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Updated: September 22, 2025
Calm seems completely restored. I talk to him of his beautiful native place. He was a baker in a village of Le Cantal. I passed through it once as a traveller in peace time. We recall the scent of the juniper-bushes on the green slopes in summer, and the mineral fountains with wonderful flavours that gush forth among the mountains. "Oh!" he exclaims, "I shall always see you!"
The Thuyère comes down from the Cantal mountains, and as it reaches Entraygues it spreads out over a broad smooth bed of pebbles, its water as clear as rock-crystal; and when the morning sun looks down upon it over the vine-clad hills, it is like something that has been seen in the happiest of dreams.
More attractive than the interior of the cheese-maker's hut often dark, ill-ventilated, and malodorous is the scene without, a wide prospect of pastoral, idyllic charm. The Cantal offers many a superb mountain panorama and grandiose scene. Nowhere is to be found more sweetness, graciousness and repose than in the valley of the Cere.
The aspect of the country changes as we quit the bright valley of the Aveyron, and enter the department of the Cantal at Capdenac, where we join the main line from Clermont-Ferrand to Toulouse. We just touch the department of the Lot at Figeac, a quaint town, birthplace of the great Orientalist Champollion, then enter the valley of the Cere, and are soon at Aurillac.
Its southern section, that of Mont Dore, the Cantal, and the Haute Loire, is characterised by magnificent valleys, traversing plateaux of volcanic lava, and exhibiting the results of river erosion on a grand scale; while its northern section, that of the Puy de Dôme, presents to us a varied succession of volcanic crater-cones and domes, with their extruded lava-streams, almost as fresh and unchanged in form as if they had only yesterday become extinct.
A Greek settlement, its fine old church was in part constructed of the materials of a temple to Diana of Ephesus. Agde possesses interest of another kind. It is built of lava, the solitary peak rising behind it, called Le Pic de St. Loup, being the southern extremity of that chain of extinct volcanoes beginning with Mont Mezenc in the Cantal. A pathetic souvenir is attached to this lonely crater.
I had been walking for some time in the department of the Cantal, but the ferry landed me on the Aveyron side of the river. I had now seriously to consider the shortest way to Conques, separated from me by very rough hill country and an uncertain number of miles.
A lover will spend two whole months, if necessary, in planning the construction of the mouse-trap. I have seen the most cunning men on earth thus taken in. There was a certain retired lawyer of Normandy. He lived in the little town of B , where a regiment of the chasseurs of Cantal were garrisoned.
But the chief point of interest is the chain of volcanic crater-cones and dome-shaped eminences which rise from the plateau, amongst which the Puy de Dôme towers supreme. Their individual forms stand out in clear and sharp relief against the western sky, and gradually fade away towards the south into the serried masses of Mont Dore and Cantal, around whose summits the evening mists are gathering.
Historically very little is known of the Schallaun castle, which is to its advantage, as when these castles are mentioned in chronicles, it is to record some deed of violence done by the occupants. In 1472 it belonged to the knightly family of Sauran, but they sold it. Perhaps the nearest approach to the Puxerloch castle in France is the Roc de Cuze near Neussargues in Cantal.
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