THE ROAD TO ANGOULÊME

Leaving Poitiers by the Route de Bordeaux, one soon reaches Vivonne, a village on the Clain, where the road goes twice to the right and then to the left, across the little River Vonne. The church passed on the left belongs to the twelfth century, and has a fine Gothic west door, with much weather-worn carving.

A change comes over the country south of Poitiers, for hedges begin to appear, and the trees are less closely trimmed. The curious sight of oxen drawing a plough with a donkey leading is sometimes to be seen.

Couhé-Vérac is a large roadside village with an uninteresting church, and no picturesqueness in its long street except the seventeenth-century market-hall, with an open wooden roof, supported by a row of stone pillars.

The road goes southwards in a straight line to Chaunay, where it bends, but on leaving the village at once resumes its straightness. The twelfth-century church at Chaunay has fine sculpture.

It is interesting to watch the way in which the houses assume a different character as one goes southwards. The roofs become very flat, and one begins to notice vines trained above doors and windows in a thoroughly Italian fashion.

The country is undulating and without distant prospects, plantations and the scattered fruit-trees closing up the views.

On passing from the department of Vienne into Charente, the direction-boards change from blue to green.

RUFFEC

is a town on a tributary of the Charente, with little charm in the street which runs straight through it; but by turning to the left along the Rue de Valence, one finds in the Rue des Petits Bancs a church with a Romanesque west front of a most ornate character. The three members of the arch of the doorway are richly sculptured; in the beautiful arcade above there remain seven statues in the twelve niches. They are time-worn and battered, and most of them have lost their heads; but they and the figure above of Christ in a vesica, with worshipping angels on either side, still show the skill of the early sculptor.

Ruffec retains some specimens of its overhanging timber-framed houses, one of them dated 1582, and the town is famed for its patties made of truffles and partridges.

Keeping a southward course, the straight stretches of road bring one to a descent to the Charente, where there is a fine view beyond the river, with the village of Mansle down below on the southern bank. On crossing the river there is a pretty view of white walls with bright green shutters, low-pitched brown roofs, and a twelfth-century church raised above the road, with large empty niches by the western door.

Outside Mansle there is a fork, where one goes to the left. The trees lining the road have their trunks covered with velvety moss, which forms a beautiful contrast to the pale blues, browns, and purply greens of the distant country.

After passing Tourriers, where there are imposing ruins of a château and a church of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, a short run brings Angoulême in sight, with the Touvre joining the Charente in the foreground.

SECTION VIII

ANGOULÊME TO BERGERAC, 84 MILES
(135 KILOMETRES)

Angoulême, like Poitiers, occupies an isolated tabular site raised above the Charente, and has beautiful views from the wide boulevards which encircle the town, where the ramparts and towers formerly stood. In medieval times the outline of the town must have been most imposing, with every tower, spire, and crenellation thrown up against the sky. To-day, although some towers have survived, there is no striking silhouette, and Angoulême has a spacious modern aspect, which even the cupolas and fantastic sculpture of its cathedral cannot alter.

The Cathedral of St. Pierre is an exceedingly interesting Romanesque-Byzantine building, begun in the eleventh century, and constructed mainly between 1110 and 1130. From 1630 to 1654 it underwent restoration, and recently Paul Abadie supervised the work which has robbed the building of some of its external picturesqueness. The western façade, however, remains, with all its carved detail, showing the ideas of the Last Judgment prevalent 800 years ago.

Beyond the interest of the Romanesque architecture of the interior, there are on the north wall of the nave some restored inscriptions coeval with the building and the tomb of Philippe de Voivre, Marquis de Ruffec and Governor of Angoulême, who was assassinated in Paris in 1585.

Adjoining the cathedral is the Évêché, built at the same time, but restored at different periods, chiefly in the fifteenth century. It was lately bought by the town, and is to be converted into a museum and library.

The Hôtel de Ville was built between 1858 and 1866 by Paul Abadie, on the site of the old castle of the counts, and into it are incorporated two of its great towers. The earlier, called le Tour Polygone, was built by Hugues IV. (le Brun), who died in 1303, and the Tour de Valois, in which Marguerite de Valois was born, is a fifteenth-century work. At the present time the museums of painting and archæology are in the ground floor of the Hôtel de Ville. They are fairly interesting.

The history of Angoulême is similar to that of Poitiers in the main events.

On leaving Angoulême the road crosses a common of almost English type, and then a good deal of woodland, until one reaches the village of Dignac, prettily situated on hilly ground, with the tower of its Romanesque church showing prominently. Then follows a wood of oaks and more common-land, succeeded by open country with wide views.

Near La Rochebeaucourt the road goes to the right, and curves downhill to a level-crossing by the railway-station adjoining the village. Close by, on the left, is the château, among trees, with circular machicolated towers and conical roofs. The Romanesque church has a fine rose-window on the south side.

Going to the right, at the cross-roads in the village, there is a pleasant run by the stream called La Belle Rivière, which the road follows almost to its source among the hills above Monsec. On approaching Mareuil-sur-Belle, the first building to be seen is the interesting château of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to the left in the marshy ground by the river. The big cylindrical towers of the gateway and the round staircase tower at the north-east corner are in excellent preservation, and so are the buildings on three sides of the courtyard; but having fallen from its dignity as a seat of one of the four baronies of Périgord, it is now an unkempt farmhouse. There are some beautifully designed doorways and windows in the courtyard, and one can look into the chapel, which is now given over to secular uses. An inscription to the memory of the troubadour Arnant de Mareuil (twelfth century) was placed over the doorway in 1903 by the Félibres of Périgord.

An old wooden cross and a stone one stand outside the church, which is not interesting.

Huge views appear at intervals as the car follows the windings of the white road, running with great smoothness on a perfect surface.[C] The peasants of the district drive to market in quaint little

donkey-carts, into which three men or women pack themselves in the quaintest fashion imaginable.

After Monsec a watershed is crossed, and there are some considerable hills, in a more or less wild state, heather and juniper growing between small oaks.

BRANTÔME

is a delightfully picturesque little place on the very attractive River Dronne. The chief interest in the town is the monastery, founded by Charlemagne about the year 769. Before that time a small religious community had inhabited the grottoes in the rocky escarpments that rise above the town. These were enlarged natural cavities, and one of them continued to be venerated all through the Middle Ages. Its walls were covered during the sixteenth century with sculptures in high relief representing the Last Judgment and the Crucifixion.

The monastic buildings now include a machicolated gateway; a Romanesque church restored by Abadie, which before the thirteenth century had two cupolas on the roof; a curiously designed tower built in the eleventh century on the rock immediately above the church; and the fifteenth-century cloisters. There are two bridges over the sparkling river, and facing one of them is the fifteenth-century parish church, a picturesque fortified building now used as a market-house. There are some interesting houses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and others of the Renaissance period, including a manor-house called La Hierse.

Quaint stone well-heads are frequently to be seen in front of the houses; the vine becomes more and more frequent, and the umbrella pine begins to appear here and there as one journeys southwards. Between Brantôme and Château-l’Évêque a light railway crosses the road half a dozen times, and keeps by the road all the way to Périgueux.

At Château-l’Évêque the very picturesque fifteenth-century castle of the Bishops of Périgueux stands out in a most attractive fashion to the right of the road just behind the village. The steep red roof rises above the square and round towers that give great dignity to the pile.

The road drops down the valley of the Beauvronne, a small tributary of the Isle, passing the village of Chancelade, where there are very extensive underground quarries. A recent collapse was the cause of several deaths.

The greater part of the abbey church, founded in 1120, dates from a restoration in 1625, but the Romanesque front remains, with the doorway half concealed by a modern porch of plaster and wood. There is also a twelfth-century chapel at the west end.

PÉRIGUEUX

The first view of the city, through an opening between steep slopes near Chancelade, is full of promise to those in search of romance. If it should happen to be a fine evening, a beautiful light gilds the great Byzantine campanile and clustered domes of the cathedral, as well as all the faces of the buildings turned towards the west, so that the river-encircled city assumes mellowed tones of creamy gold contrasted with the wooded hills overlooking it on all sides.

History.—The original prehistoric Périgueux stood on the south side of the River Isle, and it afterwards became the Gaulish city of Vesuna, the capital of the Petrocorians, whose name survives in Périgueux. When the Romans had occupied the country a new city was built on the site of the present one, and in the period of its prosperity, before the barbarian invasions swept away the Gallo-Roman civilization, the arena, the temple of Vesuna, and other surviving remains, were built.

The coming of Christianity is associated with the name of St. Front, around whose tomb an oratory was built in the sixth century. Towards the end of the tenth century an abbey arose on the site, and then, precisely as at Tours, a new town arose alongside the walled Roman cité, and the dual towns must have had somewhat the appearance of the Carcassonne of to-day. After being in rivalry for a time, the two portions of Périgueux were in 1240 united by a solemn treaty.

The Cathedral of St. Front only became the cathedral after the mutilation of St. Étienne by the Huguenots. It is a most remarkable building, in the form of a Greek cross, roofed with five huge domes. The similarity of the plan to that of St. Mark’s at Venice has suggested that it was copied from that building, with which it is generally regarded as contemporary, although a considerable conflict of opinion has taken place as to its exact age.

At the west end of the domical building there is a roofless structure consisting of three naves, and whether it is the earlier of the two still remains in doubt. Félix de Verneilh, a distinguished archæologist, holds that the domed building was begun in 984, and consecrated in 1047, and that the roofless church goes back as far as Merovingian times (fifth and sixth centuries); but latterly there has been a tendency to date the complete building between 1125 and 1150, and to regard the ruined structure as the one consecrated in 1047, and burnt in 1120.

The restoration has been so wholesale that, were it not for the domes and the impressiveness of the colossal square piers, the interior would be too bald and bare to be interesting. The arches are only slightly pointed, and this building is, perhaps, the birthplace of French Gothic. The tower is one of the very earliest, if not the only Byzantine campanile in France, while the apse is quite modern.

The Bishop’s offices are above the cloisters of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, and, since the demolition of 1903, are all that remains of the monastery. The site is now an open space, forming a broad terrace, which gives a delightful view of the river and the wooded hills, and to a town with so many narrow streets as this it must be a boon to the inhabitants.

A walk through the old streets of the episcopal town, especially the Rues Limogeaune and Aubergerie, reveals some fine domestic architecture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and there are some old houses defended with machicolation on the quay by the Pont Vieux. The Tour Mataquerre, of the fourteenth century, is a part of the ramparts of the city.

The Roman Amphitheatre, dating back to the third century, is now planted with trees, and the space inside contains some Roman remains. The Counts of Périgueux made this amphitheatre their château in the twelfth century, and inhabited it till the end of the sixteenth century. In 1644 the town ceded it to the Visitandines, who despoiled it of its stones to build their convent.

St. Étienne, the former cathedral, is close to the amphitheatre. It belongs to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and is surmounted by three domes and a tower analogous to St. Front.

The interior has three carved oak altar-screens of the seventeenth century; the largest one, formerly in St. Front, is the work of the Jesuit Laville, who took ten years over it. A richly sculptured tomb on the right on entering is that of Bishop Jean d’Asside, who died in 1169.

The Tour de Vésone is part of a Gallo-Roman temple dedicated to Vesuna, the tutelary goddess of the city. Some specimens of the red-and-green marble which formed the outer casing are preserved in the museum.

The Château Barrière has a Roman base. The highest tower, externally round, dates from the tenth century, while the body of the castle is late Gothic. Near the château is a Roman arch called the Porte Normande.

On leaving Périgueux the river is crossed in a south-easterly direction, and the first turning to the right leads one to a steady ascent out of the valley of the Isle, with the site of the original city on the right among the trees. The view backwards over the dome-crowned city in its setting of richly wooded hills is full of romance and charm. On nearly the whole of the thirty-three miles to Bergerac the road winds in and out among steep tree-clad slopes. It is a splendid drive, and on a clear moonlit evening, with the pale shadows of trees thrown across the road, and the dim mystery of the encompassing forest all around, there is left on the mind a vivid impression of a vast uninhabited country—one of those forest areas of the Dark Ages (fourth to tenth centuries) through which chivalrous knights were wont to travel in search of adventure and fair ladies. Between Clermont-de-Beauregard and Lembras, the feudal fortress of Montastruc stands above the River Condeau, and its Gothic towers fall in well with the spirit of its surroundings.

The last two miles to Bergerac are on a very straight open road, which brings one to the east side of the town, and takes one in a fairly direct fashion to the bridge across the Dordogne.

SECTION IX

BERGERAC TO MONT-DE-MARSAN,
96¼ MILES

Bergerac is a cheerful town on the north bank of the broad Dordogne, with straight modern streets and few antiquities. During the religious wars of the sixteenth century it was sufficiently important to give its name to the sixth peace concluded between Catholics and Protestants, and it became one of the eight places of safety where Protestants could worship unmolested. About 1620 Cyrano de Bergerac, the author, was born in the town.

There is a large modern church in the style of the thirteenth century. Nearer the river there is a network of narrow, and a trifle unsavoury, streets. The mouldering old houses often have their upper stories projecting on massive stone corbels or the ends of huge beams, and the half-timber work is filled in with thin bricks laid in thick mortar. Among these narrow ways, in the Rue des Rois de France, is a larger and better-built structure of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called the Château de Henri IV., but it is not worth looking for unless one has time to spare. The street leads down to the river at the point where the old bridge stood. The abutment on the south bank remains.

Crossing the Dordogne, the route is due south through a country of vineyards. On reaching some steep hills, the road curves to the right, to take the ascent as easily as possible, and soon afterwards winds down into and out of the valley of a small tributary of the Dordogne.

The tops of the hills here and there are crowned with small round towers with conical roofs.[D] After winding among the hills for several kilometres, there appears a great view towards the east as the road drops into the valley of the Drot above the picturesque village of Eymet. The houses on the road are modern, but behind them is a little medieval town, with its machicolated château grown over with ivy, a picturesque gateway and walls, as well as some interesting Gothic houses.

In Miramont, which is entered almost at right angles, one turns to the right for Marmande by a curious arcade of considerable width, which runs beneath some of the old houses. Some of the oldest shops have the primitive doorway and window in one, exactly the same as those one finds in the old Italian towns, and even in Pompeii.

The small churches dotted over the country generally have bell-cotes, and are surrounded with sentinel cypresses. Fruit-trees and vineyards are everywhere, and the slow-moving bullock-carts constantly passed make the roads exceedingly attractive.

After the village of Seyches the country becomes flatter and flatter, and the road is lined with plane-trees.

MARMANDE

is entered at a level-crossing, beyond which one goes straight on to the last turning to the right before reaching the river (Garonne). This street leads to an open space, where one goes to the left and crosses the river by a suspension bridge.

The church is an interesting building, dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, and has a fine rose-window in the façade. There are three naves and a restored apse of the thirteenth century.

Marmande must have been well defended in the Hundred Years’ War, for when the English took it in 1447 they only succeeded by resorting to a ruse.

The journey from Marmande to Mont-de-Marsan—a distance of nearly sixty miles—is practically level throughout, and nearly the whole time one is passing through an immense forest.

Casteljaloux stands on the edge of this forest, and all the yards are stacked with sawn timber. The town is full of sixteenth-century and earlier houses, and some old hôtels. The most remarkable is the Maison des Xaintrailles, or Château de Jeanne d’Albret, of which only a wing survives.

The road in passing through the town goes to the right, and then to the left, and to the left again at a fork.

South of Casteljaloux great perspectives of yellow road stretch away to a vanishing point among the blue-grey pines. It is not an uncommon thing to pass groups of dark-blue-coated soldiers bivouacking by the roadside, with stacked rifles and their heavy accoutrements deposited on the grass, while the men are lighting fires to cook their field rations.

Pompogne is a pretty hamlet in the forest, with a whitewashed church of the eleventh, thirteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

Houeillès, the next village, has a small thirteenth-century church of dark stone, with a fortified tower. There is a great staircase turret, and the tower opens into the church through a Romanesque arch with a toothed moulding.

At intervals there are large clearings in the forest, with only a tree here and there, and pools of water appear by the roadside. The lake shown on the map, near the modern château of Lubbon, is scarcely visible from the road, which continues to keep for long distances in a perfectly straight line. The white crosses frequently to be seen roughly painted on farmyard gates, where they appear in the forest, suggest that ancient superstitions linger in the dim forest glades of a country still in the thraldom of a religion that encourages belief in supernatural visitations.

ST. JUSTIN

is an old and very picturesque little town. It was greatly damaged by Montgomery in 1569, but has still some remains of its ramparts perched above the road. The thirteenth-century church stands near a monastery of the Templars.

It is here that one notices the first of the Basque type of house, with the wall of its gable-end deeply recessed to form a shady verandah with a balcony to the upper floor. The ordinary old cottage of timber-framing still appears among these of a more southern type, designed for comfort during great heat.

More perspectives through the forest succeed, and bring one to the rather uninteresting town of

MONT-DE-MARSAN

There is a quaint view of houses built above the river, and inside the big rectangular building of the old barracks stands the lower part of the keep of Nou-li-Bos, built in the fourteenth century by Gaston Phœbus, Count of Foix, to terrify the inhabitants.

BORDEAUX TO TOULOUSE AND PAMIERS OR CARCASSONNE

SECTION X

MONT-DE-MARSAN TO BIARRITZ,
66 MILES
(106 KILOMETRES)

When one leaves Mont-de-Marsan the road is still through forest, and for mile after mile the dark pines shut out the views. The marshy district of Les Landes, where the shepherds use stilts in getting over the wet places, lies to the north-west.

The traffic on the roads, with the exception of automobiles, is drawn either by bullocks or mules, with their heads yoked together in a wooden framework, in addition to their collars. A horse is rarely seen.

After passing the village of Campagne the road twists through the little town of Tartas, where there remain two towers of the fortifications dismantled by the order of Louis XIII. In the sixteenth century Tartas was one of the principal strongholds of the Protestants in Gascony. The church is modern.

After crossing the bridge over the Midouze the turning to the left is taken. One then goes to the right and to the left at the fork.

On passing over a rise a little beyond Tartas a great view to the south and south-east appears, and on a fine day one notices on the distant horizon what at first seems to be a long pale ruffle of cloud. The next glimpse, however, shows them to be the snowy peaks of the Pyrenees, ranging from 6,000 to 11,000 feet in height. The ethereal beauty of the huge mountain barrier that has for so long formed the frontier of France and Spain, when seen at a distance under the sunshine of a spring afternoon, is one of the loveliest sights in Europe. The delicacy of the amethyst and violet shadows is as exquisite as mother-of-pearl. The distant range appears and vanishes as the car races along a series of switchback hills, and every glimpse is a picture framed with the tall red stems of pines and firs, with a golden foreground of gorse.

There is scarcely a tree passed without gashes in the bark, and a small earthenware cup attached to each, into which the resinous gum trickles—if it is possible to use such a word in connection with a fluid of the consistency of the thickest honey. The inquiring individual who puts a finger into one of the pots to discover the nature of its contents is impressed for several hours afterwards with its adhesiveness.

Just before reaching Pontoux and in that village the road is paved. The road goes to the right after the open space in Pontoux, and there continue to be wide views at intervals across the River Adour down below on the left. The town of Dax is not entered unless one wishes to make a slight détour to the left. It can be plainly seen across the river from the main road. The hot mineral springs, for which Dax still has a small reputation, were known to the Romans as Aquæ Tarbellicæ, and Hare writes of the ‘curious Roman fortifications destroyed in 1856.’ The church was rebuilt in the seventeenth century.

The scenery continues of the same forest character until near Ondres, and only two other villages are passed—St. Géours-de-Marenne, with a quaint semi-fortified type of church, and St. Vincent-de-Tyrosse, with a modern church shaded by big plane-trees. When this latter village is passed cork oaks begin to abound, and near Ondres come the first glimpses of the sea horizon of the Bay of Biscay.

The road crosses one of the group of small lakes scattered over the hilly country between the Adour and the sea. They are the only lakes in France.

Some of the lower peaks and a confusion of dark green foot-hills of the western extremity of the Pyrenees are boldly conspicuous as one goes due south on the last few miles to

BAYONNE

A portion of the town is on the north bank of the Adour, but all that is interesting is reached when the long bridge has been crossed.

It is to a very large extent through its history that Bayonne makes many appeals to the visitor, and particularly to the Englishman, for it is the capital of the country of that remarkable people the Basques. It stands on a noble river, with a magnificent mountainous country to the south, contrasted with the level wastes of Les Landes to the north, and its history as a possession of England almost to the beginning of the Renaissance, and as the centre of Wellington’s victories preceding Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, is of thrilling interest.

Bayonne was included in the vast possessions of the Dukes of Aquitaine, and it passed with them into the hands of England for three centuries. The rule of the English kings was considerate, and Bayonne and Bordeaux prospered through their extensive exports of wine to England. Bayonne, in fact, reached its greatest prosperity while it was an English possession.

Towards the end of the fourteenth century the mouth of the Adour became completely blocked with a bank of sand and shingle, and the river’s course was diverted to the north, so that it entered the sea ten miles from Bayonne. This was a disaster to the town, and it was not until two centuries later, in the year 1579, that the engineer-architect Louis de Foix, aided by a great gale, succeeded in reopening the old mouth, and restoring the river to its earlier course.

The English lost Bayonne in 1451, when they were shorn of all their possessions in France except Calais.

In 1526, when François I. was released from his palatial prison in Madrid, he rejoined his Court at Bayonne, and announced his intention of eluding the treaty which gave Burgundy to the Emperor Charles V.

An interesting meeting took place in 1565, when Charles IX., with his mother, Catherine de Medici, met his sister Elizabeth, the Queen of Philip II. of Spain. It was for a long while thought that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was decided upon on this occasion, but modern historians are inclined to think otherwise.

Coming down to Napoleonic times, the year 1814 brings Bayonne into the centre of the latter phase of the Peninsular War.

Wellington’s victorious army, composed of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, having crossed the Pyrenees, attacked Marshal Soult, who had taken up a strong position on the Nivelle. Soult was defeated, and withdrew to Bayonne, where he was again defeated by Sir Rowland Hill, who commanded the right wing of the British army. Soult left a strong garrison in Bayonne, and marched towards Orthez, followed by Wellington. Sir John Hope was left to besiege Bayonne, which capitulated after the abdication of Napoleon on April 5, 1814. Nine days after the declaration of peace, when the British forces investing the town were entirely off their guard, the governor of the citadel suddenly made a treacherous sortie, which was nevertheless unsuccessful, although they captured Sir John Hope, who was wounded. The French losses were 910 to the English 830, a fact which may have been due in part to the reckless firing of the French gunboats on the river.

In the little cemetery of the Coldstream Guards, about two kilometres north of the town, can be seen the tombs of the officers and men who fell in resisting this sortie. It has been visited by the late Queen and King Edward VII.

Perhaps one of the greatest feats performed by the British army at this time was the building of a bridge of boats across the Adour below Bayonne, in order that the troops and artillery might cross the river and complete the investment of the town as rapidly as possible. Sir John Hope had managed to get a detachment of about 600 guards, under the command of Major-General Stopford, ferried across on pontoons before nightfall, and they successfully resisted an attack from the citadel of 1,300 French, who were terrified by the rockets, or Congreves,[E] which were used with startling success. The English army on the south bank of the river could only assist their comrades with artillery fire.

On the next day, February 24, the flotilla of small vessels bringing material for a bridge arrived off the river-mouth, but, owing to the force of the wind, they were only able to cross the bar with the most heroic efforts. The description given by Colonel W. Hill James gives a vivid idea of the dangers that the British sailors faced: