re world of French officialdom had
to be upheaved from its foundations in order to accomplish it.

Our route lay through Lyons to Marseilles. At Lyons I remember only the
enormous hotel where we slept the first night, with corridors wandering
like interminable streets, up-stairs and down, turning corners,
extending into vistas, clean-swept, echoing, obscure, lit only by the
glimmering candle borne by our guide. We seemed to be hours on our
journey through these labyrinths; and when at last we reached our rooms,
they were so cold and so unwarmable that we were fain to journey back
again, up and down, along and athwart, marching and countermarching past
regiments of closed doors, until at length we attained the region of
the hotel dining-saloon, where it was at least two or three degrees
less cold than elsewhere. After dinner we had to undertake a third
peregrination to bed, and a fourth the next morning to get our train.
The rooms of the hotel were on a scale suited to the length of the
connecting thoroughfares, and the hotel itself stood hard by a great,
empty square with a statue in the middle of it. But the meals were not
of a corresponding amplitude. And I think it was at the railway station
of this town that the loss of the trunk was discovered.

The region from Lyons to Marseilles, along the valley of the Rhone, with
the lower ranges of the Alps on our left hand, was much more picturesque
than anything France had shown us hitherto. Ancient castles crowned
many of the lower acclivities; there were villages in the vales, and
presently vineyards and olive groves. The Rhone, blue and swift as its
traditions demanded, kept us close company much of the way; the whole
range of country was made for summer, and the wintry conditions under
which we saw it seemed all the more improper. It must have been near
midnight when our train rolled into the station at Marseilles, and my
pleasure in "sitting up late" had long become stale.

The sun shone the next morning, and, being now in the latitude of
Florence and such places, it could not help being hot, though the shaded
sides of the streets were still icy cold; and most of the streets were
so narrow that there was a great deal of shade. The whole population
seemed to be out-of-doors and collecting in the sun, like flies, a very
animated and voluble population and of a democratic complexion; the
proportion of poor folks was noticeable, and the number of women, who
seemed to camp