prattle of
foreign guides, seemed to me not so much a well-conned lesson, as the
genuine overflowing of such a disposition as honest Thady M'Quirk's. His
interest in the persons and events of which he spoke, appeared as warm
and genuine as his _naivete_ was amusing and we took leave of him with a
strong feeling of good will towards himself and his little clean inn.

[Footnote 20: Eighty feet by twenty-four, according to a measurement
made previous to the burning of the castle.]

[Footnote 21: Pour entrer au vestibule (says the same letter which I
quoted before, written before the Revolution) on monte par un escalier,
car les appartemens sont tous au premier. Il y a quatre beaux salons,
qui s'appellent la salle du roi, la salle de la reine, la salle des
eveques, et la galerie: le reste de la maison, qui est vaste, est
distribuee en divers appartemens, dont chacun est compose d'une chambre
a coucher, un grand cabinet, et un cabinet a toilette.]

[Footnote 22: Vide Cooke's Views.]

It is as needless to apologize for devoting a whole chapter to local
circumstances connected with Madame de Sevigne's life, as it would be to
detail the well-known social virtues which have erected this amiable and
unpretending woman into a sort of household deity in the eyes of so
large a class of persons, while the Lauzuns, the Montespans, and other
gay and brilliant favourites of that period, are only recollected with
disgust.

CHAP. VI.

ORANGE--AVIGNON.

OUR road to La Palud lay along the rocky vale first discovered from the
heights above Chateau Grignan, which in fact is not so much a vale as a
high plateau of ground enclosed between hills, like many parts of
Castille. To the latter country, indeed, the Comtat Grignan bears a
striking resemblance in the characteristic features which prevail
through the greater part of it. The insulated grey rocks have forced
themselves through the starved soil, like projecting bones; the parched
fields are more full of pebbles than corn; and the stunted evergreen
oaks, with their diminutive tough leaves of a dingy grey, though well
enough adapted to the inhospitable ground in which they grow, present an
appearance quite repugnant to our English ideas of verdure and
vegetation. The immediate neighbourhood of Chateau Grignan, indeed,
seems tolerably fertile, but it is difficult nevertheless to conceive
from whence the adequate supplies for the Count's immense table were
procured, or how the