Provinces.
Districts.
Local Climates.
I have dwelt somewhat disproportionately on this contrast, because I know the country well. It is offered to the reader merely as one example out of many. I am told by those who know other parts of France familiarly that contrasts equivalent to this are to be found in various other regions and districts of that extensive country. There are three ways of dividing France, into departments, provinces, and districts. The departments, although taking their names from physical geography, as a help to the memory for locality, are in reality nothing more than artificial divisions for administrative convenience. The provinces (Burgundy, Normandy, Guienne, etc.) are convenient in another way, because of their connection with history, and also because it is believed still that the population of each province has a character of its own. Districts, though without any definite political or historical character, and often with rather vaguely defined limits, are useful in fixing local characteristics in the mind. Only local antiquaries could enlighten us about their obscure history; but one thing is always noticeable about them which is that the characteristics of each district are of a special nature. For example, the Morvan is a land of hills, woods, and streams; the Sologne is a woody plain, perfectly flat and interspersed with sandy pools and marshes; Les Dombes are an insalubrious region, full of fish-ponds; and Rouergue (in Guienne) is a land of hills and streams, like the Morvan, but with greater altitudes and wilder scenery. The population of each of these districts takes a certain character from the nature of its surroundings and from the local climate, which in one place may be dry, in another rainy, in one very equable and mild, in another extreme in heat and cold. Even within a distance of fifteen or twenty miles you discover, from the meteorological registers kept by the road surveyors, that twice as much rain falls in one village as in another. You have the wet and woody regions, the arid, hot, rocky regions, the lands of pasture and meadow, the vine lands, the country of extinct volcanoes, the peat morasses, the unprofitable sand countries by the sea where only the maritime pine can resist the invasion of sterility.
The Spirit of Towns.
An Aristocratic Centre.
A Commercial Town.
Then there is the spirit of towns; each town has a certain individuality, each has a spirit of its own derived from its historic past, and from its occupations in the present. One town may be a clerical and aristocratic little centre, where a republican (even under the Republic) has not the faintest chance of getting into society; a place where all public functionaries under the Government are socially boycotted; a place where all modern ideas are quietly ignored or despised, where reputations have no currency, and nothing is valued but conformity to a narrow local standard of the comme il faut. Thirty miles away, there is, perhaps, a busy commercial town, where all ideas are centred upon a pecuniary success, and people are esteemed exactly in proportion to their capital without regard to other considerations,—a town where all the fortunes are recent, and all have been acquired in trade.
Extremes in the same Place.
Nîmes.