ins perhaps a
little of the slight pedantry. That word, however, is scarcely in place;
I only mean that M. Dubois has made a visible effort, which has visibly
triumphed. Simplicity is not always strength, and our complicated modern
genius contains treasures of intention. This fathomless modern element
is an immense charm on the part of M. Paul Dubois. I am lost in
admiration of the deep aesthetic experience, the enlightenment of taste,
revealed by such work. After that I only hope that, Giuseppe Garibaldi
may have somewhere or other some commemoration as distinguished.

[Illustration]

Chapter xvi

[La Rochelle]

To go from Nantes to La Rochelle you travel straight southward across
the historic _bocage_ of La Vendee, the home of royalist bush-fighting.
The country, which is exceedingly pretty, bristles with copses,
orchards, hedges, and with trees more spreading and sturdy than the
traveller is apt to find the feathery foliage of France. It is true that
as I proceeded it flattened out a good deal, so that for an hour there
was a vast featureless plain, which offered me little entertainment
beyond the general impression that I was approaching the Bay of Biscay
(from which, in reality, I was yet far distant). As we drew near La
Rochelle, however, the prospect brightened considerably, and the railway
kept its course beside a charming little canal, or canalised river,
bordered with trees and with small, neat, bright-coloured and yet
old-fashioned cottages and villas, which stood back, on the farther
side, behind small gardens, hedges, painted palings, patches of turf.
The whole effect was Dutch and delightful; and in being delightful,
though not in being Dutch, it prepared me for the charms of La Rochelle,
which from the moment I entered it I perceived to be a fascinating
little town, a quite original mixture of brightness and dulness. Part of
its brightness comes from its being extraordinarily clean--in which,
after all, it _is_ Dutch; a virtue not particularly noticeable at
Bourges, Le Mans, and Angers. Whenever I go southward, if it be only
twenty miles, I begin to look out for the south, prepared as I am to
find the careless grace of those latitudes even in things of which it
may be said that they may be south of something, but are not southern.
To go from Boston to New York (in this state of mind) is almost as soft
a sensation as descending the Italian side of the Alps; and to go from
New York to Philadelp