Southwest from Mâcon, scarce thirty kilometres away, is a romantic little corner of old France known to the French themselves--those who know it at all--as the Pays de Lamartine. The little townlets of Milly and Saint-Pont were the cradle and the refuge of Lamartine, who so loved this part of France extending 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 framing 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 contemplation and admiration as many another more grand and more popular. Seated snugly at the foot of a wooded slope, the chateau, flanked with two great towers, lifts its serrated sky-line proudly above the reddish, ochre-washed walls (a colour dear to the folk of the Mâconnais) 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 entirely 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 Minister 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 dwelling." These words describe the Chateau de Lamartine very well to-day. Saint-Pont and the Chateau de Lamartine are well worth half a day of anyone who is found at Mâcon and not hard pressed to move on. Near Saint-Pont is the ancient Chateau de Noble, belonging, in 1558, to Nicolas de Pisa, and, in 1789, to Claude de la Beaune. It is not a splendid structure in any architectural sense, but a most curious and appealing one. Its chief distinction comes from its two pointed coiffed towers, one at either end of a high sloping gable.