XXVII. AUVERGNE.* Fortnightly Review, December, 1874.) In the magnificent picture of the physical geography of France, with which the genius of Michelet has illustrated its history, only a few harsh touches are given to the province of Auvergne, depicted briefly as a land of inconsistencies and contradictions, cold beneath a southern sky, and inhabited by a southern race shivering on the ashes of volcanoes; a land of vineyards, whose wine does not please, of orchards, of which distant strangers eat even the commonest fruits, and one to whose mountains thousands of emigrants yearly return without a new idea. It is, in fact, a land of contrasts, physical and moral; containing regions whose features, social and economic, as well as geological, are widely dissimilar. Yet the contrasts involve no real contra. dictions. The chief physical contrast is between mountain and plain, and remarkable economic and social diversities spring * Some controversy exists on the point whether, in translating the name l'Auvergne, the English article should be used, as in the case of the Bourbonnais, the Lyonnais, the Vivarais, the Ardennes, the Seine, the Creuse, &c., or whether we should say simply Auvergne, as in the case of Normandy, Brittany, Picardy, Flanders, &c. A German philologer whom I consulted on the point, and in whose opinion a French philologer, also consulted, concurs, draws the following distinction between the cases in which the article should be used in English, and those in which it is more idiomatic to discard it :- The Bourbonnais, the Lyonnais, the Vivarais, are adjectival formations, and therefore naturally take the article in English. The French departments, again, being the names of rivers and mountain chains, take the article in English, just as we say the Seine, the Loire, the Alps, the Pyrenees, of the rivers and mountains themselves. But the only French province which could properly take the article in English would be such as La Marche, where English idiom too would require us to say the March, or the Border. There is nothing to distinguish the case of Auvergne from that of Normandy and Brittany, where the article is omitted in English, though used in French.' from it. But mountain and plain are correlatives and complements, not contradictions, to one another; and differences of life, occupation, usage, thought, and feeling in their inhabitants are but consequences of the same laws of human nature, operating under diverse conditions, and afford excellent illustrations of the mode in which differences of structure and character in human societies, often superficially attributed to diversity of ancestral origin or race, are really produced. It is not the scenery of Auvergne that this essay seeks to describe, but some of its chief economic and social phenomena; they are, however, so related to some of its physical features, that the latter cannot be left altogether unnoticed. Of the two departments into which the ancient province once called Arvernes, from the Arverni, is now divided, that of the Cantal, formerly La Haute Auvergne, is wholly a mountainous region; while the richer, more populous, and far more important department of the Puy-de-Dôme-so named from the huge mountain overhanging Clermont-Ferrand, its capital-contains both mountainous districts, and also the famous plain or valley named the Limagne, traversed by the railway from Gannat to Issoire; of which, thirteen hundred years ago, King Childebert said, 'there was but one thing he desired before he died; that was to see the beautiful Limagne of the Auvergne, which was said to be the masterpiece of nature, and a land of enchantment.' A century earlier Sidonius Apollinaris wrote from a countryseat in this rich valley, 'The Auvergne is so beautiful that strangers who have once entered it cannot make up their minds to leave it, and forget in it their native land.' The strangers who enter Auvergne at the present day are for the most part either geologists about to inspect its extinct volcanoes and other similar phenomena, or invalids on their way to the mineral waters of Royat, La Bourboule, or Mont Dore, or ordinary tourists coming to see both its exhausted craters and its baths. The geologists and the tourists usually make up their minds to leave the province after a few days; and a few weeks at the baths generally suffice to give the invalids strength and resolution to return home. Least of all, perhaps, is the visitor who comes (as has happened more than once to the present writer) fresh from Switzerland to the Limagne, likely to be moved to the enthusiasm of Sidonius Apollinaris by its scenery; especially just after the harvest, when its corn-fields, like shorn sheep, are bare and unpicturesque. But the ancient could as little have sympathized with the modern traveller's admiration for Switzerland. What he loved was a land of corn and wine and fruit, and that the Limagne is. His associations with gigantic mountains, frowning rocks, tremendous precipices, deserts of ice and snow, were horror, hunger, danger, and death. Auvergne itself has mountains and rocks, which, picturesque as they are, have few charms for those to whom they are associated only with privation and hardship. A woman, of whom I asked my way a few weeks ago in the highlands of Mont Dore, said, 'This is not a nice country, with all these mountains and rocks,' adding, with a horizontal movement of her hand, I like a flat country." Her associations with mountain scenery were black bread with a few chestnuts and potatoes, water unreddened with the wine at which Michelet sneers, hard times in winter, and hot and weary work in summer, with only one preservative from thirst, not to have a habit of drinking. 'Je n'ai pas l'habitude de boire, ainsi je n'ai pas soif,' she replied to a question suggested by my own feelings under a burning sun. In the plain of the Limagne she knew that the labourer often owned the ground on which he worked, might, if he pleased, drink the juice of his own grapes, and might, if he sold, as Michelet says, the common apples from his orchard in a distant market, instead of eating them himself, get 450 francs to the hectare for them, with as much more for the grass amidst which they grew. Having heard an old woman in a cottage in the Limagne say to a visitor, to whom she offered a slice off a huge melon, that she was very fond of melons, which are cheap in that region, I asked my friend on the Mont Dore mountain if she liked them. 'Je les aimerais mieux,' she replied, 's'ils venaient dans les montagnes.' A contrast full of instruction and interest, when viewed in relation to its causes, between the mountain and the plain in Auvergne, is the different distribution of landed property. In the mountainous districts of the Puy-de-Dôme, the term large property-'la grande propriété'-is applied, as a general rule, only to properties of a hundred and fifty acres and upwards; properties under forty acres being there classed as 'la petitepropriété,' and those between forty and a hundred and fifty acres as 'la moyenne propriété.' In the Limagne, on the other hand, from twenty to five-and-twenty acres make a large property in popular thought and speech, and a multitude of the small properties do not exceed a quarter of an acre. The soil in this fertile plain has in the last two generations, especially the last twenty years, passed almost wholly out of the possession of wealthier, and larger owners into that of 'petits propriétaires,' who cultivate it with their own hands. The Report on the the Puy-de-Dôme, contained in one of the twenty quarto. volumes of the Enquête Agricole,' after referring to the want of capital in the mountainous parts of that department, says,. In the plain, the want of capital does not make itself felt, in consequence of the sale of land in small lots, which has permitted of the liquidation of property by paying off mortgages; but the species of proprietors has changed, and the man of means, the former proprietor, has become a capitalist, who has invested the proceeds of his land in securities.' This diversity in the distribution of landed property results partly from economic causes, partly from profound differences in the feelings and ideas generated by opposite conditions of life in mountain. and plain. The economic causes are by no means the most interesting, but they must not be overlooked. In the mountains, on the one hand, both the comparative infertility of the land and the nature of pastoral husbandry tend to maintain comparatively large farms, and to prevent their being broken up by sale in small parcels. In the Limagne, on the other hand, the aptitude of the soil and climate for the production of rich plants, the vine, for example, requiring minute cultivation, and peculiarly suited to spade-husbandry,—the rise in the price of such productions in recent years, the rise, moreover, of wages, adding nothing to the expenses of the cultivator who employs no hired labour, but heavily to those of the large farmer, the increased gains and savings of both small cultivators and labourers, and their consequently increased purchases. of land, make a combination of causes tending to minute - subdivision. Adam Smith, remarking that it was a matter of dispute among the ancient Italian husbandmen whether it was advantageous to plant new vineyards, adds that the anxiety of the owners of old vineyards in France in his own time to prevent the planting of new ones indicated an opinion that the high profits of vine-growing could last no longer than the restrictive laws which they had procured for that purpose. The increased growth of the vine around Clermont-Ferrand in the last five-and-twenty years shows what the small proprietors in the Limagne now think on the subject. In the arrondissement of Clermont alone, between thirty and forty thousand acres of both hill-side and plain are now covered by vineyards, which formerly were to be seen only on certain slopes with the best aspects. Yet, after allowing all due weight to the causes referred to, it remains certain that causes of a totally different order have powerfully contributed to the maintenance of larger properties in the mountainous districts than in the plain, namely, the greater strength in the former of ancient usage, old family feeling, and religious sentiment in both sexes. In the plain, both the sale of land in small plots and the partition of inheritances by the law of succession tend to break up family properties; in the mountain neither has hitherto operated considerably. The Report of the 'Enquête Agricole' on the Puy-de-Dôme makes no attempt to trace to their sources the curious diversities of usage and sentiment which it describes, but the description itself is worth citing. The transmission of property takes place in a manner essentially different in the plain and the mountain. In the plain, an inheritance is almost always partitioned or sold when a succession (of more than one child) takes place; if partitioned, each of the heirs takes a part of cach parcel; if it is sold, it is so in detail, and by the smallest fractions, in order the more readily to find buyers. Everything thus contributes to indefinite subdivision in the plain. In the mountains they cling to the conservation of the inheritance unbroken, and do all that is possible in order not to destroy the work of the family, and not to divide the paternal dwelling. The daughters willingly consent to take religious vows, and |