From Vézelay, a natural belvedere , one see the landscape in a league eastward, very Burgundian up to there, changing aspect.

Morvan announces itself as one croup hardly stressed overhanging, but which contrasts by its uniformity, its dark tone with the calcareous country.

It rises slowly southward; from where only, seen from the basin of Autun, it presents the aspect of a chain.

The country whose differences become more pronounced is indeed one of these special countries which, for the farmer or the wine grower of “plain lands”, awaken the idea of a thankless life, and which the manners, the cultures, dialect constitute for him a foreign world.

It is not because the Morvan is considerable by its height nor by its stretch; but, piece put in nude of the primary massif, it sets against the beautiful cultures of the plains which border it the poverty of a siliceous ground, deprived from fertilized elements, less appropriate for the harvests and for the fattening of the cattle than for the trees and for the moors, for the brooms, for the big foxgloves, for the copses of beeches and of oaks.

It is not here the protruding of the peaks that put off the traffic: the Morvan, eroded since the most ancient ages, although subsequently temporarily invaded by diverse encroachments of the sea, does not have more than the platform of its old tops; it hardly presents to its surface croups of a wide relief and sometimes almost horizontal appearance.

Main roads, like Roman ways, had made no effort to set up on the convexity of the high parts. But what misses is the thing on which the face of a country really depends, because it leads to the settlement and the daily relations: the traffic of detail.

Between these croups there are only ravines or too narrow valleys; an infinity of small sources soak valleys and hollows, ooze in swamps sowed with alders and with rushes, flood the meadows, dig of deep ruts the rough paths, multiply brooks which we could  not formerly cross only on rough-hewn trunks or stones arranged across. It is what kept isolated these small farms or these hamlets between their covered paths, their ouches or small grounds of culture around houses, their hedges of trees and their brooks.