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. I followed this
walk for some time, under the stunted trees, beside
the grass-covered bastions; it is very charming, wind-
ing and wandering, always with trees. Beneath the
rampart is a tidal river, and on the other side, for a
long distance, the mossy walls of the immense garden
of a seminary. Three hundred years ago, La Rochelle
was the great French stronghold of Protestantism; but
to-day it appears to be a'nursery of Papists.
The walk upon the rampart led me round to one
of the gatesi of the town, where I found some small
modern, fortifications and sundry red-legged soldiers,
and, beyond the fortifications, another shady walk, -
a _mail_, as the French say, as well as a _champ de
manoeuvre_, - on which latter expanse the poor little
red-legs were doing their exercise. It was all very
quiet and very picturesque, rather in miniature; and
at once very tidy and a little out of repair. This,
however, was but a meagre back-view of La Rochelle,
or poor side-view at best. There are other gates than
the small fortified aperture just mentioned; one of
them, an old gray arch beneath a fine clock-tower, I
had passed through on my way from the station.
This picturesque Tour de l'Horloge separates the town
proper from the port; for beyond the old gray arch,
the place presents its bright, expressive little face to
the sea. I had a charming walk about the harbor,
and along the stone piers and sea-walls that shut it
in.
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