There appears to be much ease in the circumstances of the inhabitants of La Rochelle: we understood that there were not many persons of very large fortune, but few positively poor. The commerce is inferior now to what it has been; as, for instance, in the _glorious_ time of the _slave trade_; but there appears still to be a good deal of bustle on the quays: however, to an English eye, all French trade seems dull when compared to the movement in our own ports. There is always building going on here, as in every other town in France, where one might imagine everything had been at a stand-still for a century, and had suddenly been endowed with new life and activity. The cities of France seem--like the enchanted domains of the marble prince of the Arabian Nights--to have been doomed to a long inaction, and restored to existence by an invisible power. The magic which changed the blue and red fishes into men, was less potent than the wise rule of the present sovereign of the kingdom, under whom his country flourishes; not a town or village being forgotten in his endeavours to rescue them from the long night of wretchedness into which war and misrule had cast them. Everywhere his donations and encouragement cause ruins and filth to disappear, and splendour and neatness to take their place: yet, in spite of all this, and obvious as the benefit is to a traveller who hears of his benefactions wherever he passes, few of the subjects of this considerate and liberal monarch seem sufficiently grateful for his patriotic endeavours to exalt their position. "He has not done _much_ for _us_," is the general remark; a rather startling one, when one recollects the hundreds of towns, villages, and bourgs which his care has reached. The French are certainly neither grateful nor just; for they seldom remember or acknowledge obligation either to individuals or kings. They seem, also, wilfully blind to the blessings of the peace, which Louis Philippe so offends their warlike propensities by insisting on: even while they are restoring all their battered towns and erecting new edifices, of which they are proud enough, they would willingly leave them half done to draw the sword against some windmill giant, and buckle on their armour to encounter some puppet-show termagant.