teau, perhaps, was still being enlarged and embellished, when the flood came upon them and destroyed them all. The science of politics is the science of regulating progress and avoiding revolutions.

The hostess of the Lion d'Or is about to transfer her establishment to an inn of greater pretensions, to which, aware that the old chateau is an object of interest to visitors, she means to give the name of the Hotel de Montgomeri. On the wall of her café is a coarse medallion bust taken from a room in the chateau. She did not know whom it represented; and I dare say it was only my fancy that made me think I recognized a rude effigy of the once adored features of Marie Antoinette.

On

The plates at the Lion d'Or were adorned with humorous devices. one was a satire on the hypocritical rapacity of perfidious Albion. Two English soldiers were standing with their swords hidden behind their backs, and trying to coax back to them some Indians who were running away in the distance. "Come to us, dear little Indians; you know we are your best friends!" Suppose "Arabs" or "Mexicans" had been substituted for "Indians." To a Frenchman, 'our conquests in India are rapine; his own conquests in Algeria or Mexico are the extension of civilization by the "holy bayonets" (I forget whether the phrase is Michelet's or Quinet's) of the chosen people. Justice gives the same name (no matter which) to both.

At Ducie a handsome new church had just been built,-mainly, I was told, by the munificence of two maiden ladies. The congregation at vespers was large and apparently devout; and here the number of the men was in fair proportion to that of the women. In the churches of the cities, though the power of the clergy has everywhere increased of late, you see scarcely one man to a hundred women.

On the road, a shower drove me for refuge into the house of a peasant, who received me with the usual kindliness of the French peasantry, and,

when the shower was over, walked two or three miles with me on my way. The condition of these present proprietors is a subject of great interest to English economists, especially as we are evidently on the eve of a great controversy

perhaps a great struggle-respecting the law of succession to landed property in our own country. Not that any English economist would go so far as to advocate the French system of compulsory subdivision, which owes its existence in great measure to the policy of the first Napoleon, who took care, with the instinct of a true despot, to secure the solitary power of the throne against the growth of an independent class of wealthy proprietors. All that English economists contemplate is the abolition of primogeniture and entail. I must not found any conclusion on observations so partial and cursory as those which I was able to make; but I suspect that the French peasant is better off than the English laborer. He is not better housed, clothed, or fed; perhaps not so well housed, clothed, or fed.

He eats black bread, which the English peasant would reject, and clumps about in wooden shoes, which the English laborer would regard with horror; but this, according to statements which I have heard, and am inclined to trust, arises, generally speaking, not so much from indigence as from self-denying frugality, pushed to an extreme. The French peasant is the possessor of property, and has a passion, almost a mania, for acquisition. He saves money and subscribes to government loans, which are judiciously brought out in very small shares, so as to draw forth his little hoard, and thus bind him as a creditor to the interest of the Empire. The cottage of the peasant which I entered on my way to Ducie was very mean and comfortless, and the food which his hospitality offered me was of the coarsest kind. But he had a valuable mare and foal; his yard was full of poultry; and his orchard showed, for a bad season, a fair crop of apples. There are some large estates, the result frequently of

great fortunes made in trade. Not far from the place where the high-born lords of the Chateau de Montgomeri once reigned, a chocolate - merchant had bought broad lands, and built himself a princely mansion. I should have thought that the great proprietors would have crushed the small; but I was assured that the two systems went on very well side by side. But this is a matter for exact inquiry, not for casual remark. The population in France is stationary, or nearly so, while that of England increases rapidly; and this is an important element in the question, and itself raises questions of a difficult, perhaps of a disagreeable kind.

The cares of proprietorship must necessarily interfere with the lightness of heart once proverbially characteristic of the French peasant. Still, he appears to a stranger cheerful, ready to chat, and at least as inquisitive as to the stranger's history and objects as Americans are commonly believed to be. It would be a happy thing if the Irish peasant's lightness of heart, pleasant as it often is, could be interfered with in the same way. There is a certain gayety which springs from mere recklessness, and is sister to despair.

They are hard economical problems that we have to solve in this Old World, and terribly complicated by social and political entanglements; and there is no boundless West, with bread for all who want it, to assist us in the solution.

From Avranches you visit Mont St. Michel, not without difficulty, for you have to drive along over sands which are never dry, and over which the tide its advance can be seen even from the distant height of Avranches-rushes in with the speed of a race - horse. But you are well repaid. Mont St. Michel is one of the most astonishing and beautiful monuments of the Catholic and feudal age. Its fortifications, and the halls, church, and cloisters of the chivalrous and monastic fraternities of which it was the seat, rise like an efflorescence from the solitary cone of granite, surrounded at low tide by the

vast flat of sand, at high tide by the sea. Gothic architecture, to which we are apt to attach the notion of a sort of infantine unconsciousness, here seems consciously to revel and disport itself in its power, and to exult in investing the sea-girt rock with the playful elegance of a Cellini vase. It is a real jeu d'esprit of medieval art. The cloisters are a model of airy grace, enhanced by contrast with the massiveness of the fortress and the wildness of the scene. A strange life the monks must have led in their narrow boundaries. But they had the visits of the knights to relieve their dulness; and probably they were rude natures, not liable to the unhappiness which such seclusion would produce in men of cultivated sensibilities and active minds. Both monks and knights are gone long ago. But there are still six priests on the rock. I asked what they did. "Ils prient le bon Dieu."

In feudal times this sea-girt fortress was almost impregnable. Two ancient cannon lying at its gate show that the conqueror of Agincourt thundered against it in vain. Its weak point was want of water: it had none but the rainwater collected in a great cistern. In these days it could not hold out an hour against a single gun-boat.

It is a pleasant drive from Avranches to Vire; and Vire itself is a pleasant place, a quiet little town, placed high, in bracing air, and with beautiful walks round it. The comfortable, though unpretending, little Hôtel de St. Pierre stands outside the town, and commands a fine view. While I was at Vire, the fête day of the Emperor was celebrated

with profound apathy. Not a dozen houses responded to the préfet's invitation to illuminate. There being no troops in the town, and a military show being indispensable, there was a review of the firemen in military uniforms; a single brass cannon pestered us with its noise all the morning; the "veterans" of the Napoleonic army (every surviving drummer-boy of the army of 1815 goes by that name) were dismally paraded about, and the fire

men practised with their muskets, very awkwardly, at a mark which was so placed among the trees that they could hardly see it.

Why has not the government the sense to let these people alone? After all their revolutions and convulsions, they have sunk into perfect political indifference, and literally care not a straw whether they are governed by Napoleon, Nero, or Nebuchadnezzar. To be always appealing to them with Bonapartist demonstrations and manifestoes, is to awaken political sentiments, in them, and so to create a danger which does not exist.

If Louis Napoleon is in any peril, it is not from the republican or constitutional party, but from his own lavish expenditure, which begins to irritate the people. They are careless of their rights as freemen, but they are fond, and growing daily fonder, of money; and they do not like to be heavily taxed, and to hear at the same time that the Emperor is wasting on his personal expenses and those of his relatives and courtiers some six millions of dollars a year. Regard for economy is the only profession which distinguishes the addresses of the socalled opposition candidates from those of their competitors. I asked a good many people what they thought of the Mexican expedition. Not one of them objected to its injustice, but they all objected to its cost. "Cela mangera beaucoup d'argent," was the invariable reply. And in this point of view the government has committed what it would think much worse than any crime, — a very damaging blunder.

It does not appear that the Orleans family have any hold on the mind of the French people. When I mentioned their name, it seemed to produce no emotion, one way or the other. But if the marshals and grandees, who have hold of the wires of administration at the point where they are centralized, chose to make Napoleon III abdicate, (as they made Napoleon I. abdicate at Fontainebleau,) and to set up a king of the House of Orleans in his place,

they could probably do it; and they might choose to do it, if, by such blunders as the Mexican expedition, he seemed to be placing their personal interests in jeopardy.

Stopping to breakfast at Condé, on the way from Vire to Falaise, I fell in with the only Frenchman, with a single exception, who showed any interest in the affairs of America. Generally speaking, I was told, and found by experience, that profound apathy prevailed upon the subject. This gentleman, on learning that I had recently been in America, entered eagerly into conversation on the subject. But his inquiries were only about the prospects of cotton; and all I could tell him on that point was, that, if the growth of cotton was profitable, the Yankee would certainly make it grow.

The castle of Falaise is the reputed birthplace of the Conqueror. They even pretend to show you the room in which he was born. The existing castle, however, is of considerably later date. It is even doubtful, according to the best antiquaries, whether there were any stone castles at the date of his birth, or only earthworks with palisades. There is, however, one genuine monument of that time. You look down from the castle on the tanneries in the glen below, and see the women washing their clothes in the stream, as in the days when Robert the Devil wooed the tanner's daughter. Robert, however, must have had diabolically good eyes to choose a mistress at such a dis

tance.

Annexed to the castle is Talbot's Tower, a beautiful piece of feudal architecture, and a monument of a later episode in that long train of miserable wars between England and France, of which the Conqueror's cruel rapacity may be regarded as the spring; for the English conquests were an inverted copy and counterpart of his. But the Conqueror's crimes, like those of Napoleon I., were on the grandiose scale, and therefore they impose, like those of Napoleon, on the slavishness of mankind; while the petty bandit, though

endowed perhaps with the same powers of destruction and only lacking the ampler sphere, is buried under the gallows. The equestrian statue of William in the public place at Falaise prances, it has been remarked, close to the spot where rest the ashes of Walter and Biona, Count and Countess of Pontoise, poisoned, if contemporary accounts are true, by the same ambition which launched havoc and misery on a whole nation. They and the Conqueror were rival claimants to the sovereignty of Maine. They supped with the Conqueror one evening at Falaise, and next morning William was the sole claimant. The Norman, like the Corsican, was an assassin as well as a conqueror.

I must leave it to architects to describe the architectural glories of Caen. But I had no idea that the Norman style, in England grand only from its massiveness, could soar to such a height of beauty as it has attained in the Church of St. Stephen and the Abbaye aux Dames. I afterwards dic. homage again to its powers when standing before the august ruin of Jumièges. There is something peculiarly delightful in the freshness of early art, whether Greek or mediæval, and whether in architecture or in poetry, when you see the mind first beginning to feel its power over the material, and to make it the vehicle of thought. There is something, too, in all human works, which makes the early hope more charming than the fulfilment.

St. Stephen is the church of the Conqueror, as the Abbaye aux Dames is that of his Queen. There he lies buried. Every one knows the story of Ascelin demanding the price of the ground in which William was going to be buried, and which the tyrant had taken from him by force; and how, at last, the corpse of the Conqueror was thrust, amidst a scene of horror and loathing, into its grave. But Rex Invictissimus is the inscription on his tomb.

The spire of St. Pierre is very graceful; the body of the church, in the latest and most debased style of Gothic

architecture, stands signally contrasted with St. Stephen, - St. Stephen the simple vigor of the prime, St. Pierre the florid weakness of the decay.

Caen is a large city, and, of course, full of soldiers, who are as completely the dominant caste in France now, as the old noblesse were before the Revolution. To this the French have come after their long train of sanguinary revolutions, after all their visions of a perfect social state, after all their promises of a new era of happiness to mankind. “A light and cruel people," Coleridge calls them. And how lightly they turned from regenerating to pillaging and oppressing the world! They have great intellectual gifts, and still greater social graces; but, in the political sphere, they have no real regard for freedom, and will gladly lay their liberties at the feet of any master who will enable them to domineer over other nations. Napoleon I. is more than their hero: he is their God. Many of them, the soldiery especially, have no other object of worship. I saw in a shopwindow a print of Napoleon I., Napoleon II., and the Prince Imperial, all in military uniform and surrounded by the emblems of war. It was entitled, "The Past, the Present, and the Future of France." Military ambition has been the Past of France, is her Present, and seems too likely to be her Future. In some directions, she has promoted civilization; but, politically speaking, she has done, and probably will long continue to do, more harm than good to mankind.

I may say with truth, that, having seen America, and brought away an assured faith in human liberty and progress, I looked with far more serenity than I should otherwise have done on the Zouaves, swaggering, in the insolence of triumphant force, over the neglected ashes of Turgot and Mirabeau. I felt as though, strong as the yoke of these janizaries and their master looked, I had the death-warrant of imperialism in my pocket. There is a Power which made the world for other ends than these, and which will not suffer its ends

to give way even to those of the Bonapartes. But to all appearances there will be a terrible struggle in Europe, a struggle to which the old "wars of the mercenaries" were a trifling affair, - before the nations can be redeemed from subjection to these armed hordes and the masters whom they obey.

From Caen I visited Bayeux,—a sleepy, ecclesiastical town with a glorious cathedral, which, however, shows by a huge crack in the tower that even such edifices know decay. Gems of the Norman style are scattered all round Caen and Bayeux; and one of the finest is the little church of St. Loup, in the environs of Bayeux.

I found that the old French officebook had been completely banished from the French churches by the Jesuit and Ultramontane party, and the Roman (though much inferior, Roman Catholics tell me, as a composition) everywhere thrust into its place. The people in some places recalcitrated violently; but the Jesuits and Ultramontanes triumphed. The old Gallican spirit of independence is extinct in the French Church, and its extinction is not greatly to be deplored; for it tended not to a real independence, but to the substitution of a royal for an ecclesiastical Pope. Louis XIV. was quite as great a spiritual tyrant as any Hildebrand or Innocent, and his tyranny was, if anything, more degrading to the soul. In fact, the Ultramontane French Church, resting for support on Rome, may be regarded by the friends of liberty, with a qualified complacency, as a check, though a miserable one, on the absolute dominion of physical force embodied in the Emperor.

The Bayeux tapestry, representing the expedition of William the Conqueror, is curious and valuable as an historical monument, though it cannot be proved to be contemporary. As a work of art it is singularly spiritless, and devoid of merit of any kind. One of the fancy figures on the border reveals the indelicacy of the ladies (a queen, perhaps, and her handmaidens) who wrought it in a way which would be

startling to any one who had taken the manners and morals of the age of chivalry on trust.

The heat drove me from Caen before I had "done" all the antiquities and curiosities prescribed by the guidebook. Migrating to Lisieux, I found myself in such pleasant quarters that I was tempted to settle there for some days. The town is almost an unbroken assemblage of the quaintest and most picturesque old houses. There are whole streets without any taint of modern architecture to disturb the perfect image of the past. Two magnificent churches, one of them formerly a cathedral, rise over the whole; and there is a very pretty public garden, with its terraces, pastures, and green alleys. A public garden is the invariable appendage of a city in France, as it ought to be everywhere. We do not do half enough in England for the innocent amusement of the people.

At Lisieux we had a public fête. It is evidently a part of the business of the sous-préfets to get up these things as antidotes to political aspiration. Panem et circenses is the policy of the French, as it was of the Roman Cæsars. For two or three days beforehand, the people were engaged in planting little firtrees in the street before their doors, and decorating them and the houses with little tricolor flags. Larger flags (of which this little quiet town produced a truly formidable number) were hung out from all the houses. As the weather was very dry, the population was at work keeping the fir-trees alive with squirts. The fête consisted of a horse and cattle show, in which the Norman horses made a very good display; the inevitable military review, which, Lisieux being as happily free from soldiery as Vire, was here, too, performed by the firemen; the band of a regiment of the line, which had been announced as a magnificent addition to the festivities, by a special proclamation of the sous-préfet; balloons not of the common shape, but in the shape of dogs, pigs, and grotesque human figures, a gentleman and lady waltzing,