The Pont du Gard and Nismes may be seen in one day. Among the Vosges and Ardennes are many soberly romantic scenes which have as yet attracted but little notice from travellers ; in the south, Provence , with its sunny sky, is too arid to deserve general praise, excepting that favoured terrace at the foot of the Alps along the shore of the Mediterranean, intervening between Toulon and Nice. The Pyrenees , however, without doubt, include the finest scenery in France, and, except in the want of lakes, are scarcely inferior to the Alps of Switzerland and Savoy.
Hand-book for Travellers in France is a guide-book on France published in the series Murray's Handbooks for Travellers. The edition below features the term ' picturesque ' at least times. It is also most fortunate in its climate. Many of its vineyards, the most valuable spots in the country, occupy tracts of poor, barren, and waste land, which in our climate would be absolutely unprofitable. But in truth our countrymen are unjust in forming their opinion from the routes between Calais and Paris, and thence to Lyons, Strasburg, and Dijon, perhaps the least varied part of the kingdom, and at least no fair sample of its beauties.
Throughout nearly one half of France, especially in Lower Normandy, Brittany, a great part of the country S. Our own island, indeed, presents as it were a miniature of other lands — a concentration, within a small area, of scenery, varying from flat fen and rolling down to mountains and precipices. In France, the features of nature are broad and expanded, and you must often traverse 50 or miles to encounter those pleasing changes which, in Britain, succeed one another almost every 10 miles.
If the English had confined themselves less to the beaten track in their way from the Channel to the Mediterranean, they would have verified the truth of this assertion. The traveller may at present farther vary his route by going from Paris by railway to Orleans, and thence by Bourges.
The districts of France which chiefly recommend themselves by their beauty and variety of scenery are, in the north, Normandy , the banks "of the Seine — the finest of the great rivers of France, the valleys round Vire , Mortain , and Avranches , the wild coast scenery of Brittany , and the course of the Rance , and of other streams near Quimper ; in the centre, the Loire below Tours, and parts of Limousin ; Auvergne , the Cantal and Ardeche , the Rhone , by some preferred to the Rhine , on account of its more extended prospects; in the east, the hills of the Jura , the mountains and valleys of Dauphine , especially the vale of the Gresivaudan , the gorge of the Grande Chartreuse , and the savage magnificence of peak and glacier around the Mont Pelvoux , a region which may be styled the Chamouni or Grindelwald of France.
