_porte-cochere_, and you climbed a vast black stone
staircase to get to your room) looked out on a dull square, surrounded
with other tall houses and occupied on one side by the theatre, a
pompous building decorated with columns and statues of the muses. Nantes
belongs to the class of towns which are always spoken of as "fine," and
its position near the mouth of the Loire gives it, I believe, much
commercial movement. It is a spacious, rather regular city, looking, in
the parts that I traversed, neither very fresh nor very venerable. It
derives its principal character from the handsome quays on the Loire,
which are overhung with tall eighteenth-century houses (very numerous
too in the other streets)--houses with big _entresols_ marked by arched
windows, classic pediments, balcony-rails of fine old iron-work. These
features exist in still better form at Bordeaux; but, putting Bordeaux
aside, Nantes is quite architectural. The view up and down the quays has
the cool, neutral tone of colour that one finds so often in French
water-side places--the bright greyness which is the tone of French
landscape art. The whole city has rather a grand, or at least an
eminently well-established, air. During a day passed in it of course I
had time to go to the Musee; the more so that I have a weakness for
provincial museums--a sentiment that depends but little on the quality
of the collection. The pictures may be bad, but the place is often
curious; and indeed from bad pictures, in certain moods of the mind,
there is a degree of entertainment to be derived. If they are tolerably
old they are often touching; but they must have a relative antiquity,
for I confess I can do nothing with works of art of which the badness is
of recent origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent
collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused
light, the musty odour, the mementos around you of dead fashions, the
snuffy custodian in a black skull-cap, who pulls aside a faded curtain
to show you the lustreless gem of the museum--these things have a mild
historical quality, and the sallow canvases after all illustrate
something. Many of those in the museum of Nantes illustrate the taste of
a successful warrior, having been bequeathed to the city by Napoleon's
marshal Clarke (created Duc de Feltre). In addition to these there is
the usual number of specimens of the contemporary French school, culled
from the annual Salons and pre