Marriages are late, and very seldom take place until a house and a bit of ground and some capital have been inherited or accumulated.  Touraine is the best specimen of the petite culture that I have seen.  The want of wood makes it objectionable as a summer residence.

We are now suffering from heat.  After eight in the morning it is too hot to walk along the naked glaring roads, yet this is only the first week in April.

Saturday, April 8.—­The sun has been so scorching during our two last drives that we have given ourselves a holiday to-day, and only dawdled about Tours.

We went first to the cathedral, which I never see without increased pleasure.  Though nearly four hundred years passed from its commencement in the twelfth century to its completion in the fifteenth, the whole interior is as harmonious as if it had been finished by the artist who began it.  I know nothing in Gothic architecture superior to the grandeur, richness, and yet lightness of the choir and eastern apse.  Thence we went to St. Julien’s, a fine old church of the thirteenth century, desecrated in the Revolution, but now under restoration.

Thence to the Hotel Gouin, a specimen of the purely domestic architecture of the fifteenth century, covered with elegant tracery and scroll-work in white marble.  We ended with Plessis-les-Tours, Louis XI.’s castle, which stands on a flat, somewhat marshy, tongue of land stretching between the Loire and the Cher.  All that remains is a small portion of one of the inner courts, probably a guard-room, and a cellar pointed out to us as the prison in which Louis XI kept Cardinal de la Balue for several years.  The cellar itself is not bad for a prison of those days, but he is said to have passed his first year or two in a grated vault under the staircase, in which he could neither stand up nor lie at full length.

‘It is remarkable,’ said Tocqueville, ’that the glorious reigns in French history, such as those of Louis Onze, Louis Quatorze, and Napoleon ended in the utmost misery and exhaustion, while the periods at which we are accustomed to look as those of disturbance and insecurity were those of comparative prosperity and progress.  It seems as if tyranny were worse than civil war.’

‘And yet,’ I said, ’the amount of revenue which these despots managed to squeeze out of France was never large.  The taxation under Napoleon was much less than under Louis Philippe.’

‘Yes,’ said Tocqueville, ’but it was the want of power to tax avowedly that led them into indirect modes of raising money, which were far more mischievous; just as our servants put us to more expense by their jobs than they would do if they simply robbed us to twice the amount of their indirect gains.

’Louis XIV. destroyed all the municipal franchises of France, and paved the way for this centralized tyranny, not from any dislike of municipal elections, but merely in order to be able himself to sell the places which the citizens had been accustomed to grant.’