First and Last

by Hilaire Belloc

Thus one may note how very different is Europe seen from the water than seen from any other opportunity for travel. So many of the great cathedrals were built to dominate men who should watch them from the wharves of the mediaeval towns, but I think it is almost a rule if you have leisure and can take your choice to choose this kind of entry to them. Amiens is quite a different thing seen from the river below it to the north and east from what it is seen by a gradual approach along the street of a modern town. The roofs climb up at it, and it stands enthroned. So Chartres seen from the little Eure; but the Eure is so small a river that he would be a bold man who would travel up it all this way. Nevertheless it is a good piece of travel, and anyone who will undertake it will see Louviers and will pass Anet, where the greatest work of the Renaissance once stood, and will go through lonely but rich pastures until at last he gets to Chartres by the right gate. Thence he will see something astonishing for so flat a region as the Beauce. The great church seems mountainous upon a mountain. Its apse completes the unclimbable steepness of the hill and its buttresses follow the lines of the fall of it. But if you do not come in by the river, at least come in by the Orleans road. I suppose that nine people out of ten, even to-day when the roads are in proper use again, come into Chartres by that northern railway entry, which is for all the world like coming into a great house by a big, neglected backyard.

Then if ever you have business that takes you to Bayonne, come in by river and from the sea, and how well you will understand the little town and its lovely northern Gothic!

Some of the great churches all the world knows must be seen from the water, and most of the world so sees them. Ely is one, Cologne is another, but how many people have looked right up at Durham as at a cliff from that gorge below, or how many have seen the height of Albi from the Tarn?

As for famous cities with their walls, there is no doubt that a man should approach them by the chief high road, which once linked them with their capital, or with their nearest port, or with Rome—and that although this kind of entry is nowadays often marred by ugly suburbs. You will get much your finest sight of Segovia as you come in by the road from the Guadarama and from Madrid. It is from that point that you were meant to see the town, and you will get much your best grip on Carcassonne, old Carcassonne, if you come in by the road from Toulouse at morning as you were meant to come, and so Coucy should be approached by that royal road from Soissons and from the south, while as for Laon (the most famous of the hill towns), come to it from the east, for it looks eastward, and its lords were Eastern lords.

Ranges of hills, I think, are never best first seen from railways. Indeed, I can remember no great sight of hills so seen, not even the Alps. A railway must of necessity follow the floor of the valley and tunnel and creep round the shoulders of the bulwarks. There is perhaps one exception to this rule, which is the sight of the Pyrenees from the train as one comes into Tarbes. It is a wise thing if you are visiting those hills to come into Tarbes by night and sleep there, and then next morning the train upon its way to Pau unfolds you all the wall of the mountains. But this is an accident. It is because the railway runs upon a sort of high platform that you see the mountains so. With all other hills that I remember it is best to have them burst suddenly upon you from the top of some pass lifted high above the level and coming, let us say, to a height half their own. Certainly the Bernese Oberland is more wonderful caught in one moment from the Jura than introduced in any other way, and the snows on Atlas over the desert seem like part of the sky when they come upon one after climbing the red rocks of the high plateaux and you see them shining over the salt marshes. The Vosges you cannot thus see from a half-height; there is no platform, and that is perhaps why the Vosges have not impressed travellers as they should. But you can so watch the grand chain of old volcanoes which are the rampart of Auvergne. You can stand upon the high wooden ridge of Foreze and see them take the morning across the mists and the flat of the Limagne, where the Gauls fought Caesar. Further south from the high table of the Velay you can see the steep backward escarpment of the Cevennes, inky blue, desperately blue, blue like nothing else on earth except the mountains in those painters of North Italy, of the parts north and east of Venice, the name of whose school escapes me—or, rather, I never knew it.

Now, as for towns that live in a hollow, it is great fun to come upon them from above. They are not used to being thus taken at a disadvantage and they are both surprised and surprising. There are many towns in holes and trenches of Europe which you can thus play “peep-bo” with if you will come at them walking. By train they will mean nothing to you. You will probably come upon them out of a long, shrieking tunnel, and by the high road they mean little more, for the high road will follow the vale. But if you come upon them from over their guardian cliffs and scars you catch them unawares, and this is a good way of approaching them, for you master them, as it were, and spy them out before you enter in. You can act thus with Grenoble and with many a town on the Meuse, and particularly with Aubusson, which lies in the depths of so dreadful a trench that I could wonder how man ever dreamt of living and building there.

The most difficult of all places on which to advise, I think, would be the very great cities, the capitals. They seem to have to-day no noble entries and no proper approach. Perhaps we shall only deal with them justly when we can circle down to them through the air and see their vast activity splashed over the plain. Anyhow, there is no proper way of entering them now that I know of. Berlin is not worth entering at all. Rome (a man told me once) could be entered by some particular road over the Janiculum, I think—which also, if I remember right, was the way that Shelley came—but I despair of Paris, and certainly of London. I cannot even recall an entry for Brussels, though Brussels is a monumental city with great rewards for those who love the combination of building and hills.

Perhaps, after all, the happiest entries of all and the most easy are those of our many market towns, small and not swollen in Britain and in Northern Gaul and in the Netherlands and in the Valley of the Rhine. These hardly ever fail us, and we come upon them in our travels as they desire that we should come, and we know them properly as things should properly be known—that is, from the beginning.

[Companions of Travel]

I write of travelling companions in general, and not in particular, making of them a composite photograph, as it were, and finding what they have in common and what is their type; and in the first place I find them to be chance men. For there are some people who cannot travel without a set companion who goes with them from Charing Cross all over the world and back to Charing Cross again. And there is a pathos in this: as Balzac said of marriage, “What a commentary on human life, that human beings must associate to endure it.” So it is with many who cannot endure to travel alone: and some will positively advertise for another to go with them.