t every one belonging to it is
extraordinarily polite--so unnaturally polite as at first to excite your
suspicion that the hotel has some hidden vice, so that the waiters and
chambermaids are trying to pacify you in advance. There was one waiter
in especial who was the most accomplished social being I have ever
encountered; from morning till night he kept up an inarticulate murmur
of urbanity, like the hum of a spinning-top. I may add that I discovered
no dark secrets at the Hotel de l'Univers; for it is not a secret to any
traveller to-day that the obligation to partake of a lukewarm dinner in
an overheated room is as imperative as it is detestable. For the rest,
at Tours there is a certain Rue Royale which has pretensions to the
monumental; it was constructed a hundred years ago, and the houses, all
alike, have on a moderate scale a pompous eighteenth-century look. It
connects the Palais de Justice, the most important secular building in
the town, with the long bridge which spans the Loire--the spacious,
solid bridge pronounced by Balzac, in "Le Cure de Tours," "one of the
finest monuments of French architecture." The Palais de Justice was the
seat of the Government of Leon Gambetta in the autumn of 1870, after the
dictator had been obliged to retire in his balloon from Paris and before
the Assembly was constituted at Bordeaux. The Germans occupied Tours
during that terrible winter: it is astonishing, the number of places
the Germans occupied. It is hardly too much to say that, wherever one
goes in certain parts of France, one encounters two great historic
facts: one is the Revolution; the other is the German invasion. The
traces of the Revolution remain in a hundred scars and bruises and
mutilations, but the visible marks of the war of 1870 have passed away.
The country is so rich, so living, that she has been able to dress her
wounds, to hold up her head, to smile again, so that the shadow of that
darkness has ceased to rest upon her. But what you do not see you still
may hear; and one remembers with a certain shudder that only a few short
years ago this province, so intimately French, was under the heel of a
foreign foe. To be intimately French was apparently not a safeguard; for
so successful an invader it could only be a challenge. Peace and plenty,
however, have succeeded that episode; and among the gardens and
vineyards of Touraine it seems only a legend the more in a country of
legends.

It was not, all the sa