an extraordinarily typical little Frenchman, who struck me even more
forcibly than the wonders of the inner enceinte; and as I am bound to
assume, at whatever cost to my literary vanity, that there is not the
slightest danger of his reading these remarks, I may treat him as public
property. With his diminutive stature and his perpendicular spirit, his
flushed face, expressive protuberant eyes, high peremptory voice,
extreme volubility, lucidity and neatness of utterance, he reminded me
of the gentry who figure in the revolutions of his native land. If he
was not a fierce little Jacobin, he ought to have been, for I am sure
there were many men of his pattern on the Committee of Public Safety. He
knew absolutely what he was about, understood the place thoroughly, and
constantly reminded his audience of what he himself had done in the way
of excavations and reparations. He described himself as the brother of
the architect of the work actually going forward (that which has been
done since the death of M. Viollet-le-Duc, I suppose he meant), and this
fact was more illustrative than all the others. It reminded me, as one
is reminded at every turn, of the democratic conditions of French life:
a man of the people, with a wife _en bonnet_, extremely intelligent,
full of special knowledge, and yet remaining essentially of the people
and showing his intelligence with a kind of ferocity, of defiance. Such
a personage helps one to understand the red radicalism of France, the
revolutions, the barricades, the sinister passion for theories. (I do
not, of course, take upon myself to say that the individual I
describe--who can know nothing of the liberties I am taking with him--is
actually devoted to these ideals; I only mean that many such devotees
must have his qualities.) In just the _nuance_ that I have tried to
indicate here it is a terrible pattern of man. Permeated in a high
degree by civilisation, it is yet untouched by the desire which one
finds in the Englishman, in proportion as he rises in the world, to
approximate to the figure of the gentleman. On the other hand, a
_nettete_, a faculty of exposition, such as the English gentleman is
rarely either blessed or cursed with.

This brilliant, this suggestive warden of Carcassonne marched us about
for an hour, haranguing, explaining, illustrating as he went; it was a
complete little lecture, such as might have been delivered at the Lowell
Institute, on the manner in which a first-