XVI.

To go from Nantes to La Rochelle you travel

straight southward, across the historic _bocage_ of La

Vendee, the home of royalist bush-fighting. The

country, which is exceedingly pretty, bristles with

copses, orchards, hedges, and with trees more spread-

ing and sturdy than the traveller is apt to deem the

feathery foliage of France. It is true that as I pro-

ceeded it flattened out a good deal, so that for an

hour there was a vast featureless plain, which offered

me little entertainment beyond the general impression

that I was approaching the Bay of Biscay (from which,

in reality, I was yet far distant). As we drew near

La Rochelle, however, the prospect brightened con-

siderably, and the railway kept its course beside a

charming little canal, or canalized river, bordered

with trees, and with small, neat, bright-colored, and

yet old-fashioned cottages and villas, which stood

back on the further side, behind small gardens, hedges,

painted palings, patches of turf. The whole effect

was Dutch and delightful; and in being delightful,

though not in being Dutch, it prepared me for the

charms of La Rochelle, which from the moment I

entered it I perceived to be a fascinating little town,

a most original mixture of brightness and dulness.

Part of its brightness comes from its being extra-

ordinarily clean, - in which, after all, it _is_ Dutch; a

virtue not particularly noticeable at Bourges, Le Mans,

and Angers. Whenever I go southward, if it be only

twenty miles, I begin to look out for the south, pre-

pared as I am to find the careless grace of those lati-

tudes even in things of which it may, be said that

they may be south of something, but are not southern.

To go from Boston to New York (in this state of

mind) is almost as soft a sensation as descending the

Italian side, of the Alps; and to go from New York to

Philadelphia is to enter a zone of tropical luxuriance

and warmth. 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. This indeed, to take things in their order, was

after I had had my breakfast (which I took on arriv-

ing) and after I had been to the _hotel de ville_. The

inn had a long narrow garden behind it, with some

very tall trees; and passing through this garden to a

dim and secluded _salle a manger_, buried in the heavy

shade, I had, while I sat at my repast, a feeling of

seclusion which amounted almost to a sense of in-

carceration. I lost this sense, however, after I had

paid my bill, and went out to look for traces of the

famous siege, which is the principal title of La Rochelle

to renown. I had come thither partly because I

thought it would be interesting to stand for a few

moments in so gallant a spot, and partly because, I

confess, I had a curiosity to see what had been the

starting-point of the Huguenot emigrants who founded

the town of New Rochelle in the State of New York,

a place in which I had passed certain memorable

hours. It was strange to think, as I strolled through

the peaceful little port, that these quiet waters, during

the wars of religion, had swelled with a formidable

naval power. The Rochelais had fleets and admirals,

and their stout little Protestant bottoms carried de-

fiance up and down.

To say that I found any traces of the siege would

be to misrepresent the taste for vivid whitewash by

which La Rochelle is distinguished to-day. The only

trace is the dent in the marble top of the table on

which, in the _hotel de ville_, Jean Guiton, the mayor of

the city, brought down his dagger with an oath, when

in 1628 the vessels and regiments of Richelieu closed

about it on sea and land. This terrible functionary

was the soul of the resistance; he held out from

February to October, in the midst of pestilence and

famine. The whole episode has a brilliant place

among the sieges of history; it has been related a

hundred times, and I may only glance at it and pass.

I limit my ambition, in these light pages, to speaking

of those things of which I have personally received an

impression; and I have no such impression of the

defence of La Rochelle. The hotel de ville is a

pretty little building, in the style of the Renaissance

of Francis I.; but it has left much of its interest in

the hands of the restorers. It has been "done up"

without mercy; its natural place would be at Rochelle

the New. A sort of battlemented curtain, flanked

with turrets, divides it from the street and contains

a low door (a low door in a high wall is always

felicitous), which admits you to an inner court, where

you discover the face of the building. It has statues

set into it, and is raised upon a very low and very

deep arcade. The principal function of the deferential

old portress who conducts you over the place is to call

your attention to the indented table of Jean Guiton;

but she shows you other objects of interest besides.

The interior is absolutely new and extremely sump-

tuous, abounding in tapestries, upholstery, morocco,

velvet, satin. This is especially the case with a really

beautiful _grande salle_, where, surrdunded with the

most expensive upholstery, the mayor holds his official

receptions. (So at least, said my worthy portress.)

The mayors of La Rochelle appear to have changed a

good deal since the days of the grim Guiton; but

these evidences of municipal splendor are interesting

for the light they throw on French manners. Imagine

the mayor of an English or an American town of

twenty thousand inhabitants holding magisterial soirees

in the town-hall! The said _grande salle_, which is un-

changed in form and its larger features, is, I believe,

the room in which the Rochelais debated as to whether

they should shut themselves up, and decided in the

affirmative. The table and chair of Jean Guiton have

been restored, Iike everything else, and are very

elegant and coquettish pieces of furniture, - incongruous

relics of a season of starvation and blood. I believe

that Protestantism is somewhat shrunken to-day at La

Rochelle, and has taken refuge mainly in. the _haute

societe_ and in a single place of worship. There was

nothing particular to remind me of its supposed austerity

as, after leaving the hotel de ville, I walked along the

empty portions and cut out of the Tour de l'Horloge,

which I have already mentioned. If I stopped and

looked up at this venerable monument, it was not to

ascertain the hour, for I foresaw that I should have

more time at La Rochelle than I knew what to do

with; but because its high, gray, weather-beaten face

was an obvious subject for a sketch.

The little port, which has two basins, and is ac-

cessible only to vessels of light tonnage, had a certain

gayety and as much local color as you please. Fisher

folk of pictuesque type were strolling about, most

of them Bretons; several of the men with handsome,

simple faces, not at all brutal, and with a splendid

brownness, - the golden-brown color, on cheek and

beard, that you see on an old Venetian sail. It was

a squally, showery day, with sudden drizzles of sun-

shine; rows of rich-toned fishing-smacks were drawn

up along the quays. The harbor is effective to the

eye by reason of three battered old towers which, at

different points, overhang it and look infinitely weather-

washed and sea-silvered. The most striking of these,

the Tour de la Lanterne, is a big gray mass, of the

fifteenth century, flanked with turrets and crowned

with a Gothic steeple. I found it was called by the

people of the place the Tour des Quatre Sergents,

though I know not what connection it has with the

touching history of the four young sergeants of the

garrison of La Rochelle, who were arrested in 1821

as conspirators against the Government of the Bour-

bons, and executed, amid general indignation, in Paris

in the following year. The quaint little walk, with

its label of Rue sur les Murs, to which one ascends

from beside the Grosse Horloge, leads to this curious

Tour de la Lanterne and passes under it. This walk

has the top of the old town-wall, toward the sea, for

a parapet on one side, and is bordered on the other

with decent but irregular little tenements of fishermen,

where brown old women, whose caps are as white as

if they were painted, seem chiefly in possession. In

this direction there is a very pretty stretch of shore,

out of the town, through the fortifications (which are

Vauban's, by the way); through, also, a diminutive

public garden or straggling shrubbery, which edges

the water and carries its stunted verdure as far as a

big Etablissernent des Bains. It was too late in the

year to bathe, and the Etablissement had the bank-

rupt aspect which belongs to such places out of the

season; so I turned my back upon it, and gained, by

a circuit in the course of which there were sundry

water-side items to observe, the other side of the

cheery little port, where there is a long breakwater

and a still longer sea-wall, on which I walked awhile,

to inhale the strong, salt breath of the Bay of Biscay.

La Rochelle serves, in the months of July and August,

as a _station de bains_ for a modest provincial society;

and, putting aside the question of inns, it must be

charming on summer afternoons.