_Bons vivants_ will revere Pont l'Evêque for its cheeses. Situated in the midst of the District of Auge, its pastures are very fertile, and accordingly its milk products are justly celebrated. Rich pasturage and great orchard enclosures, with hedges of willow so thick as to form a barrier as impassable as barbed wire, indicate the source of prosperity round about, with here and there a modest château half-hidden by the trees.
In the neighbouring Château of Bonneville William the Conqueror frequently resided.
The ancient market and the old houses of wood lend an air of antiquity to the general aspect of this rather more than usually lively country town.
In the Touques forest, which is an exceedingly fashionable driveway in summer for the gay folk of Trouville, is the Château d'Agnesseau, which dates from the reign of Louis XIII. At the cross-roads of Croix-Sonnet one comes to a vast plateau set out with orchards and fruit-gardens, while the forest itself, as one enters it by road from Trouville, offers thirty or more kilometres of beautiful tree-lined roadways, which must be refreshing to those dulled and jaded with the stone pavements and hot sands of Trouville-Deauville.
At the St. Philibert is a statue framed with verdure, erected by the wood-choppers of the forest to Notre Dame des Bois.
One makes his way from Honfleur to Trouville by a _corniche_ road, which is a marvel among all similar roads in the north of Europe.
In a way, it reminds one of the famous _corniche_ from Nice to Cape Martin on the Riviera, but so far as it goes it is a superb, though perilously planned, roadway running along the very face of the cliff, which blankets the coast-line for so great a part of the Norman shore. Its fifteen kilometres make an exceedingly picturesque drive, with charming snap-shots of sea and shore at nearly every turn.
The Hôtel St. Simon and its ancient farm and _cour_, which has been so often painted by artists (immortalized, one may say, by Monet), is passed on the right, and for a half-dozen kilometres or more one is within sight and sound of the sea and its sands.
The only town of any magnitude whatever passed is Cricqueboeuf, which has a celebrated vine-grown church dating from the twelfth century, and an old manor-house which is unusually pretentious.