im, she hoped to gain a stronger hold over his
heart.

* * * * *

The park is really delightful. Alleys wind through the woods and
clusters of trees bend over the meandering stream. You can hear the
bubbling water and feel the coolness of the foliage. If we were
irritated by the bad taste displayed here, it was because we had just
left Clisson, which has a real, simple, and solid beauty, and after all,
this bad taste is not that of our contemporaries. But what is, in fact,
bad taste? Invariably it is the taste of the period which has preceded
ours. Bad taste at the time of Ronsard was represented by Marot; at the
time of Boileau, by Ronsard; at the time of Voltaire, by Corneille, and
by Voltaire in the day of Chateaubriand, whom many people nowadays begin
to think a trifle weak. O men of taste in future centuries, let me
recommend you the men of taste of to-day! You will laugh at their
cramps, their superb disdain, their preference for veal and milk, and
the faces they make when underdone meat and too ardent poetry is served
to them. Everything that is beautiful will then appear ugly; everything
that is graceful, stupid; everything that is rich, poor; and oh! how our
delightful boudoirs, our charming salons, our exquisite costumes, our
palpitating plays, our interesting novels, our serious books will all be
consigned to the garret or be used for old paper and manure! O
posterity, above all things do not forget our gothic salons, our
Renaissance furniture, M. Pasquier's discourses, the shape of our hats,
and the aesthetics of _La Revue des Deux Mondes!_

While we were pondering upon these lofty philosophical considerations,
our wagon had hauled us over to Tiffanges. Seated side by side in a sort
of tin tub, our weight crushed the tiny horse, which swayed to and fro
between the shafts. It was like the twitching of an eel in the body of a
musk-rat. Going down hill pushed him forward, going up hill pulled him
backward, while uneven places in the road threw him from side to side,
and the wind and the whip lashed him alternately. The poor brute! I
cannot think of him now without a certain feeling of remorse.

The road down hill is curved and its edges are covered with clumps of
sea-rushes or large patches of a certain reddish moss. To the right, on
an eminence that starts from the bottom of the dale and swells in the
middle like the carapace of a tortoise, one perceives high, unequal
walls,