Motor-Flight Through France

VI. In Auvergne

VI IN AUVERGNE AT last we were really in Auvergne. On our balcony at Royat, just under the flank of the Puy de Dome, we found ourselves in close communion with its tossed heights, its black towns, its threatening castles. And Royat itself-even the dull new watering-place quarter -is extremely characteristic of the region: hanging in a cleft of the great volcanic upheaval, with hotels, villas, gardens, vineyards clutching precariously at every ledge and fissure, as though just arrested in their descent on the roofs of Clermont. As a watering-place Royat is not an ornamental specimen of its class; and it has the farther disadvantage of being connected with Clermont by a long dusty suburb, noisy with tram-cars; but as a centre for excursions it offers its good hotels and "modern conveniences" at [56 ] IN AUVERGNE the precise spot most favourable to the motorist, who may radiate from it upon almost every centre of interest in Auvergne, and return at night to digestible food and clean beds-two requisites for which, in central France, one is often doomed to pIlle. Auvergne, one of the most interesting, and hitherto almost the least known, of the old French provinces, offers two distinct and equally striking sides to the appreciative traveller: on the one hand, its remarkably individual church architecture , and on the other, the no less personal character of its landscape. Almost all its towns are distinguished by one of those ancient swarthy churches, with western narthex, great central tower, and curious incrustations of polychrome lava, which marked, in Auvergne, as strongly distinctive an architectural impulse as flowered, on a vastly larger scale, and a century or more later, in the Gothic of the Ile de France. A(~d the towns surrounding these churches, on the crest or flank of one of the volcanic eminences springing from the plain-the towns themselves, with their narrow perpendicular streets and tall black houses, are so darkly individual, so piainly akin [57 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE to the fierce predatory castles on the neighbouring hills, that one is arrested at every tum by the desire to follow up the obscure threads of history connecting them with this little-known portion of the rich French past. But to the traveller restricted by time, the other side of the picture-its background, rather, of tormented blue peaks and wide-spread forest -which must assert itself, at all seasons, quite as distinctively as the historic and architectural character of the towns, is likely, in May, to carry off the victory. We had come, at any rate, with the modest purpose of taking a mere bird's-eye view of the region, such a flight across the scene as draws one back, later, to brood and hover; and our sight of the landscape from the Royat balcony confirmed us in the resolve to throw as sweeping a glance as possible, and defer the study of details to our next-our already-projected!visit . The following morning, therefore, we set out early for the heart of the Monts Dore. Our road carried us southward, along a series of ridges above the wide Allier vale, and then up and down, over wild volcanic hills, now densely [58 ] IN AUVERGNE wooded, now desolately bare. We were on the road to Issoire and La Chaise Dieu, two of the most notable old towns of southern Auvergne; but, in pursuit of scenery, we reluctantly turned off at the village of Coudes, at the mouth of a lateral valley, and struck up toward the western passes which lead to the Pic de Sancy. Some miles up this valley, which follows the capricious windings of the Couzes, lie the baths of Saint Nectaire-Ie-Bas, romantically planted in a narrow defile, beneath the pyramidal Romanesque church which the higher-lying original village lifts up on a steep splinter of rock. The landscape beyond Saint Nectaire grows more rugged and Alpine in character: the pastures have a Swiss look, and the shaggy mountain-sides are clothed with a northern growth of beech and pine. Presently, at a turn of the road, we came on the little crater-lake of Chambon, its vivid blueness set in the greenest of meadows, and overhung by the dark basalt cliff which carries on its summit the fortified castle of Murols. The situation of Murols, lifted on its shaft of rock above that lonely upland...