Town Plan No. 28.—Roanne.
La Pacaudière is a picturesque village, with a conspicuously attractive old house on the left, having a steeply pitched turreted roof of dark brown tiles, and a carved stone doorway of the sixteenth century. One notices the gradual disappearance of the low-pitched roof as one goes northwards.
La Palisse is a picturesque town on the pretty River Bèbre. The turreted château on the right above the road and river dates from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, and has a Flamboyant Gothic chapel, containing the tombs of the family of Chabannes. Jacques de Chabannes, often called La Palisse, became Marshal of France, and was killed at the Battle of Pavia in 1525.
The road crosses the river opposite the château, and then goes out of the village westwards along a beautiful road, bordered by tall and stately poplars, standing like rows of pillars on the short, close-growing turf on each side of the way. Small flocks of sheep, feeding on the roadside grass, and tended by girls, who fill up their time with industrious knitting, are often passed.
All the low-pitched roofs have been left behind, and the villages are picturesque with thatch and weather-worn tiles and little hipped dormers. The country is slightly undulating and green, and to the south the strangely shaped peaks of the volcanic mountains of the Auvergne group are seldom out of sight.
Farther on one reaches the shallow depression in which, on sunny days, the River Allier sparkles between its low banks.
The men of this part of the centre of France wear black felt hats and blue smocks, and have side-whiskers and clean-shaven lips and chins, after the fashion of the peasants of Normandy.
Varennes-sur-Allier is a quietly picturesque little town, with many old roofs and overhanging eaves, supported with wooden brackets.