n America and extensively followed, they knew no French
synonyms into which they could be translated. The landlord, not content
with the sign manual of Daniel Webster, affirming that all was right,
applied to an American friend for a translation of the inexplicable
professions, but I am not sure that he has even yet been fully
enlightened with regard to them.

I am off to-day (I hope) for Lyons and Italy.

XIX.

FRANCE, CENTRAL AND EASTERN.

LYONS, Tuesday, June 17, 1851.

I came out of Paris through the spacious _Boulevards_,[B] which, under
various second appellations, stretch eastward from the Madeleine Church
nearly to the barrier, and then bend southward, near the beautiful
column which marks the site and commemorates the fall of the Bastile, so
long the chief dungeon wherein Despotism stifled Remonstrance and tamed
the spirit of Freedom. Liberty in France is doomed yet to undergo many
trials--nay, is now enduring some of them--but it is not within the
compass of probability that another Bastile should ever rear its head
there, nor that the absolute power and abject servitude which it fitly
symbolized should ever be known there hereafter. Very near it on the
south lies the famous Faubourg St. Antoine, inhabited mainly by bold,
free-souled working-men, who have repeatedly evinced their choice to die
free rather than live slaves, and in whom the same spirit lives and
rules to-day. I trust that dire alternative will never again be forced
upon them, but if it should be there is no Bastile so impregnable, no
despotism so fortified by prescription, and glorious recollections, and
the blind devotion of loyalty, as those they have already leveled to the
earth.

The Paris Station of the Lyons Railway is at the eastern barrier of the
City. I received here another lesson in French Railroad management. I
first bought at the office my ticket for Chalons on the Saone, which is
the point to which the road is now completed. The distance is 243 miles;
the fare (first-class) $7.50. But the display of my ticket did not
entitle me to enter the passengers' sitting-room, much less to approach
the cars. Though I had cut down my baggage, by two radical
retrenchments, to two light carpet-bags, I could not take these with me,
nor would they pass without weighing. When weighed, I was required to
pay three or four sous (cents) for extra baggage, though there is no
stage-route in America on which those bags would not have p