I was ignorant of--that Nicholas Rollin, Chancellor of
Burgundy and founder of the establishment at Beaune, was the original of
the worthy kneeling before the Virgin in the magnificent John van Eyck
of the Salon Carre. All I could see was the court of the hospital and
two or three rooms. The court, with its tall roofs, its pointed gables
and spires, its wooden galleries, its ancient well, with an elaborate
superstructure of wrought iron, is one of those places into which a
sketcher ought to be let loose. It looked Flemish or English rather than
French, and a splendid tidiness pervaded it. The porter took me into
two

[Illustration: BEAUNE--THE HOSPITAL.]

rooms on the ground-floor, into which the sketcher should also be
allowed to penetrate, for they made irresistible pictures. One of them,
of great proportions, painted in elaborate "subjects" like a ball-room
of the seventeenth century, was filled with the beds of patients, all
draped in curtains of dark red cloth, the traditional uniform of these
eleemosynary couches. Among them the sisters moved about in their robes
of white flannel with big white linen hoods. The other room was a
strange, immense apartment, lately restored with much splendour. It was
of great length and height, had a painted and gilded barrel-roof, and
one end of it--the one I was introduced to--appeared to serve as a
chapel, as two white-robed sisters were on their knees before an altar.
This was divided by red curtains from the larger part; but the porter
lifted one of the curtains and showed me that the rest of it, a long,
imposing vista, served as a ward lined with little red-draped beds.
"C'est l'heure de la lecture," remarked my guide; and a group of
convalescents--all the patients I saw were women--were gathered in the
centre around a nun, the points of whose white hood nodded a little
above them and whose gentle voice came to us faintly, with a little
echo, down the high perspective. I know not what the good sister was
reading--a dull book, I am afraid--but there was so much colour and such
a fine, rich air of tradition about the whole place that it seemed to me
I would have risked listening to her. I turned away, however, with that
sense of defeat which is always irritating to the appreciative tourist,
and pottered about Beaune rather vaguely for the rest of my hour: looked
at the statue of Gaspard Monge, the mathematician, in the little _place_
(there is no _place_ in France too little to