254

Macon: the Bridge 262

Beaune: the Hospital 267

[Illustration]

Introductory

Though the good city of Paris appears to be less in fashion than in
other days with those representatives of our race--not always, perhaps,
acknowledged as the soundest and stiffest--curious of foreign
opportunity and addicted to foreign sojourns, it probably none the less
remains true that such frequentations of France as may be said still to
flourish among us have as much as ever the wondrous capital, and the
wondrous capital alone, for their object. The taste for Paris, at all
events, is--or perhaps I should say was, alluding as I do, I fear, to a
vanished order--a taste by itself; singularly little bound up, of
necessity, with such an interest in the country at large as would be
implied by an equal devotion, in other countries, to other capitals.
Putting aside the economic inducement, which may always operate, and
limiting the matter to the question of free choice, it is sufficiently
striking that the free chooser would have to be very fond of England to
quarter himself in London, very fond of Germany to quarter himself in
Berlin, very fond of America to quarter himself in New York. It had, on
the other hand, been a common reflection for the author of these light
pages that the fondness for France (throughout the company of strangers
more or less qualified) was oddly apt to feed only on such grounds for
it as made shift to spread their surface between the Arc de Triomphe and
the Gymnase Theatre: as if there were no good things in the _doux pays_
that could not be harvested in that field. It matters little how the
assumption began to strike him as stupid, especially since he himself
had doubtless equally shared in the guilt of it. The light pages in
question are but the simple record of a small personal effort to shake
it off. He took, it must be confessed, no extraordinary measures; he
merely started, one rainy morning in mid-September, for the charming
little city of Tours, where he felt that he might as immediately as
anywhere else see it demonstrated that, though France might be Paris,
Paris was by no means France. The beauty of the demonstration--quite as
prompt as he could have desired--drew him considerably farther, and his
modest but eminently successful