Motor-Flight Through France

V. Nohant to Clermont

v NOHANT TO CLERMONT T HERE happened to us, on leaving Nohant, what had happened after Beauvais: the quiet country house by the roadside, like the mighty Gothic choir, possessed our thoughts to the exclusion of other impressions. As far as La Chatre, indeed-the little town on the Indre, where young Madame Dudevant spent a winter to further her husband's political ambitions-we were still within the Nohant radius; and it was along the straight road we were travelling that poor old :Madame Dupin de Francueil-si douillette that she could hardly make the round of the garden-fled in her high-heeled slippers on the fatal night when her son, returning from a gay supper at La Chatre, was flung from his horse and killed at the entrance to the town. These scenes from the H istoire de rna vie are so vivid, they live so poignantly in memory, that in re- [ 48] NOHANT TO CLERMONT living them on the spot one feels, with Goncourt, how great their writer would have been had her intrepid pen more often remained dans le VTat. La Chatre is a charming town, with a remarkably picturesque approach, on the Nohant side, across an old bridge out of which an old house, with a steep terraced garden, seems to grow with the conscious pleasure of well-grouped masonry: and the streets beyond have an air of ripe experience tempered by gaiety, like that of those ironic old eighteenth-century faces wherein the wrinkles are as gay as dimples. Southward from La Chatre, the road runs through a beautiful hilly country to l\fontluyon on the Cher: a fine old border town, with a brave fighting past, and interesting relics of Bourbon ascendancy; but now deeply disfigured by hideous factories and long grimy streets of operatives ' houses. In deploring the ravages of modern industry on one of these rare old towns, it is hard to remember that they are not museum pieces, but settlements of human beings with all the normal desire to prosper at whatever cost to the physiognomy of their birthplace; and Montluyon [49 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE in especial seems to have been a very pelican to the greed of her offspring. We had meant to spend the night there, but there was a grimness about the inn-the special grimness of which the commercial travellers' hotel in the French manufacturing town holds the depressing secret-that forbade even a glance at the bedrooms; and though it was near sunset we pressed on for Vichy. We had, in consequence, but a cold twilight glimpse of the fine gorge of Montaigut, through which the road cuts its way to Gannat, the first town to the north of the Limagne; and night had set in when we traversed the plain of the Allier. On good French roads, however, a motor-journey by night is not without its compensations; and our dark flight through mysterious fields and woods terminated, effectively enough, with the long descent down a lamp-garlanded boulevard into the inanimate white watering-place. Vichy, in fact, had barely opened the shutters of its fashionable hotels: the season does not begin till June, and in May only a few premature bathers-mostly English-shiver in corners of the marble halls, or disconsolately peruse last year's [50 ] CLERMONT·FERRAND: NOTRE·DAME DU PORT NOHANT TO CLERMONT news in the deserted reading-rooms. But even in this semi-chrysalis stage the town presented itself, the next morning, as that rarest of spectacles -grace triumphant over the processes of the toilet. Only a pretty woman and a French ville d'eau can look really charming in morning dishabille; and the way in which Vichy accomplishes the feat would be a lesson to many pretty women. The place, at all seasons, is an object-lesson to less enlightened municipalities; and when one finds one's self vainly wishing that art and history , and all the rich tapestry of the past, might somehow be brought before the eyes of our selfsufficient millions, one might pause to ask if the sight of a well-kept, self-respecting French town, carefully and artistically planned as a setting to the amenities of life, would not, after all, offer the more salutary and surprising example . Vichy, even among French towns, stands out as a...