He stayed six weeks at Bordeaux to improve himself in the language, and then set out for the Mediterranean.  In the diligence he had some merry companions, and the party amused itself on the way.  It was their habit to stroll about the towns in which they stopped, and talk with whomever they met.  Among his companions was a young French officer and an eccentric, garrulous doctor from America.  At Tonneins, on the Garonne, they entered a house where a number of girls were quilting.  The girls gave Irving a needle and set him to work.  He could not understand their patois, and they could not comprehend his bad French, and they got on very merrily.  At last the little doctor told them that the interesting young man was an English prisoner whom the French officer had in custody.  Their merriment at once gave place to pity.  “Ah! le pauvre garcon!” said one to another; “he is merry, however, in all his trouble.”  “And what will they do with him?” asked a young woman.  “Oh, nothing of consequence,” replied the doctor; “perhaps shoot him, or cut off his head.”  The good souls were much distressed; they brought him wine, loaded his pockets with fruit, and bade him good-by with a hundred benedictions.  Over forty years after, Irving made a detour, on his way from Madrid to Paris, to visit Tonneins, drawn thither solely by the recollection of this incident, vaguely hoping perhaps to apologize to the tender-hearted villagers for the imposition.  His conscience had always pricked him for it.  “It was a shame,” he said, “to leave them with such painful impressions.”  The quilting party had dispersed by that time.  “I believe I recognized the house,” he says; “and I saw two or three old women who might once have formed part of the merry group of girls; but I doubt whether they recognized, in the stout elderly gentleman, thus rattling in his carriage through their streets, the pale young English prisoner of forty years since.”

Bonaparte was emperor.  The whole country was full of suspicion.  The police suspected the traveler, notwithstanding his passport, of being an Englishman and a spy, and dogged him at every step.  He arrived at Avignon, full of enthusiasm at the thought of seeing the tomb of Laura.  “Judge of my surprise,” he writes, “my disappointment, and my indignation, when I was told that the church, tomb, and all were utterly demolished in the time of the Revolution.  Never did the Revolution, its authors and its consequences, receive a more hearty and sincere execration than at that moment.  Throughout the whole of my journey I had found reason to exclaim against it for depriving me of some valuable curiosity or celebrated monument, but this was the severest disappointment it had yet occasioned.”  This view of the Revolution is very characteristic of Irving, and perhaps the first that would occur to a man of letters.  The journey was altogether disagreeable, even to a traveler used to the rough jaunts in an American wilderness:  the inns were miserable; dirt, noise, and insolence