Excerpt

I was early abroad the next morning, with a day's journey ahead of me and Digne as my goal. The sun was making its overtures in the east. I felt a great delight at the beauty of the pale rose sunrise. A strange light like fine white powder seemed to descend from the heavens, as though the firmament was sprinkled with some magic spray, bringing glory to the little village.

Before leaving the cathedral of le Puy, I spent another hour in the cloisters where the tall cypresses like flameless tapers tower among the spirits of departed monks, in a place separated from the world, as certain days are from the rest of life, by an inviolable and sacred silence. Slowly, in the soft air the trees stir under the sky, and in that little sequestered place, noiseless with the footsteps of those who preceded us.

I turned my back upon La Chaise-Dieu, dusk fell and gathered up all the village, and it disappeared as a dream passes. Its influence, strange and desirable, lay upon me far into the night. The descent from the plateau was slow. I saw not Champagnac-le-Vieux because it lay in darkness, nor Lamothe, but at Brioude I halted to rest for the night. When morning came, there again were the sun, the laughing trees, and the cool shiny river l'Allier.

The evening is pure and calm, the coloring of sky and earth is such that no painter could reproduce. The rosy flush of sunset still glows in the heavens, and renders mountains into tawny and russet hues. The Puy de Dme is suddenly transfigured from the light gray tints of earlier hours, as if the rock were sprinkled with ashes, to the soft lustre of the petal of a flower.

Eight hundred years ago, morning entered the little town of Orcival much as it does today, slipping unchallenged through the silent gates, stealing like a grey nun through the narrow streets, glimmering faintly through the grated windows and, leaving the lower stories of the crag-like houses still dark and somber, touched with light the spire of the basilica and the crest of the stern towers which spring upward to guard the silver and rosy beauty of Our Lady of Orcival. The church is one of the most famous in Auvergne. Its romantic situation brings thousands of tourists to visit it, while its unusually fine Virgin of the 12th century attracts ten of thousand of pilgrims.

The road swings lazily from Vautheau to St-Lger-sous-Beuvray, a quiet old town by a turquoise lake that captures and magnifies the profile of the haunted hill, aerial with mist and faintly penciled against the light-filled sky. In the foreground rise the slender poplars showing the delicate framework of their branches under the sparse foliage. It has all of a poet's dream of Arcady - water and wood and beckoning road; ancient houses with half-closed shutters that seem to be blinking in the declining light of the afternoon, two medieval towers...the pipes of Pan himself, for these slopes are peopled with the vanished gods of ancient times.

In the church of Brou beside the form of Philibert the knight stand four cherubs, who seem to be awaiting his awakening. Two of them hold his gauntlets, two his helmet. The effect of this vigil is startling. Were this armored knight to stir himself in a great crackling of stony armor, and shove his fingers into gloves held ready for him, it would not seem at all remarkable. It is with difficulty that one banishes an impulse to walk on tiptoe through this carved choir lest one disturb the slumbering duke and the women who loved him.

East of Semur, the road climbs the plateau and, having accomplished the ascent, travels a crazy course to preserve its altitude. On either side a green landscape spreads out to merge with distant fields of blue. Slim paint-brush poplars are on the horizon. Squares of red, clean-cut in the mistless distances, mark the villages where, now and then, ambitious spires make blue pencil strokes against the sky. And, dominating the point, rises the spot where, in 54 B.C., the final tragic act of the drama of the Gallic resistance was played out on this, the western edge of Burgundy. This is Alesia, nowadays Alise Ste-Reine.

The restaurant of Auxerre was a long back room with white-painted walls that gave it the air of a railroad station's waiting room. In one of the side walls halfway back there was a long, long counter opening. It was big enough to give a panoramic presentation of the kitchen ranges, an immense chopping- block table and festoons of frying pans. Also it provided the gourmets with an unobstructed view of the culinary rites. Pyrotechnic sizzles, puffs of aromatic blue smoke and occasionally tongues of leaping flame suggested that the cuisiniers were attendant demons rather than chefs. The counter itself was a battle area suited for continuous combat between the waiters on the one side and the chefs on the other. Although in the nature of trench warfare rather than the skirmishing of armored divisions, it was anything but static and the periodic flare-up of local attacks, the clatter of china and the shrieks of abuse provided an impressive sonic background.

I hear the clock striking the hour on the Tour de l'Horloge, and I know that the day is waning, and that the sun will no longer flash liquid pearls from the fountain of the cathedral of Auxerre. It will soon sink behind the green masses of the hills. Go back into the old town, with the light of the roseate sunset all about you. The mellow afterglow will appear quickly, and then the cooling shadows of evening. Already you can feel the touch of the approaching night, when the streets will be quiet, the sturdy towers throwing long steady shadows across the moonlit Market Place. Before Saint-Etienne will come the stillness, the loneliness and appealing mystery of the Middle Ages.