Hidden places
Richard Cobb
The Companion Guide to the Ile de France Ian Dunlop (Collins maps and index, £7.95) Paris is the most fortunate of capitals, because despite the new line voie-express from Boissy-Saint-Leger, the industrialisation of the valley of the Lower Seine up to Mantes, the steady invasion of the wide plains of the Pays de France, due north of the city, the degradation of much of the valleys of the Orge, the Yvette, the Bievre and the Marne, it is still within reach of a great deal of unspoilt countryside and of calm villages. The Ile-de-France is the most beautiful region of France, partly because it is the most varied and, if one excepts the great show-places, the most unassuming. It offers the contrast between the rolling gorse-covered slopes of the Hurepoix and the open country south of Houdan (Landru territory), the sandy woodlands round Etampes, the lakes and ponds of the Yvelines, the huge wheatlands of the Brie with their gigantic perspectives lovingly cared for, the naked country of the Parisis and the Pays de France, an invitation to barbarians and invaders and a contradiction in terminology (no douke France here in this flat and threatening plain), the high plateau of the Vexin Francais, crossed by the old route haute from Paris to Rouen, and running down towards the Seine in a series of sheltered valleys and winding dusty roads, the peculiar rock formations and grottoes of the Forest of Fontainebleau, the desert de sable of Ermenonville, the secret villages of the Mantois, the bracken and heather of Saint-Nom-la-Breteche, on the edge of the forest of Marly, and the shady villages of the valley of the Oise.
It is an area of streams and small rivers: the two Morin, the Ourcq, the Aubette, the Yvette, the reedy Loing, the Orge, the Bievre, the Remarde, the Essonne, the Troesne, the Beuvronne, the Yerre, the Avon, the Yvron, the Lunain, the Ma uldre, the wonderfully peaceful Epte, once a sanguinary frontier dividing France from Normandy, its churches and castles flaming in the night: mostly gentle, feminine names, as inviting as they would imply, and, 200 years ago, covered in watermills and busy with the transport of wood and wine. Only due south, towards the grim Beauce (la steppe beauceronne as Max Jacob called it) is the country waterless and totally forbidding. The rivers — the Seine, the Oise, the Aisne —and streams give to the lie-dc-France a variety of gentle contours that shelter clustered villages around their churches, the towers of which so often mark out from a great distance the welcoming presence of water. The open and rather alarming Brie is bordered by the sheltered valleys of the Ourcq, the Valois rolls on the periphery of the flat Pays de Gonesse and the GOele; and the naked Brie itself secretes comfortable and enclosed little market towns like Brie-Comte-Robert and Rozay.
The greatest wealth of the Ile-de-France resides in its wonderfully varied countrr side, in its avenues of poplars, in its orchards and forests, its gentle hills and its largely unspoilt villages and, above all, in an abundance of country churches, unassum' ing, and in a mixture of styles: a few. Romanesque, but most of the 12th and 13th centuries, a great many of them largely rebuilt in the second half of the 15th century, after having been burnt and sacked by the English, especially in the Brie, the Valois, and the valley of the EPte; resulting in a' concentration of Flamboyant, and, in the Montmorency family country north of Paris, Renaissance.
Canon Dunlop has provided above all an excellent guide to rural churches; Richebourg, near Houdan, Saint-Sulpieede-Favieres and Villeconin, in the Hurepoix; Voulton, Rampillon, Saint' Loup-de-Naud, Donnemarie-en-Montots, in the Brie, near Provins; Champeaux, Chapelle-sous-Crecy, Autheuil-en-Valois (a Romanesque church used as a barn); 1-3, Ferte-Milon, Crepy-en-Valois (the mine° Saint-Thomas, dedicated to Thomas-a" Becket, and still bearing on its outer wall a revolutionary inscription of 1794 ditnlY denying, in fading black letters, the imrner" tality of the soul); Pontpoint, Othis, arches, le Mesnil-Aubry, Groslay, on Of very edge of Paris, Tavemy; the churches the Vexin: Chars, Magny, Clery, GtnrY' Gadancourt, Dangu, Neaufles, Parnes; Vetheil, in the Seine valley, painted hY Monet. There are three abandoned Sen1t6 churches: Saint-Aignan, now a cinema; Saint-Frambourg, a garage, Saint-Pierre, a covered market. There are Notre-Dame-des Ardents uf Lagny, Saint-Maclou, of Pontoise, the flne church at Gisors, the lovely Sainte-Anne; de-Gassicourt, a jewel in a factory suburb° Mantes (no longer-la-Jolie). The coverage is so good that one is surprised at the, omission of the splendid churches 13` Etampes, the first stop on the way to Corn' postella, of the exquisite Saint-010" l'Aumone, just outside Pontoise, and of the little church of Auvers, a tortured painting' torrid, as if moving in the waves of heat bl van Gogh, who is buried in the churchYaru, One would have liked too some mention °I the churches of the villages of Paris: Charonne, Montreuil, Vanves. lvtY' Choisy, Chaillot. For those — and they do not include myself — whose taste is for royal chateal and hunting lodges, — Renaissance a° Louis XIV — Canon Dunlop is a guide ha; enthusiastic as he is learned. Even t is tiniest and most ruined gentilh ornmi_e re included and we are taken through worn oYt room all the big pieces montees. I do tt share his enthusiasm for Versailles (wher', „t preceded him by two years as assistant 6.0 Hoche), which I think is the saddest town IA Western Europe, and the long Boulevary de ia Reine, the most hopeless street in France. The Parc, he considers, is best seen to October; I think it is even better in the utter stillness of February, when the long avenues dissolve in mist and the frozen Silence is only broken by the distant sound of the woodcutters' axe. But even at the height of summer there are little unexPected principalities of quiet in the valleys °f the Epte and the Troesne, the Ourcq and the Remarde; even in August, one can walk for hours in the Forest of Dourdan or in the Woods round Etrechy without meeting anyone on a weekday, and especially on a Tuesday. This guide is a labour of love. It is a key that will open many tiny, hidden, forsaken Places', a ruined keep in a farmyard, the remains of an arch in a field, an escutcheon, forlorn and heralding nothing but desolation and an old Revolution, a marine monster in flaking stone, lost in enveloping greenery, strange props for Orphee, a triumphal entrance leading to emptiness, a stone stag in an autumnal forest that has heard the French horn for 200 Years: and the infinite sadness of the Petit Trianon, which, as the author says, is the Most beautiful building in Europe.
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