vicars and canons
visit each other and dine out. With the exception of a few apostolic
characters the one hundred and thirty-one bishops stay at home as
little as they can; nearly all of them being nobles, all of them men of
society, what could they do out of the world, confined to a provincial
town? Can we imagine a grand seignior, once a gay and gallant abbe and
now a bishop with a hundred thousand livres income, voluntarily
burying himself for the entire year at Mende, at Comminges, in a paltry
cloister? The interval has become too great between the refined, varied
and literary life of the great center, and the monotonous, inert,
practical life of the provinces. Hence it is that the grand seignior who
withdraws from the former cannot enter into the latter, and he remains
an absentee, at least in feeling.

A country in which the heart ceases to impel the blood through its veins
presents a somber aspect. Arthur Young, who traveled over France between
1787 and 1789, is surprised to find at once such a vital center and
such dead extremities. Between Paris and Versailles the double file of
vehicles going and coming extends uninterruptedly for five leagues from
morning till night.[1333] The contrast on other roads is very great.
Leaving Paris by the Orleans road, says Arthur Young, "we met not one
stage or diligence for ten miles; only two messageries and very few
chaises, not a tenth of what would have been met had we been leaving
London at the same hour." On the highroad near Narbonne, "for thirty-six
miles," he says, "I came across but one cabriolet, half a dozen carts
and a few women leading asses." Elsewhere, near St. Girons, he notices
that in two hundred and fifty miles he encountered in all, "two
cabriolets and three miserable things similar to our old one-horse post
chaise, and not one gentleman." Throughout this country the inns are
execrable; it is impossible to hire a wagon, while in England, even in
a town of fifteen hundred or two thousand inhabitants, there are
comfortable hotels and every means of transport. This proves that in
France "there is no circulation." It is only in very large towns that
there is any civilization and comfort. At Nantes there is a superb
theater "twice as large as Drury-Lane and five times as magnificent. Mon
Dieu! I cried to myself, do all these wastes, moors, and deserts, that I
have passed for 300 miles lead to this spectacle?. . . In a single leap
you pass from misery to extrav