CHAPTER XVI.
RODEZ, VIC-SUR-CERE REVISITED.--A BREAKFAST ON THE BANKS OF THE
SAONE.


In future, tourists bound northward will be able to reach Neussargues
on the Clermont and Nimes railway by a direct line from Mende and St.
Flour. As this new line is not yet completed, and I had set my heart
upon revisiting Rodez and Vic-sur-Cere, we took the more circuitous
route, going over the same ground I had traversed the year before. It
was once my ambition to visit one by one every noteworthy spot in
France. The appetite grows by what it feeds on, and now I never see any
striking place without making up my mind to see it twice.

Great was my delight at Rodez to find a bright, cheerful, spick and
span hotel, newly opened since last year. The time-honoured house of
Biney has two credentials worthy of mention--very low charges and good
food. Its modern rival has greater claims upon the wayfarer's
gratitude--pleasant, wholesome rooms, neat chambermaids, and the kind
of modernization so necessary to health and comfort. The Hotel Flouron,
too, is presided over by a lady, and when we have said this we have
implied a good deal. A grand old town is the capital of the Aveyron. We
must see it again and again to realize its superb position and the
unique splendour of its cathedral, towering over the wide landscape as
our own Ely Cathedral over the eastern plains. To-day it was not
flushed with the flaming red and gold of sunset, as when first I saw it
a year before, but its aspect was perhaps all the more grandiose for
sombre colouring.

From both extremities of the town we obtain vast panoramas; we look