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.
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