And all this the French are doing, and if it is coming but slowly, so far as the country-side is concerned, it is most surely coming, and to-day no more delightful travel-ground is to be found in all the world than France, and Normandy and Brittany and Touraine in particular.
This, then, is one of the industries that is an important one in France, and the coming of the automobile and the revival of travel by road will do much for the increased prosperity of the genuine market-town inns of Normandy.
In the Seine valley, in the heart of Normandy, has sprung up a cotton and woollen manufacturing industry of immense proportions. Much of the wool is a local product, but large quantities of it in the raw state are brought from the river Plata; while at the wharves of Rouen are vast warehouses filled with cotton from the Southern States of America, ready to be worked into cloth by the busy looms of France.
The woollen mills of Elbeuf and Louviers are now turning out worsteds and cloth for men and women's clothing of a quality and quantity quite rivalling that of Bradford, in England, in the olden times.
As far back as 1780-90 Arthur Young wrote of a visit to a great woollen manufacturer of Louviers, where he saw "a fabric unquestionably the first woollen in the world, if success, beauty of fabric, and an inexhaustible invention to supply with taste all the cravings of fancy can give the merit of such superiority. Perfection goes no farther than the Vigonia cloths of M. Decretot." This, from an Englishman born and bred in the Midlands, is praise indeed.
[Illustration: _Harvest-time in Normandy_]
The country to the west of Evreux forms the very heart of Normandy. It is a region of rich farms, great prairies, and apple orchards, in which apple-trees are set out twenty-five or thirty to the acre. Nowhere more than in the Plain of St. André and the country district of Neubourg, which immediately environs Evreux, is there to be found anything more characteristically Norman.
Little by little great pasture-lands have been made into tilled fields, to the prosperity of the individual and the nation as well. Were the English farming peasants able and willing to work small holdings in England in the same way, who knows but what prosperity might come to the small farmer there?