Southwest from Mâcon, scarce thirty kilometres away, is a romantic little corner of old France known to the French themselves—those who know it at all—as the Pays de Lamartine. The little townlets of Milly and Saint-Pont were the cradle and the refuge of Lamartine, who so loved this part of France extending from the Loire to Lac Leman and the Alps.
CHATEAU DE LAMARTINE
The political world of the capital, into whose vortex the great litterateur was irresistibly drawn, had not a tithe of the effect upon his character as compared with that evoked by the solitudes of his Burgundian patrie and his Alpes de Chambéry.
Milly, here in the midst of the opulent plains and hillsides of Burgundy, is a spot so calm and so simply environed that one can not but feel somewhat of the inspiration of the man who called it his “chère maison.”
A half a dozen kilometres from Milly is Saint-Pont surrounded by a magnificent framing of rounded summits forming one of those grandiose landscapes of which Lamartine so often wrote:
“Oui, l’homme est trop petit, ce spectacle l’écrase.”