An exact boundary begins again in the neighborhood of Saverne, and follows the crest of the Vosges Mountains, the valleys and Alsatian plain to the east of which seem never to have been impressed with the Gallic type of culture; but whether under the dominion of the government at Paris, or autonomous, or under the dominion of the government of Berlin, or of foreign or of native lords and bishops, to have been other than Gallic in tem per, and resembling in historic times any one of the minor subdivisions of tribal Germany.
Across the gap of Belfort the line runsjust barely including that fortress a few hundred yards to the east of whose town boundaries everything, from the aspect of agriculture to the gait of the peasants, ceases to be French.
The line next proceeds to the peculiar iso lated peak known as the Mont Terrible, runs down the middle of the Jura valleys, and from the end of that range of mountains can again with difficulty be determined; the great mass of mountains which Iies between the gap of Geneva and the Mediterranean may justly be regarded as less French in character than the Italian valleys upon the farther sides. French influence and culture and the march of French armies have more deeply affected the Val d'Aoste, for instance, than such remote villages of Savoy as Lagrave. But one may say in general that it is safe to exclude Geneva and to include most of the mountain mass lying south of that town until the Mediterranean is reached. The shores of that sea continue the boundary so far as the neighborhood of Perpignan, and though the Catalan language and the Provencal, the highly differentiated climate and the long Roman tradition of this belt make it a thing somewhat apart in France, yet we must recog nize the sea as the boundary of Gaul with the exception of a still remaining foreign influence in the town of Marseilles.
In the neighborhood of Perpignan as I have said, and a little before the Pyrenees are reached, the limit which we are defining turns westward and follows the northern base of the hills. So thorough has been the work of French governments since the Revolution, that the val leys running up from that base to the crest of the Pyrenees are, with one exception, now completely transformed in their superficial aspect and seem as French as any other part of the Country; but no one well acqfiainted as is the present writer with the Pyrenean chain can question the identity of the inhabitants upon either slope. Beneath the surface of the
modern French system, the manner and culti vation of these valleys is a foreign thing. And the line which we are following may be said, for instance, to include the Canigou and Mont Louis, but not the French Cerdagne; Aix, but not the sources of the Aiege; Bagnieres but nothing beyond it; Tarbes, and perhaps Lourdes but nothing south of Lourdes, and so on all along the chain until, a few miles after the passage of the Adour, the total separate Basque country is reached, where the line strikes north east and reaches the point upon the Bay of Biscay from which we began to trace it.
It will thus be seen that the political bound aries of France do not exactly correspond to the territory which we are considering, and which as a whole represents the physical basis of the French nation. That territory overflows the political boundaries toward Belgium and Germany, and is within those boundaries in much of its southern and southeastern part as also in the Armorican Peninsula. And this lack of identity between the political and the real boundaries of Gaul has existed throughout recorded history. Thus the Romans took the convenient line of the Rhine upon the east, although the German tribal customs, dialect and general traditions have always existed in a wide belt upon the left bank of that river; and again the nominal suzerainty of the king of Paris (though that is hardly a test) for long excluded Bar-le-Duc, which is as French as Canterbury is English.
When the student sees upon the map of Europe the position occupied by this lateral, he may wonder how that position can be called in any way preponderant. It is ap parently but a fraction of the great European area, a fraction thrust far to the west, and occupying no central radiating position. The modern map, uninterpreted by history, and by the known effect of climate, leaves inexplicable the material cause of French preponderance. But an examination of these historical and climatic conditions goes far to explain it, and of the two the historical, which is the more important, should be taken first.