A cluster of five towns make up the Decazeville basin, traditionally known for their mining industry. See model mines at Cransac with its working spa at the Puèg que ars (‘mountain that burns’) and Aubin’s mine museum. The highlight is displayed in the cool interior of Decazeville’s 19th-century Church. French symbolist painter Gustave Moreau’s Way of the Cross (1863) is unsigned, but this didn’t stop author Marcel Proust discovering it, and waxing lyrical about the painting in his novel, Jean Santeuil:

“The little church in Decazeville… contained a set of admirable paintings by Moreau, a Descent from the Cross, which he had not signed and which virtually no one knew about, and was to be found there, since not all an artist’s masterpieces are in the same place. And Decazeville church was the unknown cemetery of this masterpiece, sleeping its eternal sleep as peacefully as the deceased whose names were on the stone outside the church… But one day, someone who had loved Moreau’s works would discover them and stand before these silent sumptuous graves and ask them for the secrets of the dead master’s life.”