Those of us who grew up with the French text-books of W.F.H. Whitmarsh will remember François, the old peasant with what would nowadays be regarded as a somewhat unhealthy interest in young children, and who lived in a small town called Mortagne. He had, I remember, a cat called Mistigri. There are towns called Mortagne all over France, but the best candidate for Whitmarsh's immortalisation is surely this one, in the centre of a region entirely devoted to peasant farming.

The Office de Tourisme is in the Halle aux Grains, one of those old French market buildings with arcades below and an assembly room above. The arcades are glassed in nowadays, and the hall above dignified with the name of theatre. Vast, over-modern spiral staircases lead the theatregoer to his place.

All these hilltop towns were fortified once, and Mortagne retains one of its gates, the Porte Saint-Denis. Next to it is the church of Notre-Dame, with a ridiculously solid Renaissance tower and a ridiculously over-decorated flamboyant vault. Mortagne seems to have achieved its greatest prosperity at just the wrong moment in the history of church architecture.

Behind the Hotel de Ville of Mortagne is, as one might expect, the Jardin Municipal, at the end of which an area partly given over to the local bus station boasts a balustrade overlooking what is announced as a panorama. Few things in this town disappoint, but the panorama is one of them. At the end of the garden also is a strange bronze by Frémiet, representing the infant Neptune on a horse. The inscription on the base assures us that Ceres is there as well, but I couldn't find her. The town's brochures also insist that the horse is a Percheron; if that's so, the Percheron has developed and doubled in weight since Frémiet's day (1824-1910). On closer inspection, this appears to be the same horse as the one bearing Joan of Arc in the Place des Pyramides in Paris, a far more impressive piece of work by the same hand. The proportions of this thing are all wrong; a tiny armoured putto with a vast trident on a life-size horse. Have we lost a full-size Ceres? Did she in some way offend the local worthies with her shameless fertility in their back garden, and was removed one midnight and her memory suppressed?

The nicest building I saw at Mortagne was a school; the Lycée-Collège Bignot, one of those organic structures which has been added to and rabbit-warrened over a period of centuries, with a charming entrance courtyard that would grace any chateau. Of course, education in France is as old as the nobility, and nowadays far more respected. Only fair that it should inhabit the same sort of buildings. In England, of course, where education is not respected at all, the place would have been condemned as unsuitable to its purpose years ago, and probably demolished to make way for something with a flat roof and brick corridors. There must be somebody who calls it progress.