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