3.  I will not, in presenting—­it must not be called the other side, but the supplementary, and wilfully omitted, facts, of this ideal,—­oppose, as I fairly might, the discomforts of a modern cheap excursion train, to the chariot-and-four, with outriders and courier, of ancient noblesse.  I will compare only the actual facts, in the former and in latter years, of my own journey from Paris to Geneva.  As matters are now arranged, I find myself, at half past eight in the evening, waiting in a confused crowd with which I am presently to contend for a seat, in the dim light and cigar-stench of the great station of the Lyons line.  Making slow way through the hostilities of the platform, in partly real, partly weak politeness, as may be, I find the corner seats of course already full of prohibitory cloaks and umbrellas; but manage to get a middle back one; the net overhead is already surcharged with a bulging extra portmanteau, so that I squeeze my desk as well as I can between my legs, and arrange what wraps I have about my knees and shoulders.  Follow a couple of hours of simple patience, with nothing to entertain one’s thoughts but the steady roar of the line under the wheels, the blinking and dripping of the oil lantern, and the more or less ungainly wretchedness, and variously sullen compromises and encroachments of posture, among the five other passengers preparing themselves for sleep:  the last arrangement for the night being to shut up both windows, in order to effect, with our six breaths, a salutary modification of the night air.

4.  The banging and bumping of the carriages over the turn-tables wakes me up as I am beginning to doze, at Fontainebleau, and again at Sens; and the trilling and thrilling of the little telegraph bell establishes itself in my ears, and stays there, trilling me at last into a shivering, suspicious sort of sleep, which, with a few vaguely fretful shrugs and fidgets, carries me as far as Tonnerre, where the ‘quinze minutes d’arret’ revolutionize everything; and I get a turn or two on the platform, and perhaps a glimpse of the stars, with promise of a clear morning; and so generally keep awake past Mont Bard, remembering the happy walks one used to have on the terrace under Buffon’s tower, and thence watching, if perchance, from the mouth of the high tunnel, any film of moonlight may show the far undulating masses of the hills of Citeaux.  But most likely one knows the place where the great old view used to be only by the sensible quickening of the pace as the train turns down the incline, and crashes through the trenched cliffs into the confusion and high clattering vault of the station at Dijon.