An American at Home in Europe

II.

THE HOUSE AND GARDEN WE DTD NOT FIND IN PROVENCE, TOURAINE, THE PYRENEES, ALGERIA, AND SPAIN.

THE dark, chilly Paris winter had imparted an especial value to sunshine and warmth. When I started, alone, on my journey southward to spy out the land for a new home, it was agreed that sunshine should be the first consideration. “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun,” said the Preacher, with the august authority of Scripture, and I might have blazoned the sentiment on my banner as its motto. We were to have floods of sunshine, an unlimited supply of it. Apart from that, we were to have a house and garden, and the surroundings of the house and garden were to be pleasantly romantic in the mediæval or other antiquarian way, as heretofore described. We had not liked the suburbs of Paris, but, of course, the nearer to Paris this could be realized, the better.

It will be seen in the sequel whether I grew — or possibly remained — unpleasantly over-critical as to everything that was presented to me, or whether it was only the effect of that alluring imagination which is always promising something better just a little further on. At all events, the result was an unexpectedly long journey. I made a great sweep southward through several foreign lands, touched at nearly all the typical points that vaunt, with reason, their winter climate, and returned to Paris from quite another point of the compass.

Allowing a sufficient interval for a presumable change of climate, the first place I got off at was Nevers, a hundred and fifty miles down the P. L. M. Naturally, you contract your railroads here, too. The Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean is reduced to those few letters, just as we talk about the cabalistic C. B. & Q. at home. Do I catch at once the remark that nobody ever heard of living at Nevers, or that it offered any inducements whatever? The observation permits me to say that I myself have more than once wondered whether those persons who are trying to do something nobody else has ever done, — a passion quite impossible of gratification, furthermore, in these populous times, — whether such persons are not all wrong. Very likely, the conventional people who follow the beaten track have been through it once for themselves, — or somebody else has for them, — and know there is nothing in it, and so do not let it interfere with their comfort. Thus, perhaps the would-be pioneers are only laggards instead. An eighteenth-century French writer, very notable in his day, says he thinks an excellent book could be made on prejudices justified ; and so original a person as the great Goldsmith himself tells us bluntly, “ Whoever does a new thing does a bad thing; whoever says a new thing says a false thing.”

I can discourse in this tone with the more freedom since we did not live in Nevers, nor were ever at all near doing so. It was a charming bright book that made me get off there,—Champfleury’s The Faience Violin, the most amusing satire I know of on the china craze. I did my best to make it known, some years ago, in The Atlantic. Dalègre, in Nevers, agrees to pick up, under instructions, some odd bits for Gardilanne, an old schoolmate in Paris. He imbibes the collecting mania himself, becomes guilty of astounding treasons, and the whole ends in comic catastrophe. I walked about, and looked at the houses where these worthies might have lived, and at the chief manufactory of pottery, and at some good specimens of the old ware in a small museum bundled up into the attic of the fine sculptured palace of the Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, who introduced the manufacture into the place. But Nevers would not do.

A traveling acquaintance in the train had assured me I should find just what I was in search of on the Boulevard Victor Hugo. It was lately the Boulevard Saint Gildard, but the saint had been upset for the poet. Everywhere you go, in France, in these republican days, you are certain to find a boulevard or avenue, generally one of the best, named for Victor Hugo, another for Gambetta; and now Carnot, also, is having his turn. This was a raw new one, and the stiff little gardens had exactly the same lack of privacy I had already found so unpleasant in suburban Paris. It is a general complaint, I fear. As the wealthy have too much behind their massive walls, which spoil the prospect, an average is got by giving the more modest too little. Saint Jean — Midsummer’s Day —is the great renting-day here, as it is also in Touraine and the Pyrenees, Saint Michel resuming his sway again further south. It is true, there were two firststory apartments in the old part of the town, close to the ducal palace and the cathedral, that might almost have done. They were thirteen hundred francs and six hundred and fifty francs respectively, and the latter was much in need of repairs ; but we were not yet at the stage of considering apartments.

Lyons would not do. Tame and featureless, in spite of the bold heights around it, up which the ficelle, the string, as they call it, takes you, horses, carts, and all, like the cable-road in Cincinnati, I can only conceive of any one living in Lyons if he were kept there by some commercial appointment with handsome pay. Ancient Vienne, Valence, and Orange would not do. At Valence lodgings might have been had in the house next to the one occupied by the young Napoleon when a second lieutenant in garrison there, and I am not sure but in that very one itself. He must often have looked off from the eastern terrace of the town to the Alps, and from the western to the splintered old ruin of Crussol that accompanies the view so long as you journey down the wide plain of Provence. Of what were his meditations in those days ? Surely not much of house-hunting. How are great things ever accomplished when the smallest require such a deal of pains ?

What I had really thought of in advance was Avignon. I sincerely hoped Avignon would do. When we talked of Avignon in Paris, however, a French friend used to pooh! and bah ! at it in what we should call a highly American spirit.

“You will have used up its antiquities in three days. Petrarch’s Laura will last you but half an hour,” he would say, and then how will you occupy yourselves ? No, if you will seek the Midi, keep on rather to Marseilles. There you will find movement, a proper stir of life, the theatre — a big city, in fact, and its resources.”

Each one speaks after his own taste, and these considerations left us unmoved, though Marseilles itself, all unknown as it was, evoked ideas of southern warmth and gayety, and it would have seemed by no means a disagreeable fate. Provence opened well as to the forwardness of vegetation. Cold and wintry behind us still, here, on the 9th of April, the peach and almond trees were in bloom, and the generality of the trees well budded out. In spite of this, however, and the perennial foliage of the olive, the moist green of Burgundy was abandoned. The face of the plain and the mountains that inclose it have a gray, mud-colored, sad tone that it would take all the traditional sunshine of Provence to brighten. It recalled Southern California in the dry season, but without the oranges. It recalled it, too, even to the winds, except that the winds that raise the dust-storms at Los Angeles or Riverside have no such persistency as the famous mistral, which tears through the gorges of Montélimar, and becomes the scourge of all the country down to Marseilles, and of Marseilles worse than all the rest.

The first requirement of an Old World town was always a good site for its fortress, just, as the starting-point of a Western border town is its railway station, “ saloon,” and grocery. At Avignon was found an excellent bold, flattopped rock to put the castle upon, and the broad Rhone beside it made the best of waterways for commerce. When the expatriated popes had acquired it, in the time of the great schism, they covered the rock with a gigantic brown-stone fortress palace, which ancient Froissart calls “ the strongest and finest abode in all the world.” It is on so great a scale that the city round about, though it contains forty thousand people, seems a mere scattering of tributary huts. Connect this with a ruinous suburb, having a mediæval fortress pure and simple on a like scale, by a bridge with most of its arches broken, — the bridge upon which, according to the nursery rhyme, there used to be so much dancing, — and you have Avignon. Its antiquities, its architecture, its traditions, were all charming, and corresponded to the preconceived ideal; occupation for one’s idle moments would never have been wanting there. Then, too, the principal modern street, leading from the station, made an unexpectedly fine display of shops ; there was a clinking of officers’ swords, and a cheery promenading in the evening in the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville ; and there was, above all, the fresh vitalizing breath of the Felibrige, the literary movement which has revived the glories of old Provencal poetry. It was my good fortune to see something of the new troubadours, — bluff, hearty old Roumanille in his little bookshop in the Rue Saint Agricol, and manly, kinglike Mistral in his village of Maillane. Amiable, genuine people of modest merit, all those leaders, who drew back in reserve, and would not willingly lend their countenance to a sort of traveling showman and foolish apostle of the moment, who was trying to turn their movement into a bombastic parade for his own notoriety.

On the Doms rock, the choicest of all sites, nothing rural appeared but the small public garden, whence you had the view over the level country, — the wide Rhone, turbid and headstrong as another Mississippi, and snow-patched Ventoux in the distance. Ventoux is the signal: while snow rests upon the head of Ventoux, it is not yet summer. In the old town, once compressed within ramparts, it was useless to seek any open space for living. And let us make a general rule of it at once ; the same is true of all old towns everywhere. In the new district, near the station, which, crabbedly, never comes to meet an European town more than halfway, — this district — h-m ! h-m ! — it was low and flat, and filled up with factories smoking lustily, and the cottages of their hands. It was Avignon, to be sure, but, even supposing something presentable to offer there, — and it did not chance to, — such an environment was not within the plan laid down for the expedition. I began to surmise for the first time that the search for the desired house and garden might be a difficult one.

I had been in wretched, many-storied Rue Abraham and Place de Jérusalem of the ancient Jews’ quarter, not househunting, but curiosity-hunting, for the two pursuits were inextricably mingled ; then under the brown awnings of the queer, crowded, entertaining market in the Place Pie; and had swung round back to the Rue Joseph Vernet and the chapel of the Oratoire, which, being circular and quite open within, pleasingly suggests a little Gothic Pantheon. There were bills out on two houses near by, — wide, respectable, even stately houses. My ring was answered by an ancient servant, or concierge (though the concierge system can hardly be said to prevail in the smaller towns), in an extraordinarily clean white cap. She retained a guarded air, as who should say, “You may be all right, coming along in this sudden way, with a stranger accent, making inquiries as if you meant to live here, and I shall say nothing to your face to the contrary, but the thing is very much open to doubt.” She had a first-story apartment, at one thousand francs a year. It could not be shown, however, for another fortnight, and, as it would obviously have been imprudent for me to wait so long, I do not know to this day what it was like. The other was a second story, at only six hundred francs. It was up a very high cold stone stairway. The parquetry floors of the north have disappeared ; we are in a land of stone and tiles now, a land that plans for summer rather than winter. There was no way of entering the various rooms, five or six of them and of good size, except through each other, there being no corridor. All the water to be used would have to be brought up from a fountain in the court below. It would be a compensation, of course, that there were some carven lions’ heads, but I fear hardly enough.

I did not often avail myself of the services of house-agents, where they existed, nor of the notaries who sometimes charged themselves with renting property. These persons, quite unaware that you might have all Europe, with Africa thrown in, for your hunting-ground, or that you could think of settling in any other place than theirs, proceeded with a hopeless deliberation. They proposed to settle comfortably down to it and make a campaign of weeks, or, for what I know, of years, as the case might require. In the first place, they wanted to make an appointment with you, to prepare a list. Then they would accompany you themselves, and, being rheumatic or otherwise disabled, get on with mortal slowness; and they would try to show you everything, even to the last windowcatch in a given apartment. Or they would send a blundering youth with you, who brought the wrong keys or could not find the right address. Or they would, perhaps by way of showing you the extent of their affairs, send you to places that were already rented, or that the occupants declared had never been to rent. And finally they would take great pains to prevent your getting any general grasp of all the vacancies in the place, or looking at any other than such as chanced to be in their hands. The advertisements in the local papers are but a slight resource, as these are not advertising communities. It is the general custom to put out bills on all houses to rent; thus you have only to choose the quarter that suits you, and if you do not find what there are it is the fault of your own diligence. My plan of verifying in advance the architectural and other attractions of the given place, to see if these were going to be strong enough to hold us, took me to all parts of it. Indeed, were it not for this plan, I should have to marvel, in summing up the general collection, how uniformly the habitations to rent found themselves in the neighborhood of some fine monument, — much as that other sage traveler marveled that wherever you found a great city you were apt to find a great river flowing before it. It was precisely in issuing from these monuments that I saw the habitations to rent. Of course there was liability to oversight, under such a system, and I will not maintain that I did not overlook plenty of opportunities, veritable jewels of homes for our purpose.

The Rue de la Vieille Poste was a mere winding dark alley, but the apartment at the corner had a window looking into the Place du Palais. A mosaicpaved vestibule, a dining-room, and a kitchen on the damp entrance floor, the kitchen faced with Moorish-looking tiles; then, up a narrow winding stair, a handsome large sunny drawing-room and a bedroom, and above that, again, a servant’s room; and finally the right to share in an inclosed square of garden, full of rather sober myrtles, laurels, and cypress, with a bit of historic tower looking down upon it. I tried to figure how, if we took it, we would harden our hearts to the lot of the maid in the damp kitchen, pass but the briefest possible moments daily in the damp diningroom, and then seek refuge in the sunny salon, and pass our time gazing out rapturously at the glimpse of the Palace of the Popes. It went down on the list, for want of something better. As I turned into that same Place again, the mistral was whistling loudly, and even rattling small gravel along the base of the grandiose Palais de la Monnaie, close by, which is more boldly original and striking in its way than its vaster rival across the square. My French local guidebook naively pretended that the streets of Avignon were made narrow and tortuous to defeat the searching violence of this remorseless north wind. This theory would do very well, except that every other town and village in Europe, Turin excepted, is built upon the same plan. What is more certain is that the modern Chamber of Commerce was put where it is, across the opening at the southern end of the Place, to break the irruption of the hurricane into the heart of the city.

Other apartments could have been had in a private palace of Julius II., the heritage of a decayed noble family, the vestiges of whose escutcheon remain over the door where it was battered to pieces in the Revolution. Henry IV., and even so much rarer a celebrity as Saint Francis de Sales, had slept in it. But it was in a darker and narrower street than all the rest ; they did not mind such things in those days. Meantime, too, the mistral, which I would not greatly believe in at first, was more impressed upon me daily as a positive and standing disadvantage of climate. The best authorities, including those whose local patriotism might well enough have obscured their honesty, agreed that it was a veritable scourge. Stendhal says it is the drawback to all the pleasures one might enjoy in Provence. The lamented Roumanille told me it had flattened him against the wall like a leaf. It uproots trees and tears down houses, and blows three, nine, even twelve days at a time. What then should we do here, when I recollected that S—, in Paris, has a horror, above all things, of having her hat-brim blown about in the breeze ?

Nevertheless, as there are degrees and variations of it, I continued to look longingly in Provence, and sometimes almost to forget it. I looked at Tartarin’s — and King René’s — Tarascon ; at Saint Remy ; at the rock-cut marvels of Les Baux, which some one has called “ a Pompeii of the Middle Ages ; ” and at Arles. At Les Baux you could have bought a beautifully carved Renaissance dwelling outright for three hundred dollars, and could probably have rented it in proportion. It would not have been bad at all to pass a vacation in. At Arles there is a pleasant Moorish touch in the minor habitations, a trace still, perhaps, of the long Saracen domination there. The house that chiefly caught my eye was on a street leading up to the Roman arena, and showing at the end a square Moorish watch-tower looming up grandly on the top of that massive work. It was at Tarascon, in the Rue des Halles, that the pleasant matron whom, in doubt, I asked as to the direction of the sun in her apartment answered, in affected confusion : “ Mon Dieu ! I have never stopped to think of it. I 've never taken my bearings here.” Alas! it was bare, uncompromising north; nothing could have been more so.

Arrived at Marseilles, all warm, cheery anticipations, all romantic illusions about the city of Monte Cristo, were at once swept away. It was bleaker than any part of the Rhone Valley above, and vegetation which had been out there seemed here to have gone in again; a cold, gray, wind-swept place, lacking color, and composed of very tall buildings devoid of mouldings. Some of the shabby hill-climbing streets recalled streets of certain American towns, — Albany for one. The Allées de Meilhan were but a slatternly promenade, and the walking was muddy on the Cours Belzunce, which was not even graveled. The great merit of many of the more important buildings cannot be denied, but they cannot redeem the general raw effect.

Whither next, then ? Surely further south, to Algeria ; it began to seem as if only there was winter warmth a certainty. But the notion took me of a run through the Riviera first. It had not been in the programme. I had long permitted myself a sort of disdainful air towards it, as a mere nest of idle fashion and expense, not likely to agree with either our purse or our tastes ; and on various former European journeys I had carefully avoided this route, going into Italy by others. I am sure there are not a few estimable people who think the same way. Only the other day we were reproached by friends in America, of a most intelligent sort, who were quite ignorant of the fund of ancient romance the Riviera contains, in connection with its exquisite scenery and climate, for our satisfaction and pleasure in it, since we have become converts to its charms. I shall have to return to this subject at length another time.

I went more out of curiosity than in prosecution of my general mission. It was the middle of April. Not expecting very much, I may have been somewhat distrait in the beginning of the journey. I do not recollect just where I was first fully under the shelter of the high Alpine ranges that make the Riviera what it is, “ the sunny garden wall of Europe.” Nor do I recall just where I saw the first oranges ; it was the season of orange blossoms, rather, and the air was perfumed with their rich fragrance, the fruit having been mostly harvested. But when I did see them, they left an ineffaceable impression. They were like yellow lamps, and the landscape from which they were missing thereafter seemed cold and tame, as if some illumination necessary to it had gone out. At the small station of La Farlède, fifty miles east of Marseilles, I was suddenly aware that there was a delicious pink rose blooming in the hedge, not ten feet from the car window. Perhaps there had been plenty before, but I had not seen them. Thenceforward, judging by the flowers, it was June, and not April, though the Riviera spring can have a good deal of chill in it, too.

I traversed the stretch of one hundred and fifty miles to the Italian frontier, at Mentone, purposely leaving a house-hunting trip in Italy for another occasion. Saint Raphael, discovered by Alphonse Karr, and Cannes, by Lord Brougham ; Nice, once a capital of the House of Savoy, and a place of consequence always, quite apart from the modern taste for winter stations ; Monaco, with the evil brilliancy of its playhouse, and Mentone, a lesser Cannes,—this group, clustered near together in the last third of the way, was the main field for examination. House-agents enough there ; they were well used to receiving strangers, and had made ample provision for them. Pleasing surprises were in store in more ways than one. The greatest of all was that prices were not necessarily higher in this delightful region than in some forlorn little hyperborean places with hardly an attraction of any kind to offer. Passing between Nice and Monte Carlo, and again on the return. I stopped at the beautiful harbor of Villefranche. It receives the fleets and the yachtsmen of many lands, and it is said to have a peculiarly sheltered climate of its own. I met with an eccentric agent, who offered me something in the clean narrow main street of the old town. It would not have been bad in the town itself, with its mediæval charm and wide sea view, but this was not my house and garden. The agent had another place on the hill above, and we went up to see it. The house was large, and was capable of being made very comfortable ; there was ample ground ; there were oranges, lemons, and roses, and lovely views, and the price was tempting. But alas ! he must let it immediately ; he could not possibly wait beyond the first of May, whereas I had now committed myself to a journey in Algeria and Spain, returning by way of western France, and should not have been content to decide till I had seen what all that should offer. Added to which, the Paris apartment was paid for till the middle of July. So I left this house, though it was the best that I had seen.

The voyage from Marseilles to Algiers is supposed to be made in twenty-eight hours ; we gave thirty-four to it, instead. A violent head wind and turbulent sea lay in wait for us outside the breakwater, and buffeted us all the way over. I had a similar experience, later, in going to Corsica. The blue Mediterranean of tradition is often, and even generally, a stormy sea, and the yachtsmen are quite right in laying up their craft for three months at a time and going comfortably to a hotel. Imprimis, then, it is difficult to get to Algeria, and, by a parity of reasoning, difficult to get away from it.

Lights were strung along the shore in beadlike lines, marking the streets of modern civilization, while others, scattered upon a hillside like dim coals of an expiring bonfire, marked the steep Moorish town. A sort of bare-legged Othello seized my belongings and piloted me to an hotel in the Rue Bab-el-Oued. It was raining, too, and I had obscure glimpses of the massive arches of the grand quay ; the fine new Boulevard de la République, which is a military bastion as well ; other weird Othellos ; the Duke of Orléans on horseback in the large Place du Gouvernement, and at one side of it a spacious mosque, — a real Arabian mosque, — as fine, neat, and perfectly whitewashed as the best reproduction of itself, in an international exhibition. The hotel was French, with some Spanish element in the management, I think. The Spanish are strong in the colony, even to the extent of causing some jealousy. At Oran, for instance, they are largely in the majority, and publish several journals in their own tongue.

The Rue Bab-el-Oued is one of the European streets that, with its continuation, the Rue Bab-Azoun, was once the main thoroughfare, but is now reduced to a second line, and is a sort of buffer between the later grandeurs in front and the Moors. Going along it, the next morning, I saw, from under the eucalyptus and palms of the Place du Gouvernement, the Moorish town shining high and white and minareted above. A temptation so novel was not to be resisted, and I climbed to it without a moment’s delay. The plan of it on the map is like a congeries of Arabic letters. It is a sort of hill of Montmartre, covered with blind alleys, and turned into a grave Moorish hive of industry. Let it be said at once that the characteristic Moorish life — the dwellings, dress, occupations, and habits — is still presented with surprising fullness. It is indeed Africa, another world ; the rich Oriental subjects to which the painters have accustomed us still await them in unlimited supply. Algiers itself gives a better exhibition of this peculiar life than any other part of the province; its large population has resisted the aggressive European encroachments much better than the smaller communities have been able to do. The French are no respecters of this Mussulman antiquity, and it has been predicted with alarm that in a quarter of a century a Moorish building will be as great a curiosity for Algerians themselves as for the tourists from abroad. In that day the enthusiasm of tourists will be greatly cooled, as it has been in these late years by the commonplace spirit that has all but taken away the charm of Rome. No doubt there have been prodigious changes since the arrival of the French in 1830; but the stranger, ignorant of these, will think it an ample supply of bizarre entertainment that is still left him.

You may stroll about in it all with perfect freedom ; you will come to no greater harm than a patch of whitewash on your sleeve from the door of the mosque, where you have taken off your shoes, or of Ali’s diminutive café, or of Ahmed’s basket-shop. The whitewash, is universal, except where it is varied, with a happy effect, by blue wash or pink wash. The best point of view is the battlements of the ancient Casbah, the ruined palace where the janissaries used to set up a sovereign and assassinate him, — sometimes as many as seven in a day. Your eyes wink at the dazzling brightness of the town and the wide blue sea beyond it. You may look down upon some details of private life, — perhaps a woman in a lemon-colored jacket, come forth to talk to her maid on the flat roof of her whitewashed house. Singular figures promenade, in no small numbers, also in the European streets, — the mysterious white-robed waddling women, a horseman of Fromentin in long dull red mantle, or a group, like Joseph and his brethren, prodding some camels along towards the port.

So far so good. The living accommodations in the town are a scanty choice of apartments in the new French buildings. For house and garden you would have to go out of the gate of Bab-elOued or the gate of Isly. Passing the latter, the nearer suburbs, Mustafa Inférieur and Agha Inférieur, are found given up to machine-shops and a populace more or less connected with these interests. The freer upper portions were dusty and unfinished, and very steep to climb. I remember in Mustafa Inférieur a whole pension to rent — and this only — for the summer, furnished, and at such a price that it was evident this “Land of Thirst” retained very few of its habitués for the scorching summer season. But Mustafa Supérieur, two miles and more from the town, is the quarter enjoying the chief favor of strangers. Three-horse omnibuses mount to it. It was a curious sensation to have in the omnibus some of the mysterious veiled women as fellow-passengers. The district was sown, as you might say, entirely to modern villas of an expensive sort. It is the custom to rent them furnished for the winter, and it might be difficult to find one unfurnished. The merit of their spacious, well-kept grounds could not be denied; the fragrance of their flowers weighted the air. It would be charming to take up a comfortable country life there, with pleasant neighbors close at hand, and go down occasionally, by way of a change, for a dip into the decorative Moslemism of Algiers. But it was a high climb, and far from market. I should think you would want to have horses and plenty of servants there, and not be obliged to count the cost very closely. The governor-general’s summer palace is a white, fairy-like abode, embowered in luxuriant palms, that makes you think of another summer palace, the captain-general’s quinta in sultry, tropical Havana.

The gate of Bab-el-Oued gives you more three-horse omnibuses to Saint Eugène and Point Pescade. These are on the level and on the border of the sea. Small merchants of the town live at Saint Eugène, a mile and a quarter out, and gay Sunday excursionists go to Point Pescade for fish chowder, such as Thackeray celebrated as Bouillabaisse. At Saint Eugène I could have lived in a two-story villa, Rue Salvandy, for one thousand francs. Its modest garden contained the orange, fig, almond, and pomegranate. It was too low to command the sea, but from the rear, the south (for the coast here looks directly north), there was a charming view of the green hill and Notre Dame d’Afrique, the striking church built in memory of those who have perished in the sea. That same green hill, most likely, cut off a great deal too much of the sun in the winter. Hereabouts horseshoe arches and bright tiling gave a graceful Moorish look to some of the villas ; but it was a real Moorish house, in a small farm of its own, that most caught my fancy.

I heard part of the Easter service at Notre Dame d’Afrique. You could take such a position, a little within the porch, that — and most appropriately — nothing but the outspread blue sea was visible. How soft and blue it was, that morning! You could never have suspected it of malice. Thence upward to a signal station looking down on Notre Dame; thence upward again to a mountain height, from which the signal station was as far below as was Notre Dame d’Afrique below the signal station, and Algiers below Notre Dame d’Afrique ; and so, round about, into the clean white village of Bouzarea. The snow peaks to the eastward are four-square, like a vast snow castle, and the white Moorish villas, amid their vegetation in the valleys, are like the sugar pièces montées of the confectioners. The Valley of the Consuls contains, happily, a patriotic memory for Americans. It was the abode of Shaler, a United States consul, who left behind him an impression which it would be well if more of our consuls could leave upon their districts. His Sketch of the State of Algiers, written in the barbarous old corsair times, remains the best authority on the subject to the present day. Even a French writer, discontented with reason, contrasts his energy and intelligence with the indifference of whole generations of French consuls. “ Though our consuls had resided at Algiers ever since the sixteenth century,’’ he says, “ they had left us in the most absolute ignorance of its topography, customs, language, and history. And yet we had much more at stake in the country than the United States, for instance, whose representative, Mr. Shaler, has written a most interesting history of it.” At the moment of the conquest such information was of pressing need, and from official sources none was to be had. It is to be hoped a like supineness does not really characterize the colonization work, so much stirred up in the French parliament of late.

I cannot linger upon the fascinating prospect from Bouzarea. It was the village that pleased me most of all I saw. Just as there was nothing African about the country, in the usual torrid, desert sense, there was nothing makeshift or immigrant-like about the village, standing on its broad, perfectly well made road. One could quite envy the urchins who were taught in the pretty white communal school and enjoyed its glorious view. A little further on was a cluster of Kabyle dwellings, like “hunks” of plum cake whitewashed ; and on a knoll apart a white marabout, the tomb of a holy man, with a clean toadstool of a dome.

The genuine Moorish house I have referred to was easily reached by a short cut from Saint Eugène. It stood in the midst of a few cypress-trees, with a tract of two hectares in vines about it. It was white, square, blockish, flat-roofed, and had few or no windows without, being lighted, in the customary way, from an open court within. The rent was but four hundred francs, and the agent furthermore maintained that a return of from fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred francs could be got from the vines. Here was something to cause an agreeable flutter of excitement: to turn farmer, in a Mussulman home, down in Algeria, and derive profit as well as pleasure from the experience, — that would be a novelty indeed.

I saw how a civilized family could make something quite delectable, quaint, and possibly habitable out of the house, fitting it up with draperies, and So on, in keeping with itself. The court had some columns and horseshoe arches, a well, and a kitchen and three chambers about it. Upstairs there were three more chambers. None of them received other light than what came in by the doors and some round holes over them. They were all tinted light blue, and the ceiling beams, openly displayed, were rounds of tree-trunk with the bark on. It was an altogether unheard-of sort of dwelling; but at the worst we could pass all our time out of doors, which really is what one goes to such a climate for. One would have to, if he were going to turn all those vines to account; they looked beyond the strength of a single person, and especially a novice.

“ You could have a hired man for 80 francs a month,”suggested the agent.

“ And how much should I have to count on for his keep ? ”

“ About 50 francs a month.”

Let us take to our arithmetic : 80 and 50 make 130 ; equal to 1560 a year. If the yield of grapes were 1500 francs, we should be out by 60 francs. But perhaps it would be 1800. No doubt the estate had been cultivated in its time by Christian slaves taken by the corsairs, and it was allowable to presume that one of them had run away with his master’s sympathizing daughter ; the romantic should stand for something. Then, too, the yield might be increased. When I inquired of a garde-champêtre, afterwards, as to the character of the native servants, he replied : “ For one thing, the indigène has no judgment about the vine. He can’t get it through his head, like a white man.” He said that these men were mild and tractable enough, in spite of their wild looks, and that their greatest vice was pilfering.

I journeyed by rail all along the northern belt of Algeria, more than two hundred and fifty miles, to Oran. The country was green and pastoral, planted with rich crops or flower-clad, like California in springtime. Now and again there were bananas waving their broad tattered leaves ; orange groves with fruit glowing very red; muddy rivers cutting deeply into their clay banks ; lonesome white marabouts afar ; Arabs, old as the hills in type, minding their flocks, statuelike, under a bush. Next in attraction to Algiers, by a long remove, was Blidah. One of its own Arab poets has said of it, quaintly, “ Others call you a little town, but I, I call you a little rose.” A later poet might well find inspiration in its principal avenue. It consists simply of a double line of lovely orange-trees. They were all in flower at the time of my visit, and the perfume was so continuous and all-pervading that you wondered if you ought not to take precautions against it, just as you ought not to keep flowers in your chamber at night. The well to do lived on a comfortable avenue of new two - story houses amid shrubbery, near a small park, which, though new, contained part of an ancient Sacred Wood. A four-room brick cottage on the avenue leading from the station was seven hundred francs a year. Prices were certainly not less than at Algiers. I spoke of this at my hotel. “ Oh, yes,” replied a resident, with a brisk, matter-of-course air, " things are dearer here.” As I waited to have some peculiar local explanation of it, he added, " There is no competition, you see.” I found that an American had been farming on a large scale near Blidah for ten years past. Have I said that cheap American chromes were rather frequent in the Moorish shops at Algiers, such subjects as Thanksgiving in New England and A Trotting-Match on the Bloomingdale Road ?

Bon Farik and Beni Mered, before Blidah, and El Affroun, Affreville, and others, after, — prosperous new villages all. Each has its Moslem quarter, which has become much what " China-town ” and " Spanish-town ” are in California. The natives bear themselves with much more dignity, but when they have a service to demand of you they do it with a meek gentleness that reminds you of the Mexican Indians. I aided one of them to send an express package. He could neither read nor write, and it was a question of filling out the blanks in the printed formula. Between us we got off a basket of thirty-five kilogrammes from Haj Hamet Kaboosh, of Relizane, to Haj ben Ahmed, at the Moorish market Adelia. I sincerely trust it arrived safely. It rained hard a good part of the way, the slopes of the Atlas were sprinkled with snow, and it was chilly. Some pretend that, owing to the great planting of trees, the climate has wholly changed. The women used to wear muslins in winter time, and now, on April 25, a man got in with a fur cap. " Is it often like this ? ” I asked the depressedlooking ticket-agent at Oued Fodda. " Alas ! it has done little else for three months,” he replied.

Oran is of little account after Algiers, although, on the other hand, it has a mosque much more charming than anything in the larger city. You contemplate at leisure the plashing fountain and tropical vegetation in the semicircular cloister of this mosque, and the blue tiling all round its walls ; you toil up and down the excessively steep Rue Philippe, take a refreshment on the level Place Kleber, wonder at the inaccessible forts on the naked environing crags, and you have finished Oran.

The question of residence, then, stands or falls by the attractiveness of Algiers proper. I need not go into formal statistics of the thermometer and the details that invalids of various sorts should have; all that is found in the regular treatises. It is certainly a charming flowery climate, where winter is almost abolished. In summer it is so hot that the favorite train from Algiers to Oran is run at night, only once a week at that, and people wait for it. Dr. Bennet asserts that in the summer malarial fevers exist there almost everywhere, in the high mountains as well as on the plains. It is much farther away than the Riviera, for instance, without corresponding advantages, since the lower latitude on the south side of the Mediterranean is counterbalanced by the sheltering mountain ranges on the north side, and the winter temperature remains much the same. I can see how it might be popular enough among English people, who in going there are not far away from home at the worst. But the question was whether, besides separating ourselves three or four days further from our letters, it agreed with our peculiar ideas of thrift to transport our household effects such a long journey by land and sea, and then still have before us the probable necessity of getting out of the country again and making the return journey northward for the summers.

I had a shrewd idea of my own that the question would speedily settle itself in Spain. We were forty-eight hours coasting along to various north African ports and crossing to Malaga. The auspices were favorable. This voyage was as smooth and delightful as the other had been detestable. The process of elimination seemed to be placing our destiny there, and I was not at all sorry. I began to see how we should probably be led to call our new abode a castle in Spain, and I hoped the humor of this would not be considered too threadbare at a distance. But for our purpose the land of enchantment proved disappointing. There was a far-away, difficult-of-access feeling about it. I did not strike the ideal habitation that would have overcome the ideas of expense and remoteness from support. That is the truth of the matter. The domain of climate is confined chiefly to Andalusia. The elusive house and garden did not present themselves. Suburban life in Spain is unusually confined, whether because the environs of the cities have not been very safe, or the cities themselves have continued large enough without spreading out, or whether it is a matter of sociability and taste. Malaga was simply ugly. Granada alone, of all that I saw, really offered a considerable temptation. The warm-toned, half-ruinous Alhambra, somewhat inferior to its reputation as a spectacle, is very much beyond it as a comfortable thing to live with.

My notebook shows a plan of one of the few apartments I saw offered for rent there; not a house of one’s own, mind you, but an apartment. It was in a small plaza precisely under the Alhambra tower of La Vela. At the left, as you faced it, was an old church, a little bridge across the Darro, and the route by which you would go up among the gypsies in their hillside caverns. It was a third piso, or story, which means, however, that you went up only two pairs of stairs ; the ground floor being counted a story here, as it is not in France. It was in a very wide, brilliantly white house with an azotea, or loggia, on top, balconies to every window, and, at the moment, yellow draperies hanging from the balconies in honor of some festival. I much fear me that it was to the north once more, and the Alhambra hill shut off the sun from the south ; but, looking at it merely as a type and basis, that makes no difference. That it was supposed to be warm enough in winter is inferred from the fact that there were no fireplaces except in the kitchen. There were eleven rooms, plain and large, brick-floored and calcimined. The doors were all paneled in a peculiarly elaborate way. One good idea, I thought, was closing the upper panels of the closet doors with only a pretty lattice-work. for the freer admission of air. In the kitchen, the swift water of the Darro was pumped into a reservoir consisting of a Forty-Thieves-like earthen jar. The chief characteristic of the place was its vast and labyrinthine extent. It had three courts of various sizes, and a proportionate amount of corridor to get around them. Most of the bedrooms received their light only from these courts, and were what we should call “ dark rooms,” though their cool obscurity may have been grateful enough in a fervid summer. All this, the grizzled, smiling proprietor assured me, would cost one hundred and forty-five duros (dollars). He said at first, good-naturedly, that that would arrange itself, not believing I would take it, and he was right. It was not conventional, at any rate. One could probably find a better; and what with the reasonable and attractive marketing, the lively shopping in the old street of the Zacatin, the university, the cathedral, the theatre, and the really grand cafés, — for it is a city of eighty thousand people, with modern resources, too, as well as those for which it is forever famous, — life at Granada ought to pass with economy, comfort, and charm.

Seville, though nearly twice the size of Granada, I should estimate as less than half as attractive. Neither the second piso of seven rooms I saw under the shadow of the Giralda, nor the other commanding a view of the delicious old Alcazar, nor a third opposite the richly sculptured Ayuntamiento, — none of these was more than plain, neat, and commonplace. The dearest of the three was about two hundred and twenty-five dollars. They have a curious way of counting the rent by the day. Thus the one above was stated to be twelve reals a day, no matter how long the period. As the real is but five cents, you find yourself forever boiling down magnificent totals of thousands of reals, and finding the residuum a very modest sum. In general, in Spain, you can count on having a highly presentable apartment for four hundred dollars, — this in the large, expensive cities, including Madrid. Perhaps even one of the famous houses in Seville, with patio, or halfMoorish courtyard, could be had for that, if one of them could ever be found vacant. The cost of provisions cannot vary greatly from what it is in France. In servants’ wages there is a notable reduction. You can have an excellent cook for thirty-five pesetas (francs), and a maid-of-all-work for no more than fifteen or twenty.

I had once thought very seriously of Madrid, but cold middle and northern Spain could never retain one who had tasted the charm of genial climate. Why, then, detail it all, — the inadequacy of Don Quixote’s brown and lonesome La Mancha, of Madrid with all its Velasquez and its fine new paseos, and Salamanca with its venerable university, to square with our highly valuable ideas ? I had been breathing the soft breath of summer, and everybody thereabouts was wearing a heavy winter overcoat on the blessed 10th of May. My last plan, curiously enough, was sketched at Philip II.’s gloomy Escorial. The village that holds the stern granite magnificence of that ascetic monarch is more or less of a summer resort for Madrid people. Even this usage does not brighten it. The only redeeming feature is the plentiful thyme and kindred balsamic plants which, as in sympathy, perfume the bleak granite hills. The court retainers who occupied the village in Philip’s day used, no doubt, to express their opinion strongly of their ruler’s attempt to turn life into death. I saw a bill out, and went in to see what country life was like where no cottages, but only cramped apartments, were offered even for the professed vacation season. The “ bill,” after a common Spanish usage, was only a bit of white rag tied to a railing. There were two stories, and two apartments of four rooms each. The floors were brick, the staircase was wood, — a concession to warmth which is made in the north ; but thus much having been done for comfort, it was not thought necessary to paint it. The rooms had numerous closed alcoves for beds, so that a much larger family could have been stowed away in them than you might have thought. In the yard were two flowerless flower-beds, and backed against the end wall was an unsculptured fountain; for sculpture was never a fashion in this more than Puritanical village. The visit was, naturally, more one of curiosity than practical design ; but “ How much?” I asked. “Two hundred pesetas for the three months of the temporada [the summer season], and five duros the month if taken for all the year.”

Surely not dear; and one who happened to be living at Madrid might do worse, as a student, than move some furniture out there, and pass the temporada in re-reading Prescott and thoroughly mastering Philip’s vast Escorial. But there are other ideas. “ Many thanks and good-day, señora.”

“ Vaya con Dios!” (Go with God), she mumbles piously.

The better and more frequent trains, the more active stir of life, were grateful, when back in France again. I carried the same programme of “ ifs ” and “ buts ” through Gascony, the Pyrenees, Touraine, and the Orléannais. All had their peculiar charm, all had their attendant drawbacks. In particular, all had to contend with a memory, a subtile persuasive recollection from near the other end of the journey, which kept rising into greater and greater prominence. I see I must be yet briefer in this final stretch of the course, though, like Spain, it needs more ample treatment.

A sort of bargain offered at Saint Jean de Luz, a beach of yellow sand, a modest, dull little place just over the frontier, — good, like much of this district, for winter and summer alike. The houses, when not of gray granite, are in open timber-work and plaster, of a halfSwiss or Early English effect, as they are in northern Spain. A tradesman of the place would have let me have such a one, on the hill, across the port, a large one, well furnished and with a garden at last, for six hundred francs. I exclaimed in surprise at finding it furnished, which I had not expected; and his demands at first were much higher, but mon Dieu ! enfin — he would let it go at that rather than be at the trouble of taking out the furniture. Breaking on the wheel would not draw a price from a proprietor until he had first shown you the attractions of his premises. The house had squalid neighbors, much too close, on one side, though they were very good on the other ; the drinking-water had to be brought up from a public fountain down on the road, and other water from a neglected spring at the far end of the long garden. Still, this was a chance that did not fail to go into my notebook with an especial mark of approval.

Biarritz was too much like Dinard ; it had an ephemeral, hasty look ; the shops were full of the usual seaside knickknacks, and of English tourists selecting keepsakes from them. The villa of the ex-Empress Eugénie did not redeem it; could it have been so bare, treeless, and ordinary as that in the days of the Empire ? Pau, on the other hand, has a good deal of solidity. Like Nice, its great contemporary on the other side of France, it has an air of being there partly for its own people, and not merely for the swarm of passing strangers. Let us remember that the towns are not of the same dimensions ; Nice has eighty thousand people, and Pan thirty thousand. What is very comfortable about both is that they are so well used to receiving strangers, and have made such ample provision for housing them, that a few more or less do not throw them into a flurry. Quarters are not difficult to find, and you see at once that you are not expected to sleep on a billiardtable if you want to stay there. Then the shops abound with everything to sustain life agreeably; they are numerous and substantial, and the fever of novelty being long past, and unscrupulous fleecing checked by wholesome competition, they furnish their goods at about as reasonable prices as if there were no question of a ville de raison.

The favor that Pau meets with from the large English colony is well accounted for by the beauty of the site, the magnificent view of the snow-crowned Pyrenees from the terrace, and the green and thrifty country round about. In a short promenade I had already found three lodgments, any one of which would have done. They were all, as it happened, on that most respectable thoroughfare, the Rue Henri Quatre. The dearest of them was eight hundred francs, and it had three or four more bedrooms than we should have needed. Another, a first story, in the house of a respectable official. consisting of antechamber, kitchen, dining-room, parlor, two bedrooms, and servant’s bedroom, was but five hundred and fifty francs. Perhaps one would not need a garden so much in a semi-rural place like this, being low down, and with ample opportunity to debouch into the Place Royale and other spacious promenades close at hand.

The château of Henry IV., like the château of Francis I. at Saint Germain, would be much better if it had been left to a little of its sentimental ruin. Directly underneath it is a smoking tannery, which scents up the town in a way it is hard to understand how an energetic ville de raison can put up with. The panorama of the snowy Pyrenees, too, is often veiled, for we are in a rather moist country, and not a dry one. Consult your weather-records ; I have heard an acquaintance, somewhat given to exaggeration by nature, assert that he has seen it rain forty days at a time at Pau. You have lovely camellias there, and what not beside, but you have no oranges. The yellow lamps have gone out in the green landscape, and leave you almost sad.

Areachon and its flat district redeemed from the once desert Landes, — a whiff of hygienic pine, and a pretty glimpse of garden-patch or so in the clearings, but not to the purpose. The two large cities of Bayonne and Bordeaux each in turn had something stately, smooth, green, and pleasant about it, but here we are in the rainy zone of Brittany again. I wanted to get off at Angouleme and Poitiers, as I had wanted to get off at Coutances and Avranches in Normandy; they occupy the same sort of position, on high terraces with borders of garden. Tours, in Touraine, focus of the best château life, and rendezvous of all those who esteem themselves most highly in the social way, was too large and level for me, forsooth. It was clear now that a place must be hilly to be truly picturesque. A hilly site, too, can be cleaner. The agent I saw had no notable bargains for me. The house he showed me in the Rue des Acacias was thoroughly commonplace ; and one would need horses, I thought, if he lived in the others he indicated, some miles away from town. Orléans, again, seemed too level. We were getting very near to Paris now, and from Orléans on, the regimented fields of choice vineyards that had long embellished the land gave place to flatter, more ordinary plain. A second-story apartment, close to the grand atrium of the cathedral, for one thousand francs, the rooms more numerous, but no better, than our own in Paris ; and a pleasing two-story house, with high slate mansard, in the shady little Place Saint Aignan, at twelve hundred francs : these are the items I noted there. I would gladly have taken the latter, had it been elsewhere than in storied Orléans.

Blois alone, thirty-five miles farther from Paris than Orléans, —I keep it to the last, — Blois alone checked the course of this universal disparagement. Blois was hilly, accidenté, or varied, clean, tranquil, not too large, endowed with pretty promenades, and amply romantic. “ Here was not wanting,” as Dr. Johnson puts it, “ the private passage, the dark cavern, the deep dungeon, or the lofty tower.” The silvery Loire reflected its old red bricks and bluish slates; round about were vineyards, a rich undulating plain, prosperous villages with windmills and castles in their midst; the famous chateaux of the Loire were close at hand ; and, best of all, one of the most prepossessing of them was the very clou, the centre-piece and clinching argument, of the town. Here the houses to rent were in the Place, beside the rich red Louis XII. château itself, which the painter Marchetti, among others, has rendered with such appreciative feeling. One of the houses, unnecessarily large for us, fourteen rooms, with a garden, was about twelve hundred francs. Another was seven hundred francs. It was a queer place, without any windows at all on the square, I think ; only its entrance door, which, with a very long hall, was wedged between two other houses. It was much in need of repairs, but these were promised. It was three stories in height, when you got to it, and had seven rooms, and a small sunny terrace which looked down on the slate roofs of the town, old churches, and the ancient bridge crossing the Loire. The Loire ought to be a resource for boating and swimming in the summer. It was to be considered whether its lush meadows, with their essentially French perspective of vaporous poplars, sent up any malarious exhalations that were to be guarded against. That was one of the things to be inquired about. The Château of Blois was entirely charming, and the strangers coming up to look at its warm facade and see the room where the Duke of Guise was stabbed would be something of a distraction, if other amusement failed.

There was another point in favor of Blois, — a strong one : it was only four hours from Paris. All the other localities mooted would entail long and costly migrations ; if such a place as Blois would do, what a vast saving in expense and trouble, besides retaining the closer connection with America ! Naturally it was not the same sort of a change ; plenty of brooding skies, plenty of winter, might be expected at Blois ; but, considering the notable economy, some disadvantages could be put up with. The lilacs were in bloom in those last days, and spring gave her most illusive impressions.

Arrived in Paris, and submitting the report of the journey to the expectant ears of S—. we summed up the whole subject calmly, and again not at all so calmly. We fancied ourselves living now in face of the ducal palace at Nevers, now by the Palace of the Popes at Avignon, now in the Moorish farmhouse at Algiers, now under the red Alhambra tower at Granada, again at Saint Jean de Luz, at Pau, and at Blois. We threw them out one by one ; then threw them back again and began anew.

“ If we should write to the man at Villefranche-sur-Mer, and see if by any chance that one — the one, you know, with the long walk, and the terrace, and the unlimited orange-trees — was not rented yet?” suggested S—.

The suggestion being acted upon, the agent at Villefranche- sur-Mer replied that his villa was not rented. He had probably known quite well it would not be, and fixed the date of the first of May only to force a decision more advantageous to himself. He placed it entirely at our disposition ; he would put it in order, and we could have it from the 1st of July. We gladly closed with him, and completed the negotiation by mail.

William Henry Bishop.