himself
an emotion because more than five centuries ago, on French soil, one
rapacious Frenchman got the better of another. Edward was a Frenchman as
well as John, and French were the cries that urged each of the hosts to
the fight. French is the beautiful motto graven round the image of the
Black Prince as he lies for ever at rest in the choir of Canterbury: _a
la mort ne pensai-je mye_. Nevertheless, the victory of Poitiers
declines to lose itself in these considerations; the sense of it is a
part of our heritage, the joy of it a part of our imagination, and it
filters down through centuries and migrations till it titillates a New
Yorker who forgets in his elation that he happens at that moment to be
enjoying the hospitality of France. It was something done, I know not
how justly, for England; and what was done in the fourteenth century for
England was done also for New York.

[Illustration]

Chapter xviii

[Angouleme]

If it was really for the sake of the Black Prince that I had stopped at
Poitiers (for my prevision of Notre Dame la Grande and of the little
temple of St. John was of the dimmest), I ought to have stopped at
Angouleme for the sake of David and Eve Sechard, of Lucien de Rubempre
and of Madame de Bargeton, who when she wore a _toilette etudiee_
sported a Jewish turban ornamented with an Eastern brooch, a scarf of
gauze, a necklace of cameos, and a robe of "painted muslin," whatever
that may be; treating herself to these luxuries out of an income of
twelve thousand francs. The persons I have mentioned have not that
vagueness of identity which is the misfortune of historical characters;
they are real, supremely real, thanks to their affiliation to the great
Balzac, who had invented an artificial reality which was as much better
than the vulgar article as mock-turtle soup is than the liquid it
emulates. The first time I read "Les Illusions Perdues" I should have
refused to believe that I was capable of passing the old capital of
Anjou without alighting to visit the Houmeau. But we never know what we
are capable of till we are tested, as I reflected when I found myself
looking back at Angouleme from the window of the train just after we had
emerged from the long tunnel that passes under the town. This tunnel
perforates the hill on which, like Poitiers, Angouleme rears itself, and
which gives it an elevation still greater than that of Poitiers. You may
have a tolerable look at the cathedral with