number of children here is still less. I scarcely meet any.

Marriages are late, and very seldom take place until a house and a bit of
ground and some capital have been inherited or accumulated. Touraine is
the best specimen of the _petite culture_ that I have seen. The want of
wood makes it objectionable as a summer residence.

We are now suffering from heat. After eight in the morning it is too hot
to walk along the naked glaring roads, yet this is only the first week in
April.

_Saturday, April_ 8.--The sun has been so scorching during our two last
drives that we have given ourselves a holiday to-day, and only dawdled
about Tours.

We went first to the cathedral, which I never see without increased
pleasure. Though nearly four hundred years passed from its commencement
in the twelfth century to its completion in the fifteenth, the whole
interior is as harmonious as if it had been finished by the artist who
began it. I know nothing in Gothic architecture superior to the grandeur,
richness, and yet lightness of the choir and eastern apse. Thence we
went to St. Julien's, a fine old church of the thirteenth century,
desecrated in the Revolution, but now under restoration.

Thence to the Hotel Gouin, a specimen of the purely domestic architecture
of the fifteenth century, covered with elegant tracery and scroll-work in
white marble. We ended with Plessis-les-Tours, Louis XI.'s castle, which
stands on a flat, somewhat marshy, tongue of land stretching between the
Loire and the Cher. All that remains is a small portion of one of the
inner courts, probably a guard-room, and a cellar pointed out to us as
the prison in which Louis XI kept Cardinal de la Balue for several years.
The cellar itself is not bad for a prison of those days, but he is said
to have passed his first year or two in a grated vault under the
staircase, in which he could neither stand up nor lie at full length.

'It is remarkable,' said Tocqueville, 'that the glorious reigns in French
history, such as those of Louis Onze, Louis Quatorze, and Napoleon ended
in the utmost misery and exhaustion, while the periods at which we are
accustomed to look as those of disturbance and insecurity were those of
comparative prosperity and progress. It seems as if tyranny were worse
than civil war.'

'And yet,' I said, 'the amount of revenue which these despots managed to
squeeze out of France was never large. The taxation under Napoleon was
much less than under Lo