BEAUTIFUL LORRAINE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 May 1939, Page 6

BEAUTIFUL LORRAINE

HOME OF PRESIDENT LEBRUN. One of the least known regions of France, Lorraine, has been strangely neglected by the tourist, and yet there are few places where so great a spirit of peace and rest is to be found. It is reposeful because there is nothing abrupt about it. Its hills are gentle, its valleys broad, and it.is difficult to imagine one is in a region which has been so much fought over and fought for since the days when it was allotted to the Emperor Lothaire I, in 843, by the treaty of Verdun. - Lorraine is distinguished by immense forests and broad plains. Mercy-le-Haut, where the President was born, in 1871, is a part perhaps less favoured by nature and where the inhabitants have had to wrest their pittance from the soil with greater toil. It is a village with a few hundred inhabitants, not far from Thiacourt, described by Hillaire Belloc in “The Path to Rome.”

When we get away from forest and plain to the towns we find > history written on almost every house. As in Flanders, the Spanish influence of the days of Charles V’s occupation is evident in the flat-roofed houses, more appropriate to a southern climate, and the broad- squares with the surrounding houses set over pillared arcades. Bar-le-Duc well repays a visit, and is full of handsome monuments of its past. • An ancient bridge with a tower on' its centre, quaint old streets that wind up hills, town gateways, a fourteenth century clock tower, the Chateau of the Dukes of Bar, and, numbered among its curiosities, the Cafe des Ciseaux, a veritable museum of natural history with more than 50,000 specimens. There is in the church of Saint-Pierre, at Bar-le-Duc, one of the great works of art of the Renaissance. This is the gruesome, realistic skeleton that stands on the tomb of Rene de Chalon, Prince of Orange, killed at the siege of St Dizier, in 1544. It was to Bar-le-Duc that “the Old Pretender” retired after the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713. Lorraine has other fine cities for the delight of the tourist —Nancy and Metz, and the humble village of Domremy where Joan of Arc was born.