The church of Nantua is worth a visit. It has a good Romanesque façade, carved with the usual energy and freedom of the Burgundy school; but the capitals are mutilated, as is the tympanum at the first order of the arch. The interior is in the usual Burgundian style. The nave has square pillars with engaged vaulting shafts; but the original ceiling has been replaced by a thirteenth-century ribbed vault, springing from corbel-capitals at the same height as the vaulting shafts. The thrust of the vaults has forced the pillars outwards both ways, and flying buttresses of a very substantial kind have been built to hold the church together. The tower, of later date than the body of the church, is the best in the district. Other points worth noticing are the barrel-vaulted transept, the primitive vaulting of the ceiling, the frescoes in the choir, and the westward slope of the floor.
[CHAPTER XX]
Our strongest impression of Bourg en Bresse—apart from its associations with the Eglise de Brou—was that it brought us almost within hail of the beloved Midi. As at Mâcon, the sun, when it shone, was aggressive. You welcomed the sight of leafy plane trees, you hugged the shady side of the road. Good peaches were to be had for a sou la pièce; and the cattle wore hats—red and yellow tassels and elaborate string fly-protectors bound about their foreheads. These things are full of significance for one who has seen the south.
Another memory is the ill-manners of the townspeople. The attentions of the folk at Paray were but neglect when compared with the fixed stare of Bourg. One delinquent was so absorbed in us that he nearly wrecked his motor in the open street: another fell down the hotel stairs; there were three cases of abrasion. The fact that these victims had obviously not forgotten the "convenances," only made more striking their failure to observe them. They appeared to have no control over certain faculties. Both sexes had forgotten how to blush. They wrought me to anger, and my wife to tears.
But such trifles, after all, are merely the "petit désagréments" of travel—remembered only with a smile; relics of primitivism, such as was the service de la gare—omnibuses still running, not so much as varnished since the French Revolution.