both of the church
and of the world; and if I too had not been afraid of his colleague, who
read the _Figaro_ as seriously as if it had been an encyclical, I should
have entered into conversation with him.

All this while I was getting on to Bordeaux, where I permitted myself to
spend three days. I am afraid I have next to nothing to show for them,
and that there would be little profit in lingering on this episode,
which is the less to be justified as I had in former years examined
Bordeaux attentively enough. It contains a very good hotel--an hotel not
good enough, however, to keep you there for its own sake. For the rest,
Bordeaux is a big, rich, handsome, imposing commercial town, with long
rows of fine old eighteenth-century houses which overlook the yellow
Garonne. I have spoken of the quays of Nantes as fine, but those of
Bordeaux have a wider sweep and a still more architectural air. The
appearance of such a port as this makes the Anglo-Saxon tourist blush
for the sordid water-fronts of Liverpool and New York, which, with their
larger activity, have so much more reason to be stately. Bordeaux gives
a great impression of prosperous industries, and suggests delightful
ideas, images of prune-boxes and bottled claret. As the focus of
distribution of the best wine in the world, it is indeed a sacred
city--dedicated to the worship of Bacchus in the most discreet form. The
country all about it is covered with precious vineyards, sources of
fortune to their owners and of satisfaction to distant consumers: and as
you look over to the hills beyond the Garonne you see them, in the
autumn sunshine, fretted with the rusty richness of this or that
immortal _clos_. But the principal picture, within the town, is that of
the vast curving quays, bordered with houses that look like the _hotels_
of farmers-general of the last century, and of the wide, tawny river,
crowded with shipping and spanned by the largest of bridges. Some of the
types on the water-side are of the sort that arrest a sketcher--figures
of stalwart, brown-faced Basques, such as I had seen of old in great
numbers at Biarritz, with their loose circular caps, their white
sandals, their air of walking for a wager. Never was a tougher, a harder
race. They are not mariners nor watermen, but, putting questions of
temper aside, they are the best possible dock-porters. "Il s'y fait un
commerce terrible," a _douanier_ said to me, as he looked up and down
the interminable d