"C'est L'heure De La
Lecture," Remarked My Guide; And A Group Of Conva-
Lescents - All The Patients I Saw Were
Women - were
gathered in the centre around a nun, the points of
whose white hood nodded a little above them,
And
whose gentle voice came to us faintly, with a little
echo, down the high perspective. I know not what
the good sister was reading, - a dull book, I am afraid,
- but there was so much color, and such a fine, rich
air of tradition about the whole place, that it seemed
to me I would have risked listening to her. I turned
away, however, with that sense of defeat which is
always irritating to the appreciative tourist, and pot-
tered about Beaune rather vaguely for the rest of my
hour: looked at the statue of Gaspard Monge, the
mathematician, in the little _place_ (there is no _place_ in
France too little to contain an effigy to a glorious son);
at the fine old porch - completely despoiled at the
Revolution - of the principal church; and even at the
meagre treasures of a courageous but melancholy little
museum, which has been arranged - part of it being
the gift of a local collector - in a small hotel de ville.
I carried away from Beaune the impression of some-
thing mildly autumnal, - something rusty yet kindly,
like the taste of a sweet russet pear.
XL.
It was very well that my little tour was to termi-
nate at Dijon; for I found, rather to my chagrin, that
there was not a great deal, from the pictorial point of
view, to be done with Dijon. It was no great matter,
for I held my proposition to have been by this time
abundantly demonstrated, - the proposition with which
I started: that if Paris is France, France is by no
means Paris. If Dijon was a good deal of a disap-
pointment, I felt, therefore, that I could afford it. It
was time for me to reflect, also, that for my disap-
pointments, as a general thing, I had only myself to
thank. They had too often been the consequence of
arbitrary preconceptions, produced by influences of
which I had lost the trace. At any rate, I will say
plumply that the ancient capital of Burgundy is want-
ing in character; it is not up to the mark. It is old
and narrow and crooked, and it has been left pretty
well to itself: but it is not high and overhanging; it is
not, to the eye, what the Burgundian capital should
be. It has some tortuous vistas, some mossy roofs,
some bulging fronts, some gray-faced hotels, which
look as if in former centuries - in the last, for instance,
during the time of that delightful President de Brosses,
whose Letters from Italy throw an interesting side-light
on Dijon - they had witnessed a considerable amount
of good living. But there is nothing else. I speak as
a man who for some reason which he doesn't remem-
ber now, did not pay a visit to the celebrated Puits
de Moise, an ancient cistern, embellished with a sculp-
tured figure of the Hebrew lawgiver.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 144 of 145
Words from 74777 to 75303
of 75796
