File:Castles and chateaux of old Burgundy and the border provinces (1909) (14597657880).jpg

Identifier: castleschateauxo00mans (find matches)
Title: Castles and chateaux of old Burgundy and the border provinces
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Mansfield, Milburg Francisco, 1871- (from old catalog)
Subjects: Castles
Publisher: Boston, L. C. Page & company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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Text Appearing Before Image:
166 Castles and Chateaux of Old Burgundy

martine. The little townlets of Milly and Saint-
Pont were the cradle and the refuge of Lamar-
tine tine, who so loved this part of France extend-
ing from the Loire to Lac Leman and the Alps.
The political world of the capital, into whose
vortex the great litterateur was irresistibly
drawn, had not a tithe of the effect upon his
character as compared with that evoked by the
solitudes of his Burgundian patrie and his
Alpes de Chambéry.
Milly, here in the midst of the opulent plains
and hillsides of Burgundy, is a spot so calm
and so simply environed that one can not but
feel somewhat of the inspiration of the man
who called it his " chère maison."
A half a dozen kilometres from Milly is
Saint-Pont surrounded by a magnificent fra-
ming of rounded summits forming one of those
grandiose landscapes of which Lamartine so
often wrote:

" Oui, l'homme est trop petit, ce spectacle l'écrase."

Here is the Chateau de Lamartine, not a
tourist sight by any means, at least not an
over-done one, but a shrine as worthy of con-
templation and admiration as many another
more grand and more popular.
Seated snugly at the foot of a wooded slope,
Text Appearing After Image:

Mâcon, Cluny and the Charolais 167

the chateau, flanked with two great towers,
lifts its serrated sky-line proudly above ther
eddish, ochre-washed walls (a colour dear to
the folk of the Maconnais) high above the level
of the roofs of the town below.
A more massive square tower sets further to
the rear, and a tourelle, with a pointed candle-
snuffer roof, accentuates the militant aspect of
the edifice, though indeed its claims rest en-
tirely on the arts of peace to the exclusion of
those of war.
Here, in the family chateau, Alphonse-Marie-
Louis-de-Lamartine passed the happiest years
of his life. This was at a time when the pomp
of power which he afterwards tasted as Minis-
ter of Foreign Affairs, after the abdication of
Louis Philippe, had no attraction for him.

" Il est sur la colline
Une blanche maison,
Une tour la domine,
Un buisson d'aubepine
Est tout son horizon."

As Lamartine himself wrote: "Nothing here
will remind one of luxury; it is simply the
aspect of a great farm where the owners live
the simple life in a great block of a silent dwell-
ing." These words describe the Chateau de
Lamartine very well to-day.

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