of the works are signed by such luminaries as Dufy, Modigliani and Picasso – who was particularly enamoured of the technique – the actual execution is by professional technicians working from a design. To the south lay the pilgrim city once known as Martinopolis after St Martin, the ex-soldier who became bishop of tours in the fourth century and went on to be a key figure in the spread of Christianity through France. Among Catholics he is usually remembered for giving half his cloak to a beggar, an image repeated on capitals and in stained-glass windows all over the region. The Romanesque basilica stretched along rue des Halles from rue des Trois-Pavées-Ronds almost to place de Châteauneuf: the outline is traced out in the street, but only the north tower, the Tour de Charlemagne, and the western clock tower survived the iconoclastic Huguenot riots of 1562, along with the Cloître de St-Martin, behind rue Rapin, where you can see a single Renaissance gallery. The new Basilique de St-Martin, on rue Descartes, is a late nineteenth-century neo-Byzantine affair built to honour the relics of St Martin, rediscovered in 1860. They are now housed in the crypt, watched over by hundreds of votive prayers carved into the walls. St Martin's day, 11 November, is still celebrated.
| 
