This Peyrou (To Come To It At Last) Is A
Wonderful Place, Especially To Be Found In A Little Pro-
Vincial City.
France is certainly the country of towns
that aim at completeness; more than in other lands,
they contain stately features as a matter of course.
We
should never have ceased to hear about the Peyrou, if
fortune had placed it at a Shrewsbury or a Buffalo. It
is true that the place enjoys a certain celebrity at
home, which it amply deserves, moreover; for nothing
could be more impressive and monumental. It consists
of an "elevated platform," as Murray says, - an im-
mense terrace, laid out, in the highest part of the town,
as a garden, and commanding in all directions a view
which in clear weather must be of the finest. I strolled
there in the intervals of showers, and saw only the
nearer beauties, - a great pompous arch of triumph in
honor of Louis XIV. (which is not, properly speaking,
in the garden, but faces it, straddling across the _place_
by which you approach it from the town), an equestrian
statue of that monarch set aloft in the middle of the
terrace, and a very exalted and complicated fountain,
which forms a background to the picture. This foun-
tain gushes from a kind of hydraulic temple, or _cha-
teau d'eau_, to which you ascend by broad flights of
steps, and which is fed by a splendid aqueduct,
stretched in the most ornamental and unexpected
manner across the neighboring valley.
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