I remember nothing else at Angers but the curious old Café Serin, where, after I had had my dinner at the inn, I went and waited for the train which, at nine o'clock in the evening, was to convey me, in a couple of hours, to Nantes--an establishment remarkable for its great size and its air of tarnished splendour, its brown gilding and smoky frescoes, as also for the fact that it was hidden away on the second floor of an unassuming house in an unilluminated street. It hardly seemed a place where you would drop in; but when once you had found it, it presented itself, with the cathedral, the castle, and the Maison d'Adam, as one of the historical monuments of Angers. [Illustration] Chapter xv [Nantes] If I spent two nights at Nantes, it was for reasons of convenience rather than of sentiment; though indeed I spent them in a big circular room which had a stately, lofty, last-century look--a look that consoled me a little for the whole place being dirty. The high, old-fashioned inn (it had a huge windy _porte-cochère_, and you climbed a vast black stone staircase to get to your room) looked out on a dull square, surrounded with other tall houses and occupied on one side by the theatre, a pompous building decorated with columns and statues of the muses. Nantes belongs to the class of towns which are always spoken of as "fine," and its position near the mouth of the Loire gives it, I believe, much commercial movement. It is a spacious, rather regular city, looking, in the parts that I traversed, neither very fresh nor very venerable. It derives its principal character from the handsome quays on the Loire, which are overhung with tall eighteenth-century houses (very numerous too in the other streets)--houses with big _entresols_ marked by arched windows, classic pediments, balcony-rails of fine old iron-work. These features exist in still better form at Bordeaux; but, putting Bordeaux aside, Nantes is quite architectural. The view up and down the quays has the cool, neutral tone of colour that one finds so often in French water-side places--the bright greyness which is the tone of French landscape art. The whole city has rather a grand, or at least an eminently well-established, air. During a day passed in it of course I had time to go to the Musée; the more so that I have a weakness for provincial museums--a sentiment that depends but little on the quality of the collection. The pictures may be bad, but the place is often curious; and indeed from bad pictures, in certain moods of the mind, there is a degree of entertainment to be derived. If they are tolerably old they are often touching; but they must have a relative antiquity, for I confess I can do nothing with works of art of which the badness is of recent origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused light, the musty odour, the mementos around you of dead fashions, the