Here life goes on gaily and in animated fashion, in a hundred dignified and picturesque old towns, and the wise traveller will go a-hunting after those which the guide-books complain of—not without a sneer—as being dull and desultory. French, and for that matter the new régime of English, historical novelists are too obstinately bent on the study of Paris, "At all events," says Edmund Gosse, "since the days of Balzac and George Sand, and have neglected the provincial boroughs."
They should study mid-France on the spot; and read Stevenson and Mérimée while they are doing it. It will save them a deal of worrying out of things—with possibly wrong deductions—for themselves.
The climatic conditions of France vary greatly. From the gray, wind-blown shores of Brittany, where for quite three months of the autumn one is in a perpetual drizzle, and the equally chilly and bare country of the Pas de Calais, and the more or less sodden French Flanders, to the brisk, sunny climate of the Loire valley, the Cevennes, Dauphiné, and Savoie, is a wide range of contrast. Each is possessed of its own peculiar characteristics, which the habitant alone seems to understand in all its vagaries. At all events, there is no part of France which actually merits the opprobrious deprecations which are occasionally launched forth by the residents of the "garden spot of England," who see no topographical beauties save in their own wealds and downs.
France is distinctly a self-contained land. Its tillers of the soil, be they mere agriculturists or workers in the vineyards, are of a race as devoted and capable at their avocations as any alive.
They do not, to be sure, eat meat three times a day—and often not once a week—but they thrive and gain strength on what many an English-speaking labourer would consider but a mere snack.
Again, the French peasant is not, like the English labourer, perpetually reminded, by the independence of the wealth surrounding him, of his own privations and dependence. On the contrary, he enjoys contentment with a consciousness that no human intervention embitters his condition, and that its limits are only fixed by the bounds of nature, and somewhat by his own industry.
Thus it is easy to inculcate in such a people somewhat more of that spirit of "l'amour de la patrie," or love of the land, which in England, at the present time, appears to be growing beautifully less.
So, too, with love and honour for their famous citizens, the French are enthusiastic, beyond any other peoples, for their monuments, their institutions, and above all for their own province and department.
With regard to their architectural monuments, still more are they proud and well-informed, even the labouring classes. Seldom, if ever, has the writer made an inquiry but what it was answered with interest, if not with a superlative intelligence, and the Frenchman of the lower classes—be he a labourer of the towns or cities, or a peasant of the country-side—is a remarkably obliging person.
In what may strictly be called the south of France, that region bordering along the Mediterranean, Provence, and the southerly portion of Languedoc, one is manifestly environed with a mellowness and brilliance of sky and atmosphere only to be noted in a sub-tropical land, a feature which finds further expression in most of the attributes of local life.