The Gateway to France: Flanders, Artois, and Picardy

Just across the Channel lies a superb area of France that the British, in a desire to speed south of Paris, have unaccountably neglected. James Bentley's book aims to remedy this. This is a book about a region whose great cities (such as Amiens, which boasts the largest cathedral in Christendom, and Laon, which rises from its ramparts on a 181-metre hill) vie with more intimate spots like Jean-Jacques Rousseau's final retreat of Ermenonville and Raray, whose fantastic chateau inspired Jean Cocteau's celebrated film "La Belle et al Bete". From Agincourt to Dunkirk this part of France has been closely connected with Britain. The department of the Somme also bears the scars of the World War I, its great war memorials including that of the Canadians at Vimy ridge, whose environs are still pockmarked with crators and littered with unexploded mines. In this book James Bentley blends the history of the region with a taste of its gastronomic delights, along with detailed tours of cities, small towns, villages, forests and the luscious countryside of Flanders, Artois and Picardy. He also evokes the men and women who once lived there: La Fontaine at Chateau-Thierry; Alexandre Dumas at Villers-Cotterets; the chronicler Jean Froissart and the painter Antoine Watteau at Valenciennes; and the doomed poet Gerard de Nerval at Senlis. Countless out-of-the-way spots and chateaux which are open to the visitor are included in this guidebook.