Category: Travel Writing
We good Americans - I say it without presumption - are too apt to think that France is Paris, just as we are accused of being too apt to think that Paris is the celestial city. This is by no means the case, fortun- ately for those persons who take an interest in modern Gaul, a...
Fortunately, it did not rain every day (though I believe it was raining everywhere else in the depart- ment); otherwise I should not have been able to go to Villeneuve and to Va...
16. Chapter 16About four miles from Arles, as you drive north- ward toward the Alpilles, of which Alphonse Daudet has spoken so often, and, as he might say, so in- timately, stand on a hill t...
7. Chapter 7The cathedral is not the only lion of Bourges; the house of Jacques Coeur is an object of interest scarcely less positive. This remarkable man had a very strange history, and he...
11. Chapter 11The only Roman remains at Toulouse are to be found in the museum, - a very interesting establish- ment, which I was condemned to see as imperfectly as I had seen the Capitol. It...
2. Chapter 2I have mentioned the church of Saint Martin, which was for many years the sacred spot, the shrine of pilgrimage, of Tours. Originally the simple burial- place of the great apost...
10. Chapter 10The most charming thing at Poitiers is simply the Promenade de Blossac, - a small public garden at one end of the flat top of the hill. It has a happy look of the last century (...
15. Chapter 15Beaucaire used to be the scene of a famous fair, the great fair of the south of France. It has gone the way of most fairs, even in France, where these delight- ful exhibitions h...
6. Chapter 6The consequence of my leaving to the last my little mention of Loches is that space and opportunity fail me; and yet a brief and hurried account of that extra- ordinary spot wou...
18. Chapter 18The collection consists of but two objects, but these objects are so fine that I will let the word pass. One of them is a triumphal arch, supposedly of the period of Marcus Aure...
13. Chapter 13The gem of the place is the Musee Fabre, one of the best collections of paintings in a provincial city. Francois Fabre, a native of Montpellier, died there in 1837, after having...
5. Chapter 5But attention was not long in coming round to the charming structure that presently rose before us. The pale yellow front of the chateau, the small scale of which is at first a...
3. Chapter 3Pass beneath it into the court, and the sixteenth century closes round you. It is a pardonable flight of fancy to say that the expressive faces of an age in which human passions...
14. Chapter 14Behind the straight walls and the quiet gates the little town has not crumbled, like the Cite of Carcas- sonne. It can hardly be said to be alive; but if it is dead it has been...
1. Chapter 1We good Americans - I say it without presumption - are too apt to think that France is Paris, just as we are accused of being too apt to think that Paris is the celestial city....
4. Chapter 4On the whole, Chambord makes a great impression; and the hour I was, there, while the yellow afternoon light slanted upon the September woods, there was a dignity in its desolat...
8. Chapter 8I am shocked at finding, just after this noble de- claration of principles that in a little note-book which at that time I carried about with me, the celebrated city of Angers i...
9. Chapter 9To go from Nantes to La Rochelle you travel straight southward, across the historic _bocage_ of La Vendee, the home of royalist bush-fighting. The country, which is exceedingly...
12. Chapter 12I have mentioned that my obliging friend the _amoureux-fou_ handed me over to the door-keeper of the citadel. I should add that I was at first committed to the wife of this func...
19. Chapter 19In the centre lies Philibert-le-Bel, a figure of white marble on a great slab of black, in his robes and his armor, with two boy-angels holding a tablet at his head, and two mor...