The door was opened by a footman struggling into his coat, with a handful of faggots in his arms.  He ushered us through several bare, stiff, cold rooms (proportions handsome enough) to a smaller salon, which the family usually occupied.  Then he lighted a fire (which consisted principally of smoke) and went to summon his mistress.  The living-room was just as bare and stiff as the others, no trace of anything that looked like habitation or what we should consider comfort—­no books nor work nor flowers (that, however, is comparatively recent in France).  I remember quite well Mme. Casimir-Perier telling me that when she went with her husband to St. Petersburg about fifty years ago, one of the things that struck her most in the Russian salons, was the quantity of green plants and cut flowers—­she had never seen them in France.  There were often fine pictures, tapestries, and furniture, all the chairs in a row against the wall.

[Illustration:  Then he lighted a fire.]

Our visits were always long, as most of the chateaux were at a certain distance, and we were obliged to stay an hour and a half, sometimes longer, to rest the horses.  It was before the days of five-o’clock tea.  A tray was brought in with sweet wine (Malaga or Vin de Chypre) and cakes (ladies’-fingers) which evidently had figured often before on similar occasions.  Conversation languished sometimes, though Mme. A. was wonderful, talking so easily about everything.  In the smaller places, when people rarely went to Paris, it ran always in the same grooves—­the woods, the hunting (very good in the Villers-Cotterets forest), the schoolmaster (so difficult to get proper books for the children to read), the cure, and all local gossip, and as much about the iniquities of the republic as could be said before the wife of a republican senator.  Wherever we went, even to the largest chateaux, where the family went to Paris for the season, the talk was almost entirely confined to France and French interests.  Books, politics, music, people, nothing existed apparently au-dela des frontieres.  America was an unknown quantity.  It was strange to see intelligent people living in the world so curiously indifferent as to what went on in other countries.  At first I used to talk a little about America and Rome, where I had lived many years and at such an interesting time—­the last days of Pio Nono and the transformation of the old superstitious papal Rome to the capital of young Italy—­but I soon realized that it didn’t interest any one, and by degrees I learned to talk like all the rest.