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Updated: May 17, 2025
In their salon of the inn at Avallon were curious emblem pictures of different nationalities: one a belle of fair hair; another a belle of raven locks; a third a belle of brown ringlets; all these for Europe; but for the United States was "a wench as black as coal!" So thought Switzerland of us in the days of 1828. One lovely day Cooper "persuaded A. to share" his seat on the carriage-box.
Tennyson caught the spirit of it in the grand moments of the Morte D'Arthur; and missed it by a thousand miles elsewhere in the Idylls. The spirit, the atmosphere, is that of a glory receding into the unknown and the West of Wonder; into Lyonnesse, into Avallon, into the Sunset Isles.
I must explain, then, without going over ground I have already described, that the Morvan, accessible as a tourist-ground from Avallon, Autun, or Nevers, is a little Celtic kingdom, isolated till recent times from the rest of France, alike by position, language, and customs. The name is familiar to French ears as Wales is to our own.
At the same a time a Welsh bard directed King Henry to cause search to be made at Glastonbury, the true Avallon, for the ancient hero's corpse, which, as old traditions declared, had been buried between two pyramids within the abbey. A little deeper was a coffin, hollowed out of an oak tree, and within lay the bones of the renowned Arthur and his fair Queen Guenever.
Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement which surrounds Paris, the first three days of travelling towards Marseilles are quiet and monotonous enough. To Sens. To Avallon. To Chalons. A sketch of one day's proceedings is a sketch of all three; and here it is.
"I come from the Avallon country. I have family papers going back to 1200 and something...." Olivier was intrigued, and tried to find out more about him. Hurteloup asked nothing better than to be allowed to talk. He belonged, in fact, to one of the oldest families in Burgundy.
Not having eaten since his scanty supper of the night before, he approached the ladies, one of whom arose and spoke to him, saying: 'Welcome, Ogier of Denmark! I have waited for you long. A hundred years have passed since I stood by your cradle a hundred years of war and of fighting. But you have tired of them at last and have come back to me! And now you shall rest in the palace of Avallon.
French towns, like French scenery, should be revisited thus, and I hope ere very long to pay Autun my fourth visit, and to take, for a second time, those delightful drives from Avallon to Vezelay, and from the modern capital of the little Celtic kingdom to the ancient, perched so airily above the surrounding hills.
"Ha!" cried Medenham, warming to his subject and retarding speed again, "that opens up a wide field. In Celtic mythology Avallon is Ynys yr Afallon, the Island of Apples. It is the Land of the Blessed, where Morgana holds her court.
He signed to his bard, who, during the conference between wife and lord, had retired to a distance, and said, with a writhing attempt to smile: "Was there truth, thinkest thou, in the legend, that Guenever was false to King Arthur?" "No," answered the bard, divining his lord's thought, "for Guenever survived not the King, and they were buried side by side in the Vale of Avallon."
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