



i 



the: flower girls of northern France 



What woes their country bears, what sorrows and sufferings their fathers and mothers know, 



may their childish lives not realize ! 



duct and bridge, the engineers have sewn 

 the mountains together with their steel 

 bodkins and made possible comfortable 

 exploration for the least adventurous 

 traveler. 



REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE 



The geography of France has affected 

 the people as well as the climate and the 

 architecture. Though the old provincial 

 boundaries are gone long ago, the char- 

 acteristics the people of those former 

 divisions imbibed from the soil remain 

 the same, and in each lives a pride of 

 locality second to none, with idiosyncra- 

 sies of speech and custom and costume 



easily traced back to regional conditions 

 and peculiarities. In architecture we find 

 the explanation of some of the most re- 

 markable buildings of the country in the 

 geographical conditions of their loca- 

 tions. 



In the great plain of Toulouse, for ex- 

 ample, stone is not available, but there is 

 plenty of good clay. Consequently, the 

 Toulousans have wrought with brick, 

 rearing churches and palaces of the 

 noblest types by using the material at 

 hand, and adapting their style to their 

 means, instead of going far afield for 

 stone or marble and building structures 

 without a whit of local significance. 



393 



