In Part III of the series “5 days in Auvergne,” the author visits the hot springs town of Chatel-Guyon on the edge of the Regional Nature Park of the Volcanoes and reports on the town’s evolution over the past 160 years, the medical uses of its mineral water, its architectural heritage, and its plans for future development.

Part II of an exploration of spa towns, hot springs, Romansque churches, cattle pastures, cheese farms and villages in Auvergne. A brief history of economic developments relative to hot springs, by way of Royat.

Part 1 of a 5-part investigation in Auvergne (in the center of France) with a focus on spa towns. Part 1 includes the train ride from Paris to Clermont-Ferrand, the region’s capital, some highlights in the city, and a dinner of hearty regional fare accompanied by uncommonly awful music.

Now here’s a photography festival that’s right up our alley: the 22nd annual Travel Photography Festival of Bordeaux, Itinéraires des Photographes Voyageurs. The festival, running April 1-29, 2012, reveals a diversity of approaches to travel and place by French photographers who collectively present far-flung “itineraries” from Bordeaux to Tokyo to Africa to South America.

American photographer Quinn Jacobson, a specialist in early photographic techniques, has returned to Paris this spring with “The American West Portraits,” a showing of recent works at the gallery Centre Iris pour la photographie until June 19, 2012. The portraits in this show were created with the wet plate collodion process, a photographic technique developed in the 1850s.

At the bar of the 5-star Hotel Fouquet’s Barriere, just off the Champs-Elysees, I met Stephane Ginouves, winner of the first Meilleur
Ouvrier de France (Best Craftsman in France) competition for bartenders, and got his recipe for mixing with Singles.

John M. Edwards thinks the most exotic experience Americans have in Paris these days is ordering macaroons in a Piere Hermé boutique. But John remembers a time in the 1990s when, between girlfriends and apartments, Paris still rhymed with bewildering encounters and doomed relationships.

Vincent Dallet invites us into his pastry and chocolate school in Epernay to make the Champagne region’s famous “biscuits roses” or “biscuits roses de Reims,” known in English as champagne biscuits, and shares the recipe with our readers.

Some see them as graffiti, others view them as symbols of love placed at the heart of a romantic city. They are the love locks of Paris, attached to historic bridges over the River Seine. A France Revisited audio-slideshow.