It Hardly
Seemed A Place Where You Would Drop In; But When
Once You Had Found It, It Presented Itself, With The
Cathedral, The Castle, And The Maison D'Adam, As One
Of The Historical Monuments Of Angers.
XV.
If I spent two nights at Nantes, it was for reasons
of convenience rather than of sentiment; though, in-
deed, I spent them in a big circular room which had
a stately, lofty, last-century look, - a look that con-
soled me a little for the whole place being dirty.
The
high, old-fashioned, inn (it had a huge, windy _porte-
cochere_, and you climbed a vast black stone staircase
to get to your room) looked out on a dull square, sur-
rounded with other tall houses, and occupied on one
side by the theatre, a pompous building, decorated
with columns and statues of the muses. Nantes be-
longs to the class of towns which are always spoken
of as "fine," and its position near the mouth of the
Loire gives it, I believe, much commercial movement.
It is a spacious, rather regular city, looking, in the
parts that I traversed, neither very fresh nor very
venerable. It derives its principal character from the
handsome quays on the Loire, which are overhung
with tall eighteenth-century houses (very numerous,
too, in the other streets), - houses, with big _entresols_
marked by arched windows, classic pediments, balcony-
rails of fine old iron-work. These features exist in
still better form at Bordeaux; but, putting Bordeaux
aside, Nantes is quite architectural.
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