Auvergne

“ Just beyond the lake of Chambon the road begins to mount the long curves of the Col de Diane, the pass which leads over into the valley of Mont Dore. As we rose through bleak meadows and patches of scant woodland, the mountains of Auvergne unrolled themselves to the east in one of those lonely tossing expanses of summit and ridge and chasm that suggest the mysterious undulations of some uninhabited planet. ”

“ Historic France is there! Auvergne is Auvergne, Languedoc is only Languedoc; but Touraine is France; the most national river for Frenchmen is the Loire, which waters Touraine. For this reason we ought not to be surprised at the great number of historically noble buildings possessed by those departments which have taken the name, or derivations of the name, of the Loire. At every step we take in this land of enchantment we discover a new picture, bordered, it may be, by a river, or a tranquil lake reflecting in its liquid depths a castle with towers, and woods and sparkling waterfalls. ”

“ Thirty-one years before, he had left Auvergne for Paris, a precocious lad of eight, already so skilled in mathematics and geometry that he produced his famous treatises while still in his teens, and at the age of twenty-three was known for his abilities throughout Europe. No man dying, as he did, not yet forty years of age, has left so distinct and permanent an impress on contemporary, and on later, thought. ”

“ There is an east end, such as one hardly sees on so small a scale out of Auvergne. Here is the apse, the surrounding aisle, the apses again projecting from the aisle; and the varied outline is made yet more varied by a round turret of the same date and style thrown in among the apses. The general air is early, the work plain, the masonry simple; but the clerestory windows have pointed arches. We gaze with delight on an outline more thoroughly picturesque than we have seen for a long while, and which carries back our thoughts to a land of which all the memories are pleasing. ”

“ There was that upper valley of the Allier down which Cæsar had retreated, gathering his legions into the North, and there was that silent and menacing sky which everywhere broods over Auvergne, and even in its clearest days seems to lend the granite and the lava land a sort of doomed hardness, as though Heaven in this country commanded and did not allure. Never had I seen a landscape more mysterious than those hills, nor at the same time anything more enduring. ”

“ A Caledonian farmer, put down suddenly in the Limagne, would think himself in fairy regions; so kindly do all things come in it, so pure and excellent of their sort—in such variety, in such never-failing succession. Purple mountains, red plains, dark green woods, and a sky of pure azure—such is the combination of colours that meets the eye on first coming into Auvergne.
And yet man thrives not much in it; he remains a stunted half-civilized animal—with his black shaggy locks, his brown jacket, red sash, and enormous round beaver ”

“ I am only a poor gentleman of Auvergne, without any head for political intrigue or any hand for political matters, and were I to open that letter, I would do the business so badly, that my unaccustomed hand would betray itself. ”

“ So he saw himself—himself as an identity emerging at last from the confusion of time and place and circumstance; for there followed the public school, the joys of rivalry, the eager outrush for the boy's Ever New, the glory of scrimmage and school-boy sports, the battle royal for the little Auvergnat when taunted with the epithet "Johnny Frog" by the belligerent youth, American born, and the victorious outcome for the "foreigner"; the Auvergne blood was up, and the temperament volcanic like his native soil where subterranean heats evidence themselves in hot, out-welling waters. ”

“ Be to them ever more than I who perish sadly here.” No word has passed his pallid lips, no sound his voice has made. ’Twas but the utterance of his heart, this prayer the soldier prayed. But then? ah, then! No voice on earth e’er rang more loud and clear: “Auvergne!” he cried, “Auvergne, Auvergne! Behold! the foe is here!”
The forest echoes with the shout. Appalled his captors stand. The courage of that dauntless heart has stayed each murderous hand. A moment’s pause,—then who can tell how quick their bayonets’ thrust Reached D’Assas’ heart, and laid him there, a helpless heap of dust! ”

“ Autumn is wintry enough, sometimes, in the Haute Auvergne. The earth looks bare and hard, the chestnut-trees are all stripped of their thick foliage, and the snow has encroached half-way down the sides of the mountains. The raw north-east wind rushes howling through the passes and along the valley, carrying with it at sunrise and sunset drifting sleet and fine snow, [256] Soon it will come down thick and fast, and bury all the bushes in its white mantle. Now the herdsmen's huts are empty, and the cows are transferred to the warm stabling of the château. ”

“ In France the quality of the dinner is the first question of national importance, after the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine!
The railway takes us direct to Aurillac, chef-lieu of the Cantal, and ancient capital of Haute Auvergne. At first the scenery resembles that passed through the day before, close under the embankment, the river flowing clear and bright between green slopes, hanging chestnut-woods, and sweeps of vineyards. The earth everywhere seems soaked with claret; and this wine-red colour of the soil, contracted with the golden-leafed vine, makes a landscape of wonderful brilliance. ”

“ Travellers to Tulle this way are forced to go,
—An old high-road from Lyons to Bordeaux,—
From Tulle to Brives the swift Corrèze descends,
At Brives you’ve railway, and your trouble ends;
A little bourg La Quenille; from the height
The mountains of Auvergne are all in sight ”

“ At the bottom of the park, a handsome viaduct of arches, built of lava, spans the valley, seeming to shut Royat in from the outer world, and beyond, the valley broadens out into a wide plain, with Clermont, the capital of Auvergne, in the foreground, and beyond the city, stretching right away to Switzerland, a splendid sea (as it were) of corn and maize and vines and olives, the richest, it is said, in the whole of la belle France. ”

“ Jacques was a native of Auvergne, and a long way from his own province, for what was formerly called Auvergne, is, as you remember, Eugène, that part of the country where the departments of the Puy-de-Dôme, du Cantal, &c., are now situated, and he was then in Maine, which is at present the department of the Sarthe. The natives of Auvergne are much in the habit of travelling beyond the limits of their own province. They leave it, while very young, to make what they call their Tour of France. ”

“ The noblesse of Auvergne have the reputation of being in general ignorant and despotic. There is but little agrément or instruction to be derived from their society, for they have not the ideas of the age. In general the nobles of Auvergne, tho' great sticklers for feudality and for their privileges, and tho' they disliked the Revolution, had the good sense not to emigrate. ”

“ From the shore of the ocean right away to Auvergne there is no country which has preserved its freedom, no city, no village but has been overwhelmed by the devastating fury of these Pagans, and this has been going on for thirty years. ”

“ I hope that, when your health recovers, you will become reconciled to Auvergne: there is no spot incapable of presenting some beauty to such eyes as yours. I am now living at Rennes: my loneliness suits me fairly well. ”

“ The state of society in Auvergne, in the seventeenth century, is exhibited in a most unfavourable light. We find a brutal and unchivalrous nobility, deficient in every principle of honour, and even of common honesty, unfeeling to their dependents, discourteous to ladies, perfidious to each other. ”

“ But in France, for example, the inhabitants of Auvergne, secluded among their mountains, are undoubtedly of a purer race than the inhabitants of the plains in Southern France, where so many different races have come in contact. Well, can the women of Upper Auvergne dispute the prize with the grisette of Arles, Toulouse, or of Montpellier? These three feminine types are very distinct; they clearly point to a mixture of blood. They are not the less remarkable in the matter of beauty, and are undoubtedly superior to the women of Auvergne. ”

“ I never meet without a sort of melting curiosity those little Auvergnats who go to seek their fortunes in this great world with a small deal chest. They have little besides hope in their box, as they climb down their rocks: lucky are they if they bring it back with them!
Alas, Madame de Beaumont had not lain two years on the bank of the Tiber when I trod her natal soil in 1805; I was at but a few leagues from that Mont Dore where she had come in search of the life which she lengthened a little in order to reach Rome. Last summer, in 1838, I once more travelled through this same Auvergne. ”

“ Twelve hundred gentlemen have left Poitou alone; Auvergne, Limousin, and ten other provinces have been equally depopulated of their landowners. There are towns in which nobody remains but common workmen, a club, and the crowd of devouring office-holders created by the Constitution. ”

“ Auvergne`, an ancient province of France, united to the crown under Louis XIII. in 1610, embracing the deps. of Puy-de-Dôme, Cantal, and part of Haute-Loire, the highlands of which separate the basin of the Loire from that of the Garonne, and contain a hardy and industrious race of people descended from the original inhabitants of Gaul; they speak a strange dialect, and supply all the water-carriers and street-sweepers of Paris.
Auxerre` (15) , an ancient city, capital of the dep. of Yonne, 90 m. SE. of Paris; has a fine cathedral in the Flamboyant style; drives a large trade in wine. ”

“ The woods are safer than the river, for the reeds are full of cached canoes. Five leagues from here is the blockhouse of Poitou, and fifteen miles beyond, that of Auvergne. We will go to-morrow to Poitou through the woods and see if all be safe. I will go with you, and I give you my word that if the Iroquois are there, Greysolon du Lhut will know it. The lady we shall leave here, and if we find that all is safe we shall come back for her. Then in the same fashion we shall advance to Auvergne, and there you must wait until you hear where their war-parties are. ”

“ Of the interval between taking the train at St.-Pierre, probably to go southward toward Bordeaux, and my waking on board the Auvergne I have as yet only such fragments of memory as one retains of dreams. Even that which stands out is shadowy, uncertain, evanescent. It is without context. No one fragment is substantial enough for me to be sure of it as pertaining to a fact.
Facts began for me anew at the instant when I opened my eyes in the cabin and saw Drinkwater shaving. ”

“ The southern provinces of France, Poitou, Saintogne, Auvergne, Perigord, Limousin, Angoumois and Guienne, received of the Romans the classic appellation of Aquitaine. This beautiful land, watered by the Garonne and Loire, whose clear and sparkling streams, flowing from vine-clad hills, stretched their silvery arms to irrigate the fairest fields and to enclose the finest harbors in the world, was in the twelfth century, inhabited by the most civilized and polished people on the face of the earth. ”

“ How greatly one would like to know what the men in medieval days thought of the volcanic phenomena of Auvergne and the Velay and the Vivarais. Possibly enough they did not give a thought to them, any more than does the peasant of to-day. But the baron who built his castle on the top of a rock compiled of basaltic prisms thick-set as reeds by a river side, the builders of churches who exploited these naturally faced columns—did they never ask how these came into existence, what their origin was? ”

“ Some leagues before this he had bid good-by to the beautiful district of Limagne, which had charmed him by its sea of verdure, it's deep golden foliage, and its rich and fertile plains. This was the first canton of France which was considered worthy of a particular description, and it was of this part of l'Auvergne that Apollo Lidoine said: "It is so beautiful that strangers who go there cannot leave it, and there have even then instances of persons forgetting their own country when there." ”

“ The western slopes of the Central Highlands receive a greater rainfall and possess a more durable pasturage and a more dense population than the eastern. Auvergne is celebrated as the home of sharp cattle merchants, as well as of the peddlers of France. The central plateau has been aptly termed, by the French, a 'pole of divergence/ from which the population migrate in all directions, but especially toward the northern plains, within which lies the pole of attraction. ”

“ Valençay, September 22, 1840.—M. and Madame de Castellane arrived here yesterday from their native Auvergne, which seems by no means a pleasant district in which to live. There are no high-roads to their residence, but only badly made paths, which must be traversed in a litter or on horseback. The snow is already upon their mountains, where there are no trees and no cultivation, nothing but grass for the cattle; there is no fruit and no vegetables, no game, and no doctor within easy reach. ”

“ Some parts of Auvergne are very picturesque, but not on this side; the mountains are too round and their summits too flat and bare; there is no fine expanse of water, and the whole outlook is most monotonous. The ruins of the old castle of Aubijou alone give a little character to the countryside ”