Motor-Flight Through France

II. Poitiers to the Pyrenees

II POITIERS TO THE PYRENEES T HE road from Poitiers to Angouleme carries one through a country rolling and various in line-a country with a dash of Normandy in it, but facing south instead of west. The villages are fewer than in Normandy, and make less mark in the landscape; but the way passes through two drowsy little towns, Civray and Ruffec, each distinguished by the possession of an important church of the typical Romanesque of Poitou. That at Civray, in particular, is remarkable enough to form the object of a special pilgrimage, and to find it precisely in one's path seemed part of the general brightness of the day. Here again are the sculptured archivolt and the rich imagery of Poitiers-one strange mutilated figure of a headless horseman dominating the front from the great arcade above the doorway, as at the church of the Sainte Croix [95 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE in Bordeaux; but the fa~ade of Civray is astonishingly topped by fifteenth-century machicolations , which somehow, in spite of their later date, give it an air of greater age, of reaching back to a wild warring past. Angouleme, set on a promontory between Charente and Anguienne, commands to the north, south and east a vast circuit of meadowy and woody undulations. The interior of the town struck one as dull, and without characteristic detail; but on the front of the twelfthcentury cath~dral, perched near the ledge of the cliff above the Anguienne, detail abounds as profusely as on the fa~ade of Notre Dame at Poitiers. It is, however, so much less subordinate to the general conception that one remembers rather the garlanding of archivolts, the clustering of figures in countless niches and arcades, than the fundamental lines which should serve to bind them together; and the interior, roofed with cupolas after the manner of Saint Hilaire of Poitiers, is singularly stark and barren looking. But when one has paid due tribute to the cathedral one is called on, from its doorway, to [96 ] POITIERS '1'0 THE PYRENEES recognize Angouleme's other striking distinction : its splendid natural site, and the way in which art has used and made the most of it. Starting from a long leafy COUTS with private hotels, a great avenue curves about the whole length of the walls, breaking midway into a terrace boldly hung above the valley, and ending in another leafyplace, beneath which the slope of the hill has been skilfully transformed into a public garden. Angouleme now thrives on the manufacture of paper, and may therefore conceivably permit herself such civic adornments; but how of the many small hill-towns of France-such as Laon or Thiers, for instance--which apparently have only their past glory to subsist on, yet manage to lead up the admiring pilgrim by way of these sweeping approaches, encircling terraces and symmetrically planted esplanades? One can only salute once again the invincible French passion for form and fitness, and conclude that towns as well as nations somehow always manage to give themselves what they regard as essential, and that happy is the race to whom these things are the essentials. On leaving Angouleme that afternoon we saw [97 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE the first cypresses and the first almond blossoms. We were in the south at last; not the hot delicately pencilled Mediterranean south, which has always a hint of the East in it, but the temperate Aquitanian midi cooled by the gulf of Gascony. As one nears Bordeaux the country grows less broken, the horizon-line Hatter; but there is one really noble impression, when, from the bridge of Saint Andre de Cubzac, one looks out on the lordly sweep of the Dordogne, just before it merges its waters with the Garonne to form the great estuary of the Gironde. Soon after comes an endless dusty faubourg, then the long stone bridge over the Garonne, and the proud riverfront of Bordeaux-a screen of eighteenth-century buildings stretched along thecrescent-shaped quay. Bordeaux, thus approached, has indeed, as the guide-book says, fort grand air; and again one returns thanks to the motor, which almost always, avoiding the mean purlieus of the railway station, gives one these romantic or stately first impressions. This river-front of Bordeaux is really little more than the architectural screen, a street or two deep, of a bustling, bright but...