MONT-GARGAN IN THE HEART OF FRANCE is a peaceful place, its 2,400-foot peak topped by the ruins of the neo-Gothic Notre-Dame de Bon Secours chapel. From here, a pathway moseys to a prairie-covered point overlooking the surrounding Limousin countryside, a pastoral realm of chestnut woods, thousand-year-old villages, and sparkling streams. The sun falls beneath undulating maroon hills along the Massif Central’s western edge, casting a magical glow in a landscape that appears straight out of a 19th-century Romantic painting.
“Guingouin used to picnic here, after the war,” Claudine Legouffe from the Châteauneuf-la-Forêt tourist office tells me. “He loved the view.”
I try to wrap my head around that—the legendary Resistance leader, Georges Guingouin, who headed a famed 1944 assault against the Nazis at this very spot, enjoying a picnic with a view? But that was decades after he had gone underground, in 1941, to organize groups of rural guerrilla fighters.
