The Rest of France

Abstract

Apart from capital, most tourists saw little of France other than from the road to Paris from Calais and the route from Paris to Italy. The route was clear to Lyons. Most tourists went, via Dijon, to Chalon-sur-Saône, either by the Lyons diligence or in other vehicles. Edward Thomas, who took the diligence in March 1750, found little worthy of note:

Fontainebleau, its woods and ridings cut in them, its only beauty. A monstrous St. Christopher with a monstrous child Jesus on its shoulders in the old Gothic cathedral of Auxerre. Champagne a poor white thin soil, Burgundy the same but mountainous and interspersed with starved woods and rocks but the sides of these seeming barren mountains produce the finest liquor in the world; you in some places see the vineyards creep up the sides of these hills almost perpendicular.¹