Tournus has an artistic shrine of great moment and interest, although its architectural details comport little with the really dignified examples of mediæval architecture. It is the birthplace of the painter Greuze, and before its arcades rises a monument to his memory. The great painter of the idealist school was born here. In the local museum are nearly five hundred designs from his hand. Opposite Tournus, in mid-Saône, is a strip of flat island known as the Ile-de-la-Palme, a morsel of alluvial soil respected by centuries of spring floods which have passed it by on either side, and indeed, often over its surface. The Helvetians, quitting their country in ancient times, invaded Gaul and made use of the Ile-de-la-Palme to cross the Saône, aided by either pontoons or rafts. Centuries later, after the bloody battle of Fontenay, the son of Louis-le-Débonnaire held a conference on this isle with regard to the division of the conquered territory. Thus it is that the Ile-de-la-Palme in the Saône has something in common with that other historic island in the Bidassoa where France and Spain played a game of give and take in the sixteenth century. A short distance from the east bank of the Saône is Romenay in the heart of the Chalonnais. It is a relic of an ancient fortified city, a townlet to-day of less than six hundred inhabitants, though once, judging from the remains of its oldtime ramparts, much more extensive and influential. Saint Trivier-de-Courtes, like Romenay, has little more than a bare half a thousand of population to-day, though it was once a noble outpost planted by the Ducs de Savoie, the masters of Bresse, against the possible invasion of the Burgundians and the French from the north. At Bagé-le-Chatel, between Mâcon and Bourg, rises a grim reminder of the feudality. It is the silhouette of the fine old castle of the ancient Seigneurs de Bagé. Passing Mâcon by, and still following the Saône, one comes in a dozen or twenty kilometres to Thoissey, a town which has not been greatly in evidence these latter days. It is a somnolent little city of the ancient Principality of Dombes, that disputed ground of the Burgundians and the Savoyards in the middle ages. Only from the fact that it was the birthplace of Commandant Marchand of the ill-fated Faschoda expedition would it ever have been mentioned in the public prints of the last generation.