He
Does, However, Scant Justice To The Banks Of The Loire;
His Want Of Appreciation Of The Picturesque - Want Of
The sketcher's sense - causes him to miss half the
charm of a landscape which is nothing if not "quiet,"
as
A painter would say, and of which the felicities
reveal themselves only to waiting eyes. He even
despises the Indre, the river of Madame Sand. The
"Memoires d'un Touriste" are written in the character
of a commercial traveller, and the author has nothing
to say about Chenonceaux or Chambord, or indeed
about any of the chateaux of that part of France; his
system being to talk only of the large towns, where he
may be supposed to find a market for his goods. It
was his ambition to pass for an ironmonger. But in
the large towns he is usually excellent company, though
as discursive as Sterne, and strangely indifferent, for a
man of imagination, to those superficial aspects of
things which the poor pages now before the reader are
mainly an attempt to render. It is his conviction that
Alfieri, at Florence, bored the Countess of Albany ter-
ribly; and he adds that the famous Gallophobe died
of jealousy of the little painter from Montpellier. The
Countess of Albany left her property to Fabre; and I
suppose some of the pieces in the museum of his
native town used to hang in the sunny saloons of that
fine old palace on the Arno which is still pointed out
to the stranger in Florence as the residence of Alfieri.
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