In the Truffle Country It is, of course, the road.
It is pleasant to come across a town with so gay a name, and it is only right that one of its inhabitants should have caught the spirit of the thing and called his chophouse the roastery of the black truffle, the fame of the whole province, that simple fruit of the earth which is now so expensive that most people only know it in potted crumbs. These things sometimes happen to you in France—but all the same it is that'road that makes the place. It winds and turns in the most serpentine manner most of the way from Angouleme to Perigueux and from Perigueux to Brive: and worse still if you come up from the south, from Cahors and Rocamadour and Souillac. You drive through an endless forest of oak and beech, over and round little hills, always twisting, always slowing down, always cautiously putting on a furtive spurt. There is not a dull yard in it.
It is a drive unlike any other I know in France, though it runs through Perigord itself, than which no part could be more purely French. It is little known to the tourist at large because it is mercifully off the roads to Biarritz and the Riviera. You have it to yourself as you might have before the War. That is its superlative charm, that and the friendly-smelling woods and, of course, Brive la Gaillarde which awaits you in the heart of it all, complete with roastery and, past doubt, joviality such as you must go to France to find.
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