It was in Paris, in his room on the hill of the University, that a traveller woke and wondered what he should do with his day.  In some way—­I cannot tell how—­ephemeral things had captured his mind in the few hours he had already spent in the city.  There is no civilisation where the various parts stand so separate as they do with the French.  You may live in Paris all your life and never suspect that there is a garrison of eighty thousand men within call.  You may spend a year in a provincial town and never hear that the large building you see daily is a bishop’s palace.  Or you may be the guest of the bishop for a month, and remain under the impression that somewhere, hidden away in the place, there is a powerful clique of governing atheists whom, somehow, you never run across.  And so this traveller, who knew Paris like his pocket, and had known it since he could speak plain, had managed to gather up in this particular visit all the impressions which are least characteristic of the town.  He had dined with a friend at Pousset’s; he had passed the evening at the Exhibition, and he had had a bare touch of the real thing in the Rue de Tournon; but even there it was in the company of foreigners.  Therefore, I repeat, he woke up next morning wondering what he should do, for the veneer of Paris is the thinnest in the world, and he had exhausted it in one feverish day.

Luckily for him, the room in which he lay was French, and had been French for a hundred years.  You looked out of the window into a sky cut by the tall Mansard roofs of the eighteenth century; and over the stones of what had been the Scotch College you could see below you at the foot of the hill all the higher points of the island—­especially the Sainte Chapelle and the vast towers of the Cathedral.  Then it suddenly struck him that the air was full of bells.  Now, it is a curious thing, and one that every traveller will bear me out in, that you associate a country place with the sound of bells, but a capital never.  Caen is noisy enough and Rouen big enough, one would think, to drown the memory of music; yet any one who has lived in his Normandy remembers their perpetual bells; and as for the admirable town of Chinon, where no one ever goes, I believe it is Ringing Island itself.  But Paris one never thinks of as a place of bells.  And yet there are bells enough there to take a man right into the past, and from there through fairyland to hell and out and back again.

If I were writing of the bells, I could make you a list of all the famous bells, living and dead, that haunt the city, and the tale of what they have done would be a history of France.  The bell of the St. Bartholomew over against the Louvre, the tocsin of the Hotel de Ville that rang the knell of the Monarchy, the bell of St. Julien that is as old as the University, the old Bourdon of Notre Dame that first rang when St. Louis brought in the crown of thorns, and the peal that saluted Napoleon, and the new Bourdon that is