Page:A Motor-Flight Through France.djvu/242

A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE fine backward glimpses of the Rhone before our road began to traverse the dull plain of the Bresse.

If the lines have pursued one from childhood, the easiest—and, alas, the most final!—way of laying their lovely spectre is to turn aside from the road to Dijon and seek out the church of Brou. To do so, one must journey for two or three hours across one of the flat stretches of central France; and the first disillusionment comes when Brou itself is found to be no more than a faubourg of the old capital of the Bresse—the big, busy, cheese-making town of Bourg, sprawling loosely among boundless pastures, and detaining one only by the graceful exterior of its somewhat heterogeneous church.

A straight road runs thence through dusty outskirts to the shrine of Margaret of Austria, and the heart of the sentimentalist sank as we began to travel it. Here, indeed, close to the roadside, stood "the new pile," looking as new as it may have when, from her white palfrey, the widowed Duchess watched her "Flemish carvers, Lombard gilders" at work; looking, in fact, as [ 148 ]