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Matilda Betham-Edwards - Holidays in Eastern France
potatoes, or gathering in their little crop of maize. All the women seem to be out of doors and sunburnt,
toil-worn looking creatures they are, though they wear an expression of contentment, or rather
resignation. The potato crop, on which these rural populations so largely depend for winter food, is
fortunately good and abundant, and little else but potato and maize seem to be grown here. The villages
we pass through have a dirty and neglected appearance; but beggars are nowhere encountered, and, at the
entrance of each, we see the inscription, "Mendicity is forbidden in the Department of the Jura."
CHAPTER XII. NANTUA AND THE CHURCH OF BRON.
It was evening when we reached the little railway-station of La Cluse, and exquisite indeed was the
twilight drive to Nantua. The crimson glories of sunset were still flaming in the west, and reflected in the
limpid lake, whilst a silvery crescent moon rose slowly above the dark purple mountains framing in the
picture. A delicious scene this, and wonderfully contrasted to the sombre splendour of St. Claude,
tenderest allegro after stateliest adagio maestoso, droppings of pearly rain after heavy
thunder-claps. Nantua must be seen from above its interesting Romanesque old church to be appreciated.
It lies at the end of a mountain gorge, black with pines from summit to base, the transparent fairy-like
lake opening beyond, shut in with violet hills.
No less delightful is the walk to La Cluse alongside the lake, an umbrageous avenue, the shadows of
which are grateful this hot June-like October day. Through a light screen of foliage you look across the
blue waters upon bluer hills, and still bluer sky. Nantua, in spite of its smiling appearance, is inevitably
doomed one day to destruction, Straight over against the town impends a huge mass of loosened rock,
which, so authorities predict, must sooner or later slide down, crushing any thing with which it comes in
contact. People point to the enemy with nonchalance, saying, "Yes, the rock will certainly fall at some
time or other, and destroy a great part of the town, but not perhaps in our time." Be this as it may, the
gigantic fragment of rock hanging so menacingly over Nantua, is a curious object of contemplation.
I fell into conversation with two nuns belonging to the Order of St. Charles, and I wish I could delineate
the hideousness of their costumes, and the unmitigated ugliness of their general appearance. Their dress
consisted of a plain black gown with round cape and close fitting hood, on each side of which projected
black gauze flaps extended on wires, shading their withered, ill-favoured countenances, and making them
look indeed more like female inquisitors, ogres, or Witches of Endor than human beings. I never saw
human nature made so uninviting, and I could fancy the terror inspired by these awful figures, with their
bat-like flaps, in the tender minds of the little children entrusted to their care. It was edifying to hear
these holy women discourse upon the Paris Exhibition, which it is hardly necessary to say the clerical
party throughout France was bound to consider a failure. Alike the highest and the lowest, bishop and
parish priest, were determined in their own minds that the Exhibition, as a display of rehabilitated France
under a Republican Government, should fail altogether, and come to some conspicuously bad end. The
very reverse had happened, yet here were two women of age, experience, and some intelligence coolly
talking of this terrible failure of the Exhibition, financially and otherwise, the bad effect upon trade
generally, and so forth.
I take the railway from Bourg to La Cluse, a mile from the town, and a marvellous piece of railway
engineering is this short journey, veritable Alpine ascent in a railway-carriage, scaling perpendicular
mountain sides by means of the steam-engine! The train curls round the mountain as the Jura roads are
made to do, high above an awful gorge, in the midst of which runs the River Ain, emerald-green
irradiated by diamond-like flashes of cascade and torrent. When we have accomplished this aerial bit of
travel - it is very like being up in a balloon - we suddenly lose alike mountain, river, and ravine, all the
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