NORTH-WESTERN FRA.NCE.*
THERE are those—and they have the true spirit of a traveller —who can be happy for hours reading a guide-book, or planning journeys with the help of a Continental Bradshaw. It is not among them that the personally conducted tour finds its willing victims; if they are reduced to this way of seeing the world, it is faute de mieux, and for the sake of cheapness. Their spirits are independent ; they have also more curiosity about foreign lands than can be satisfied by a few days' stay in principal towns. Such bare sight-seeing does not satisfy their imagination.
It always seems as if Mr. Hare's guide-books were written chiefly for the delight of minds like these. As most people know, they are like M. Joanne's valuable books in following lines of road or railway, and pointing out the objects of interest, far and near, on each side of the track. They are inferior to the Guides Joanne in lightness and portableness, in maps, and in practical details ; they are superior in in- tellectual interest. The extracts from many writers, English and foreign, which make Mr. Hare's pages so attractive, could not possibly be contained in an ordinary pocket volume, and a book of this size is a rather serious addition to a traveller's knapsack. Still, after reading Mr. Hare at one's own fireside, one wants him all the more as a travelling companion, and we therefore venture to suggest that North-Western France might very well be republished in two conveniently thin books, to deal, roughly speaking, with Normandy and Brittany separately, including those parts of frontier provinces with which the present volume is also concerned.
Of the quarters into which Mr. Hare has divided France, this last one is perhaps the most important and the most interesting, certainly the most familiar to English people. The peculiar character and the special beauties of Normandy and Brittany are known to us all ; ease of access, historical association, connection by blood, however long ago; every- thing attracts the native of England to the country across the Channel, whose Dukes were once his Kings, and the native of Ireland or Wales to that mysterious province of his own race, where old religion and legend have left traces so strangely marked and vivid, among the characteristics of whose people—their sadness, their poetry—he recognises those of his forefathers, and feels himself more or less at home. The Norman farmer among his apple-orchards, grown rich on cider-making, comfortably conscious of a good balance at the bank, seems like a person to be envied by his English brother, and yet he is not any more contented. Mr. Hare quotes the answer he generally makes when asked about his apple season "Pour une armee oh il n'y a pas de pommes, il y a des pommes ; mais pour une annee oii ii y a des pommes, il n'y a pas de pommes ! " And still the Breton imagination, like the Irish, lives in the invisible. The Breton may sometimes be as mercenary and worldly as the Norman, but the dreamy melancholy of the Celt is behind all, and religion, even if it be not much more than superstition, is his ruling power. Renan himself in his best moments " nageait en plein reve." Even such an intellect as his could not quite free itself from the influence of race, or from that of the wild romantic nature of Brittany.
In reading through Mr. Hare's new volume, we are reminded of much already known, and introduced to many a wonderful old church with miraculous history and beautiful architecture, hidden away from the beaten track,—many a famous old town or village fallen from former greatness, many a splendid château, ruined in the Revolution, or still inhabited, perhaps, by one of those old families which are the salt of France, and might be her salvation; many a remote battle-field of wars that only historians and students of country tradition take the trouble to remember. All this part of France—Nor- mandy, Brittany, and their environs—is especially rich in architecture and in history. From the Gare Saint-Lazare or Montparnasse, one travels through districts full of delight to those who care about such things. Mr. Hare says a word of warning, by-the-by, as to the "great distance" of the Gare Montparnasse "from the hotels usually frequented by Eng- lish visitors." Ile might have added that a drive in the early morning from the Gare du Nord across Paris to Montparnasse is so full of beauty, interest, and amusement, that a traveller
• North-Weetern Prance : Normandy end Brittany. By Augustus J. 0. Ihrr. 1410(1011: George Allen, is only inclined to wish it longer. As a matter of fact, it does not take much more than half an hour.
From the Gare Saint-Lazare, on the roads to Rouen and Dieppe, we may visit such places as Gisors, Gournay, Forges- les-Eaux, with its memories of "La Grande Mademoiselle," Poissy, Mantes, La Roche-Guyon, Gaillon, Les Andelys, and Château Gaillard, all, with many others, full of early Norman and French history ; the course of the Seine with its charming banks, and especially such places as Caudebec, which, from Mr. Hare's account, keeps its fascination of years ago; shrines of faith such as Jumieges, Bee, Montivilliers, of which last it would have seemed worth while to tell a fuller history. Among châteaux, there are few more interesting in France than Anet, once the magnificent toy of Diane de Poitiers, and within the walls of which she was buried. Mr. Hare says that her tomb was the only thing destroyed at Anet "by the direct act of the Revolution ; all the other devastations at Anet have been due to the ignorance or avarice of its former owners." But as these former owners were apparently persons into whose hands Anet was thrown by the Revolution, it having been partially destroyed in 1799, we do not ourselves feel inclined to clear the Revolution of blame. For the rest of Normandy, one need only mention the names of Caen, Falaise, Lisieux, Coutances, Vire, Mont Saint-Michel, Bayeux. A word might have been said for sunny and charming little Arromanches, the "Village on the Cliff" of romance.
We have now trespassed on the Montparnasse line, the " Ligne de l'Ouest," which leads to more attractive lands for some people than even Normandy with all its beauty and variety of interest. Saint-Cyr, even in its present very different state, reminds us of the seventeenth century and that most unlikeable person, Madame de Maintenon. Here Esther, composed at Maintenon, was acted before Louis XIV. by the young ladies of Saint-Cyr to his great satisfaction. The wicked wits of the time, we believe, saw in the triumph of Esther over Vashti the victory of virtue over vice, of Madame de Maintenon over Madame de Montespan. A pleasanter and nobler story is that of Port Royal. Rambonillet has many associations, mostly melancholy, and connected with fallen greatness. We pass on gladly to Chartres, to which Mr. Hare does full justice when he calls the cathedral "perhaps the most beautiful in existence." Lowell called it "the most wonderful thing in France." Long may its glorious porches remain, as they are now, "in unrestored splendour " ! Le Mans, though very interesting in its own way, and full of antiquity, pales before Chartres. A small excursion to the South brings us to the little-known town of Le Lude, distinguished by its magnificent château, built by Jean de Daillon in the fifteenth century, and afterwards well known as the residence of the courtier Comtes du Lude,—not de Lude, as a modern writer calls them, who ought to know better. In the country about Le Lade, buried among lanes and woods which sometimes suggest Devonshire, sometimes Surrey, but have a kind of medieval wildness of their own, there are châteaux, both ruined and inhabited, which make these quiet depths of Anjou and Maine strangely interesting to those who care for such relics.
The last half of the volume is chiefly given up to Brittany, and there the churches, the Calvaries —Plougastel, Saint Thegonnec—the mysterious remains of an older worship, the melancholy poetry of nature and of human life, can only be touched on in a review. Mr. Hare's pages on Brittany are as fascinating as they ought to be, which is saying a good deal, and this part of his book is specially full of interesting and suggestive quotations. Wolves, almost driven out from Anjou, are still to be found in the forests of Brittany. Paganism, of a time that makes the Druids seem children, is still repre- sented there by the Venus of Quinipily.
North-Western France is altogether a lesson which has been many times repeated to other nations, but never yet really learnt by them ; the lesson of the largeness and the variety of the strangely composite eountry now called France.
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