y, it is doubtless because he had more
feeling than any of his contemporaries, and appreciates more keenly the
horror of this terrible epoch.

CHAPTER IV.

CONVENTS.--NEIGHBOURHOOD OF CONVENTS.--CONVENTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY.--CONTRAST WITH THE MIDDLE AGE.--THE DIRECTOR.--DISPUTE ABOUT
THE DIRECTION OF THE NUNS.--THE JESUITS TRIUMPH THROUGH CALUMNY.

An ingenuous and intellectual German lady told me one day that, when
she came with her husband to Paris for the first time, they had
wandered about in a grand but very dull quarter of the town, where they
made an infinite number of turns and windings without being able to
find their way. They had entered by a public garden, and found at last
another public garden that brought them out again at the quay. I saw
that she meant the learned and pious neighbourhood which contains so
many convents and colleges, and reaches from the Luxembourg to the
"Jardin des Plantes."

"I saw," said this lady, "whole streets with gardens, surrounded with
high walls, that reminded me of the deserted districts of Rome, where
the _malaria_ prevails, with this difference, that these were not
deserted, but, as it were, mysteriously inhabited, shut up,
mistrustful, and inhospitable. Other streets, exceedingly dark, were
in a manner buried between two rows of lofty grey houses with no front
aspect, and which showed, as it were in derision, their walled-up
windows, or their rivetted lattices, turned upside down, by which one
may see--nothing. We asked our way several times, and it was often
pointed out to us; but somehow or other, after having gone up and down
and up again, we ever found ourselves at the same point. Our _ennui_
and fatigue increased. We invincibly and fatally met with the same
dull streets, and the same dismal houses sullenly shut, which seemed to
look at us with an evil eye. Exhausted at last, and seeing no end to
the puzzle, oppressed more and more by a certain dispiriting influence
that seemed to ooze from these walls, I sat down upon a stone and began
to weep."

A dispiriting lassitude does indeed seize and oppress our hearts at the
very sight of these disagreeable-looking houses; the most cheerful are
the hospitals. Having been for the most part built or rebuilt in those
times of solemn dulness, the reigns of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV.,
there is nothing about them to remind us of the lovely art of the
_renaissance_. The latest memento of that art is th