r
conduits take it to plunging and swimming baths, to douches, and to
other medical contrivances. In the small single baths you receive the
water piping hot from the rock, at about one hundred degrees of
Fahrenheit; and you may lie there, bolling away--for a constant supply
of the same natural water keeps running into and through your bath--for
hours together, upon payment of _a franc_. The water costs nothing; the
building has been erected at the public expense, and the visitor
therefore enjoys this luxury at a moderate rate. For the poorer class of
patients gratuitous baths are provided; and in fact the gifts of nature
are here grudged to no one, but every man's wants may be gratified in a
liberal manner.

By four o'clock in the morning of a summer day, you may see a train of
ghost-like beings winding along the village street, clad in the simple
attire of a chemise, a blanket, and the eternal nightcap--lean,
sallow-faced, or crippled mortals, who have had the wise precaution to
undress at home, and not being afraid of shocking the wood-nymphs from
their propriety, sally forth to court the Goddess of Health. They
congregate in a dark cellar-like chamber, round an ample and steaming
pool, and then sink into it, to forget for a while all their pains and
maladies, and to enjoy that indescribably delightful sensation of having
the joints gently unscrewed and fresh oiled. Others, whose shoulders
and backs have known the pangs of lumbago and acute rheumatism, are put
under one of the douches; and down comes on them a discharge of the hot
fluid as if from the hose of a fire-engine, or as though shot out from
some bursting steam-boiler. Away fly the pains and troubles of humanity;
the rickety machine is put in order for that day at least, and
twenty-four hours of peaceful enjoyment is the almost invariable
consequence.

Later on in the morning, the fashionable visitors crawl forth to the
baths; but not so late that nine o'clock does not see them all safely
housed again after their ablutions, shaving or curling away with might
and main to get ready for a grand _dejeuner_. For here, as at Bath, not
only is it well to remember the inscription,--

"[Greek: ariston men udor]"

but it would be advisable to add,

"[Greek: Broma de megiston]:"

seeing that the appetite which is got up by all this early rising, and
steaming, and washing, is doomed to be satisfied in a way fully worthy
of the most refined French _cuisine