AUVERGNE AND ITS PEOPLE.* IT is about two years since
Mrs. Gostling's interesting book, The Bretons at Home, was reviewed in the Spectator. Her new book on Auvergne is even more attractive, because, while quite as rich in picturesque detail, it deals with a part of France very much less blown than Brittany to English travellers. One hardly exaggerates, perhaps, in saying that Auvergne is the most beautiful part of France. Its colour, its romantic landscape, we have always known to be unequalled, and it is a pleasure to find our own impressions justified and put into eloquent words by so careful a student of the country as Mrs. Gostling certainly is. It will not be her fault if Auvergne does not become as favourite and as happy a hunting-ground for the English as either Provence or Touraine.
The writer and her husband began their tour by crossing from Southampton to Saint Malo, and travelled on in their motor-car through part of Brittany, Touraine, and Berry till, climbing up the heather-scented hills into Auvergne, they reached their first headquarters at Clermont, its ancient capital, "shut in by the Puy-de-Dome" and commanded by the statue of Vercingetorix. As in her former book, Mrs. Gostling mingles the ancient history and legends of her provinces with their modern customs, characteristics, and beauties in a very enjoyable way, and while we wander with her among the old towns and churches, the wild mountains, cliffs, and valleys of Auvergne, we could almost forget that all this lies in the very centre of modern France, the heart of modern civilization. Indeed, these venerable provinces take a great deal of spoiling. It will be long, we hope, before Auvergne loses the character of remoteness which belongs to her nowadays much more than to Brittany. As Mrs. Gostling says, Auvergne is still "an almost undis- covered country." And so she has given herself the task of "opening up this romantic and beautiful land." It had to be done, but there are those who would not have been sorry for a little more delay. They may take comfort in the thought that Auvergne will not for some time yet be very easily reached or very comfortably trampled over by unin- telligent crowds of ordinary tourists.
We need hardly say that Mrs. Gostling's delightful and well-illustrated volume is not a mere book of travels. It is full of intellectual interest in the wonderful, the prehistoric past, religious and social, which has developed into the Auvergne of to-day. This old, inaccessible province has always been the centre of France as to ancient customs and superstitions growing out of a paganism which lingered long. The famous Black Virgins of Auvergne, their cult and their legends, may fairly be traced back to Druidical days. The Frankish con- quest of the Celts was here never so complete as to alter to any extent the original nature and ways of the people.
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