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the mind of the French people. When I mentioned their name, it seemed to produce no emotion, one way or the other. But if the marshals and grandees, who have hold of the wires of administration at the point where they are centralized, chose to make Napoleon III abdicate, (as they made Napoleon I. abdicate at Fontainebleau,) and to set up a king of the House of Orleans in his place, they could probably do it; and they might choose to do it, if, by such blunders as the Mexican expedition, he seemed to be placing their personal interests in jeopardy. Stopping to breakfast at Conde, on the way from Vire to Falaise, I fell in with the only Frenchman, with a single exception, who showed any interest in the affairs of America. Generally speaking, I was told, and found by experience, that profound apathy prevailed upon the subject. This gentleman, on learning that I had recently been in America, entered eagerly into conversation on the subject. But his inquiries were only about the prospects of cotton; and all I could tell him on that point was, that, if the growth of cotton was profitable, the Yankee would certainly make it grow. The castle of Falaise is the reputed birthplace of the Conqueror. They even pretend to show you the room in which he was born. The existing castle, however, is of considerably later date. It is even doubtful, according to the best antiquaries, whether there were any stone castles at the date of his birth, or only earthworks with palisades. There is, however, one genuine monument of that time. You look down from the castle on the tanneries in the glen below, and see the women washing their clothes in the stream, as in the days when Robert the Devil wooed the tanner's daughter. Robert, however, must have had diabolically good eyes to choose a mistress at such a distance. Annexed to the castle is Talbot's Tower,--a beautiful piece of feudal architecture, and a monument of a later episode in that long train of miserable wars between England and France, of which the Conqueror's cruel rapacity may be regarded as the spring; for the English conquests were an inverted copy and counterpart of his. But the Conqueror's crimes, like those of Napoleon I., were on the grandiose scale, and therefore they impose, like those of Napoleon, on the slavishness of mankind; while the petty bandit, though endowed perhaps with the same powers of destruction and only lacking the ampler sphere, is buried under the gallow
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