THE LOIRE.•
MR. GOLDEING'S agreeable book will open the eyes of many who flatter themselves on knowing the Loire because they have visited Tours, Blois, and the neighbouring chliteaux of historical or romantic fame, or even have travelled on to • The Loire: the Record of a Pilgrimage from Gerbier de Jones to St. Nataire. By Douglas Goldring. With Illustrations in colour and black and white by A. L. Collins. London : Constable and Co. [72.13d. net.]
Nantes and seen the great river near its entrance into the sea. Not that such knowledge is at all to be despised : and if we were to notice a defect in this charming pilgrimage, it would be that the pilgrim is inclined to treat with a certain superior scorn those sights and recollections which have become hackneyed simply by reason of the great and compelling interest they have possessed during the last fur centuries. And as to the restoration (so called) which rouses Mr. Goldring's angry contempt at Blois, for instance, and at Chaumont, one remembers that time will soon arrange all that. It does not, after all, affect the old associations.
The life of the Loire, at least in this part of its course, can hardly be separated from that of its towns and castles. It is different with the higher reaches, which are far less familiar to the ordinary traveller. Of these Mr. Goldring gives a delightful and valuable account, though slightly too much flavoured with his personal experiences : the methods of "R. L. S." cannot always be used with impunity. But some of Mr. Goldring's adventures are really interesting and amusing; and his resolution to penetrate to the actual source of the Loire—which he found in a farmer's stable at a height of four thousand five hundred feet, on the slope of Mont Gerbier de Jones, in the Cevennes—meant resolution and hardy perseverance in the face of considerable fatigue, not to mention lack of food and attacks by the fierce dogs of the countryside.
The history of the Loire, "le fleuve national," is told with clearness and spirit. The varied scenery of its course does not affect the curiously personal character of a liver which has been compared to a capricious woman in its moods of softness and fury; sometimes sleeping blue and clear among its sandbanks and islands, sometimes in terrible flood, devas- tating the whole country; always uncertain, always changing its course, and thus adding danger to the navigation which, once constant and busy, now hardly exists at all. This state of things is rightly lamented, Mr. Goldring reminds us, by many patriotic Frenchmen, and plans have been made for restoring the old use of the Loire as a commercial water-way, as well as the important line of defence it was proved to be in the war of 1870. Of that war it bears many a trace in the restoration of its broken bridges and the heroic traditions of its towns.
The book has interesting illustrations and a useful map of the course of the Loire, which is six hundred and twenty-five miles long, the river skirting or flowing through the nine departments of Haute Loire, Loire, Saone-et-Loire, Nievre, Loiret, Loir-et-Cher, Indre-et-Loire, Maine-et-Loire, and Loire-Inferieure.
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