THROUGH FRENCH WINDOWS • By David Horner
This book (Macmillan, 8s. 6d.) is really two. The first eight chapters are an account of travel in south-western France and Burgundy, supplemented by passages. of reminiscence and a few quotations from the works of previous travellers. The author displays .a Sitwellian sensibility to detail : he describes the interior of a bathroom better than a landscape or a church. On page 89 he begins a different and much better book, in which he sketches the life of a small town in the lower valley of the Rhone. The impoverished aristocrats, retired cavalry officers, lawyers, servants, and " Madame Durand at the pcitisserie where I get my chocolates," who form the cast of this plotless comedy of manners, are portrayed.with humour and an eye for character. The book would have gained in more than unity if the author had begun it with his arrival at ' Valen- tigny " ; but we may forgive him the occasional dullness and pomposity of his earlier chapters for the sake of his admirable picture of French provincial life, and the useful reminder that there still exists an educated and intelligent, if politically intransigent, upper middle class, in a country which we are a little inclined to think of as being inhabited solely by function- aries and tradesmen,
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