en-draper, who
flourishes under the auspicious sign of the Mere de Famille; and above
his shop the tall front rises in five overhanging storeys. As the house
occupies the angle of a little _place_, this front is double, and the
black beams and wooden supports, displayed over a large surface and
carved and interlaced, have a high picturesqueness. The Maison d'Adam is
quite in the grand style, and I am sorry to say I failed to learn what
history attaches to its name. If I spoke just above of the cathedral as
"moderate," I suppose I should beg its pardon; for this serious charge
was probably prompted by the fact that it consists only of a nave,
without side aisles. A little reflection now convinces me that such a
form is a distinction; and indeed I find it mentioned, rather
inconsistently, in my note-book, a little further on, as "extremely
simple and grand." The nave is spoken of in the same volume as "big,
serious, and Gothic," though the choir and transepts are noted as very
shallow. But it is not denied that the air of the whole thing is
original and striking; and it would therefore appear, after all, that
the cathedral of Angers, built during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, is a sufficiently honourable church; the more that its high
west front, adorned with a very primitive Gothic portal, supports two
elegant tapering spires, between which, unfortunately, an ugly modern
pavilion has been inserted.

I remember nothing else at Angers but the curious old Cafe Serin, where,
after I had had my dinner at the inn, I went and waited for the train
which, at nine o'clock in the evening, was to convey me, in a couple of
hours, to Nantes--an establishment remarkable for its great size and its
air of tarnished splendour, its brown gilding and smoky frescoes, as
also for the fact that it was hidden away on the second floor of an
unassuming house in an unilluminated street. It hardly seemed a place
where you would drop in; but when once you had found it, it presented
itself, with the cathedral, the castle, and the Maison d'Adam, as one of
the historical monuments of Angers.

[Illustration]

Chapter xv

[Nantes]

If I spent two nights at Nantes, it was for reasons of convenience
rather than of sentiment; though indeed I spent them in a big circular
room which had a stately, lofty, last-century look--a look that consoled
me a little for the whole place being dirty. The high, old-fashioned inn
(it had a huge windy