To Go From Nantes To La Rochelle You Travel
Straight Southward, Across The Historic _Bocage_ Of La
Vendee, The Home Of Royalist Bush-Fighting.
The
country, which is exceedingly pretty, bristles with
copses, orchards, hedges, and with trees more spread-
ing and sturdy than the traveller is apt to deem the
feathery foliage of France.
It is true that as I pro-
ceeded it flattened out a good deal, so that for an
hour there was a vast featureless plain, which offered
me little entertainment beyond the general impression
that I was approaching the Bay of Biscay (from which,
in reality, I was yet far distant). As we drew near
La Rochelle, however, the prospect brightened con-
siderably, and the railway kept its course beside a
charming little canal, or canalized river, bordered
with trees, and with small, neat, bright-colored, and
yet old-fashioned cottages and villas, which stood
back on the further side, behind small gardens, hedges,
painted palings, patches of turf. The whole effect
was Dutch and delightful; and in being delightful,
though not in being Dutch, it prepared me for the
charms of La Rochelle, which from the moment I
entered it I perceived to be a fascinating little town,
a most original mixture of brightness and dulness.
Part of its brightness comes from its being extra-
ordinarily clean, - in which, after all, it _is_ Dutch; a
virtue not particularly noticeable at Bourges, Le Mans,
and Angers. Whenever I go southward, if it be only
twenty miles, I begin to look out for the south, pre-
pared as I am to find the careless grace of those lati-
tudes even in things of which it may, be said that
they may be south of something, but are not southern.
To go from Boston to New York (in this state of
mind) is almost as soft a sensation as descending the
Italian side, of the Alps; and to go from New York to
Philadelphia is to enter a zone of tropical luxuriance
and warmth.
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