The ordinary week-day life, I mean, for on Sundays the market people have assembled by four, and there are nights when the noises never cease.  It is no unusual thing to be awakened, an hour or two after midnight, by a tumult so loud and deep that my first impression is one of conspiracy or revolution.  The sound is not unlike the hoarse roar of Sir Henry Irving’s admirably trained mobs,—­the only mobs I have ever heard,—­and I jump out of bed, wondering if the President has been shot, or the Chamber of Deputies blown up by malcontents.  Can these country people have heard the news, as the shepherds of Peloponnesus heard of the fall of Syracuse, through the gossiping of wood devils, and, like the shepherds, have hastened to carry the intelligence?  When I look out of my window, the crowd seems small for the uproar it is making.  Armand, the waiter, who, I am convinced, merely dozes on a dining-room chair, so as to be in readiness for any diversion, stands in the middle of the road, gesticulating with fine dramatic gestures.  I cannot hear what is being said, because everybody is speaking at once; but after a while the excitement dies away, and the group slowly disperses, shouting final vociferations from out of the surrounding darkness.  The next day when I ask the cause of the disturbance, Armand looks puzzled at my question.  He does not seem aware that anything out of the way has happened; but finally explains that “quelques amis” were passing the hotel, and that Madame must have heard them stop and talk.  The incident is apparently too common an occurrence to linger in his mind.

As for the Amboise dogs, I do not know whether they really possess a supernatural strength which enables them to bark twenty-four hours without intermission, or whether they divide themselves into day and night pickets, so that, when one band retires to rest, the other takes up the interrupted duty.  The French villager, who values all domestic pets in proportion to the noise they can make, delights especially in his dogs, giant black-and-tan terriers for the most part, of indefatigable perseverance in their one line of activity.  Their bark is high-pitched and querulous rather than deep and defiant, but for continuity it has no rival upon earth.  Our hotel—­in all other respects unexceptionable—­possesses two large bulldogs which have long ago lost their British phlegm, and acquired the agitated yelp of their Gallic neighbours.  They could not be quiet if they wanted to, for heavy sleigh-bells (unique decorations for a bulldog) hang about their necks, and jangle merrily at every step.  In the courtyard lives a colony of birds.  One virulent parrot which shrieks its inarticulate wrath from morning until night, but which does—­be it remembered to its credit—­go to sleep at sundown; three paroquets; two cockatoos of ineffable shrillness, and a cageful of canaries and captive finches.  When taken in connection with the dogs, the hotel cat, the operatic Armand, and the cook who plays “See, O Norma!” on his flute every afternoon and evening, it will be seen that Amboise does not so closely resemble the palace of the Sleeping Beauty as Mr. Molloy has given us to understand.