Given This Absurd Disposition, I Could
Not Fail To Flatter Myself, On Reaching La Rochelle,
That I Was Already In The Midi, And To Perceive In
Everything, In The Language Of The Country, The _Ca-
Ractere Meridional._ Really, A Great Many Things Had
A Hint Of It.
For that matter, it seems to me that to
arrive in the south at a bound - to wake up there, as
it were - would be a very imperfect pleasure.
The
full pleasure is to approach by stages and gradations;
to observe the successive shades of difference by
which it ceases to be the north. These shades are
exceedingly fine, but your true south-lover has an eye
for them all. If he perceive them at New York and
Philadelphia, - we imagine him boldly as liberated
from Boston, - how could he fail to perceive them at
La Rochelle? The streets of this dear little city are
lined with arcades, - good, big, straddling arcades of
stone, such as befit a land of hot summers, and which
recalled to me, not to go further, the dusky portions
of Bayonne. It contains, moreover, a great wide
_place d'armes_, which looked for all the world like the
piazza of some dead Italian town, empty, sunny,
grass-grown, with a row of yellow houses overhanging
it, an unfrequented cafe, with a striped awning, a tall,
cold, florid, uninteresting cathedral of the eighteenth
century on one side, and on the other a shady walk,
which forms part of an old rampart.
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