contain an effigy to a
glorious son); at the fine old porch--completely despoiled at the
Revolution--of the principal church; and even at the meagre treasures of
a courageous but melancholy little museum, which has been arranged--part
of it being the gift of a local collector--in a small hotel de ville. I
carried away from Beaune the impression of something mildly
autumnal--something rusty yet kindly, like the taste of a sweet russet
pear.

[Illustration: DIJON.]

[Illustration]

Chapter xl

[Dijon]

It was very well that my little tour was to terminate at Dijon, for I
found, rather to my chagrin, that there was not a great deal, from the
pictorial point of view, to be done with Dijon. It was no great matter,
for I held my proposition to have been by this time abundantly
demonstrated--the proposition with which I started: that if Paris is
France, France is by no means Paris. If Dijon was a good deal of a
disappointment, I felt therefore that I could afford it. It was time for
me to reflect, also, that for my disappointments, as a general thing, I
had only myself to thank. They had too often been the consequence of
arbitrary preconceptions produced by influences of which I had lost the
trace. At any rate, I will say plumply that the ancient capital of
Burgundy is wanting in character; it is not up to the mark. It is old
and narrow and crooked, and it has been left pretty well to itself: but
it is not high and overhanging; it is not, to the eye, what the
Burgundian capital should be. It has some tortuous vistas, some mossy
roofs, some bulging fronts, some grey-faced hotels, which look as if in
former centuries--in the last, for instance, during the time of that
delightful President de Brosses whose Letters from Italy throw an
interesting sidelight on Dijon--they had witnessed a considerable amount
of good living. But there is nothing else. I speak as a man who, for
some reason which he doesn't remember now, did not pay a visit to the
celebrated Puits de Moise, an ancient cistern embellished with a
sculptured figure of the Hebrew lawgiver.

The ancient palace of the dukes of Burgundy, long since converted into
an hotel de ville, presents to a wide, clean court, paved with
washed-looking stones, and to a small semicircular _place_, opposite,
which looks as if it had tried to be symmetrical and had failed, a
facade and two wings characterised by the stiffness, but not by the
grand air, of the early part of