sense of defeat which is always irritating to the appreciative tourist, and pottered about Beaune rather vaguely for the rest of my hour: looked at the statue of Gaspard Monge, the mathematician, in the little _place_ (there is no _place_ in France too little to contain an effigy to a glorious son); at the fine old porch--completely despoiled at the Revolution--of the principal church; and even at the meagre treasures of a courageous but melancholy little museum, which has been arranged--part of it being the gift of a local collector--in a small hôtel de ville. I carried away from Beaune the impression of something mildly autumnal--something rusty yet kindly, like the taste of a sweet russet pear. [Illustration: DIJON.] [Illustration] Chapter xl [Dijon] It was very well that my little tour was to terminate at Dijon, for I found, rather to my chagrin, that there was not a great deal, from the pictorial point of view, to be done with Dijon. It was no great matter, for I held my proposition to have been by this time abundantly demonstrated--the proposition with which I started: that if Paris is France, France is by no means Paris. If Dijon was a good deal of a disappointment, I felt therefore that I could afford it. It was time for me to reflect, also, that for my disappointments, as a general thing, I had only myself to thank. They had too often been the consequence of arbitrary preconceptions produced by influences of which I had lost the trace. At any rate, I will say plumply that the ancient capital of Burgundy is wanting in character; it is not up to the mark. It is old and narrow and crooked, and it has been left pretty well to itself: but it is not high and overhanging; it is not, to the eye, what the Burgundian capital should be. It has some tortuous vistas, some mossy roofs, some bulging fronts, some grey-faced hotels, which look as if in former centuries--in the last, for instance, during the time of that delightful Président de Brosses whose Letters from Italy throw an interesting sidelight on Dijon--they had witnessed a considerable amount of good living. But there is nothing else. I speak as a man who, for some reason which he doesn't remember now, did not pay a visit to the celebrated Puits de Moïse, an ancient cistern embellished with a sculptured figure of the Hebrew lawgiver.