alloy," however, and certainly the old peasant woman up in the corner, with a bottle of red acid liquor and a stout staff of bread—the real staff of life—guarding-like a halberdier the well-closed windows, did not strike the eye as anything peculiarly attractive, excepting perhaps at times, when, from the red acid which she occasionally imbibed, her face took a sympathetic tone, and being completely encircled by her large frill, produced an effect which a rather extravagant imagination might regard as something like that of the setting sun in a nightcap. The girls were young—she, doubtless, at some time or other had been so too; but grey moustaches are not generally associated with any distinct type of beauty in ladies. Notwithstanding the aforesaid head-gear she certainly could not be pronounced cap-tivating as our punning friend said and, wonderful to say, she knew it!
Our train passed through Lisieux, where Henry II. was married to Eleanor of Guienne, and where the modern inhabitants are chiefly employed in the manufacture of horse clothing and general flannelry. Near this not very striking town, M. Guizot spends his summer months, and in it, by-the-by, Thomas à Becket passed his banishment in 1169. About four o'clock p.m. our train turned us out high and dry, bag and baggage, on to a lonely wooden platform in the midst of a dreary flat tract of country, compared with which Cambridgeshire is extremely steep and alpine.
"Où sommes-nous donc?" asked we.
"À Mezidon, m'sieu," said an official. "Deux heures d'attente."
We immediately left our luggage with this trusty man, set our watches by the clocks of the gare, pulled our hats with determination on to our heads, and walked desperately four miles straight along a dusty high road, then turned round and walked four miles back; by which time the train was ready to start again.
CHAPTER II.
LE MANS.—ANCIENT CITY BY NIGHT.—THE LUXURY OF BATHING.—CATHEDRAL OF ST. JULIEN.—TOURS.—POITIERS.—ANGOULÊME.—BORDEAUX.—EN ROUTE FOR BAYONNE.—A MERCANTILE DEFAULTER.—A LONELY REGION.—HOTEL INTERIOR.—INGENIOUS INVENTION.—TABLE D'HÔTE.
AT midnight Le Mans was reached, amidst a deluge of rain and an insufficiency of street lamps. Gas, we believe, has found its way to Jerusalem, but not to Le Mans; and yet Le Mans is a large and important town, blessed with an enlightened and despotic government.
After settling ourselves, to our extreme inconvenience, in a vehicle like an opera-box drawn side-ways by a horse and bells, we bumped and jingled slowly on through long, dark streets, the houses in which were all so large and gloomy that they looked like prisons, and in which there appeared to be a general flushing of sewers.
Le Mans may or may not be the "trodden ground" our critics complain of, but we are quite sure it was not so when we arrived there, for not a living thing was seen in the great black town save a benighted cat or two and one very ancient rag-picker. A more forsaken and deserted-looking place could not be imagined—no, not even by Daniel the Prophet, with all his experience of "the abomination of desolation," &c.
The grey light of the skies showed us at last a great square opening before us, with a lofty stone building like a war tower rising dark in the midst. We stopped at an inn door in this square, and descended, the opera-box making a vigorous plunge to assist us in the operation. Repeated pulls at a cracked bell, which sounded dismally in some remote depth of the old house, eventually produced the effect desired, for a rattling of chains was heard, and then the heavy door swung slowly on its hinges, sufficiently to admit of the protrusion of a man's head. The head came out as far as the shoulders, and nothing more ghastly could be conceived, as for a few seconds it remained there motionless and isolated against the black background, like the decapitated skull of some malefactor nailed to a gibbet, the face gleaming deadly in the uncertain night-light. The dreary silence of the dark square was broken only by the lonely cry of some distant watchman, pacing the old streets here and there with a dull lamp, which served to deepen still more the darkness beyond, whilst, high, gaunt, and spectral against the dull grey air, loomed the fortress-like building. A gigantic lighted clock was poised on a high tower, the long hands thereof making great leaps of five minutes each along the dial, as if it were dozing, and then suddenly waking and making up for lost time by desperate strides. In fact, to anyone who had recently supped upon pork chops, or to the cheerful mind of the late lamented Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, of raw-head-and-bare-bones memory, this old tower and its clock might have appeared as the Ogre Time, or some huge Cyclopean ghoul of night, watching and gloating, with its burning eye, over the surely passing hours of the thousand slumberers lying for a season sweetly unconscious of the fleeting of life beneath, and counting each heave of breath which as it passes must bring all nearer and nearer to its maw.
The waiter who belonged to the head before mentioned turned out to be a most excellent young man, and, in his assiduous exertions to make himself agreeable to apparently the first British traveller he had ever beheld, danced about like an electrified frog. Indeed, we were grateful enough for this very sprightliness of his, for it acted as a corrective to the depressing effect of the entire establishment, which was pervaded by an air of dull, forlorn gloom. The walls appeared to be constantly in tears. The long cavernous passages and mysterious corridors were made doubly dark by the sulky gleam of a consumptive "short ten." The lofty bedrooms were provided with beds which had too close a resemblance to four-post hearses, and their furniture in general had too much of the faded grandeur of other days. The old wooden staircases creaked audibly before we began to walk upon them, as if some invisible ghost of a dead housemaid were waiting to show us up to bed, and when we ventured upon them we found they were leaning alarmingly on one side. We endeavoured as well as we could to keep in the middle, but they were so unsteady that their movement produced a sensation like that of mild intoxication or incipient sea-sickness. We were not without dread lest, supposing the balustrades showed equal signs of weakness, we might, if we did not hug the wall and coast along it very carefully, be shovelled neck and crop into the abyss below. Can anyone wonder, therefore, that in such a place we were grateful for the sprightliness of our waiter, whose good spirits and lively antics prevented us from indulging in depressing thoughts? Variety of any kind is pleasing. Who has not heard of the gentleman who got into such a depressed condition of mind from attending the debates in the House of Lords and the burlesques at the London theatres, that, with the view of obtaining a little beneficial change, he took occasional walks in Brompton Cemetery, attended executions at the Old Bailey, or paid frequent visits to an anatomical museum? It was the same gentleman who was said always to carry an umbrella with an ivory death's-head as the handle, who had a velvet coat made from a piece of his wife's pall, and who took to singing the songs of Claribel.
Le Mans is a grand old town, stately, but mouldy and only half alive. Throughout there is happily an absence of that white garish Parisian element. No whitewash, gilded railings, or sculptured gewgaws offend the genius of the spot. The solemn old houses and walls stand looking down on the quiet streets as sadly as on that day when the last remnant of the gallant Vendean army under Larochejaquelein, wearied with the toils of long campaigns, was cut to pieces beneath them in the year 1793. The face of the old town seems as sorrowful now as when the shrieks of dying women and children, remorselessly slaughtered before it by the conquering Republicans, died away upon the air, on that day when cannonades of grape and volleys of musketry swept through all the streets, among a helpless crowd of the wretched wives and little ones of the scattered Royalists, of whom ten thousand corpses lay red in that awful sunset.
In the early morning we nearly frightened to death some good citizens by bathing in the river Sarthe, and several crowded to the bank to witness the last gasps of two insane victims to the love of ablution. It was a fine warm day in September, yet the idea to them seemed madness. However, this little adventure brought to light what Diogenes had so long sought for—an honest man. As we were drying ourselves on the river bank, beneath