Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/23

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

heart so aggressively upon his sleeve, emotion so transparently transient ever on the surface, subtly disguising self-interest and calculation?

For every diversity of character equal diversity of scenery—from the Alpine grandeur of the Dauphiny land to the beautiful lagoons of the Marais; the Vendean plain washed by the long blue roll of the Atlantic; Provence, land of salt lagoons and dead old cities of Greece and Rome; the central provinces, with their lovely rivers and chestnut woods; Celtic Brittany, half English; Normandy, with its glorious capital, one of the fairest of France; the radiant cities of the Loire, French river of romance; the bright and witching little kingdom of Béarn, exquisite Roussillon, with its old hum of wars and troubadour songs, its delicate sweetness of herb and leaf and bloom, its quaint old towns breathing of Spain, and its high air of legend; the east, with its mountains and dense pine forests, up to sunnier Ardennes. And the patois of these so different districts are not less distinct than the scenery, the note of town and province, and the characteristics of each race. Shelley most seriously wrote that there was nothing worth seeing in France. Even the tourist will find more to delight his eye in going from one department to another than he will find place to record in the most voluminous note-book. Let him only content himself with such a province as Touraine, with its