The servants, however, seem good, industrious, honest, and very civil; and, as far as our own experience went, we saw only good conduct; while from our hostess at the Bain Royal we met with liberality and extreme courtesy; she, it is true, is from the refined city of Toulouse, but has long resided at Pau, and I should certainly counsel any stranger, whom, they would suit, to choose her apartments as a residence; for her pavilions are situated in the most agreeable position, out of the noise and dampness of the town, and with the whole range of Pyrenees constantly in uninterrupted view. [Footnote 26: All hot! all hot!] CHAPTER II. THE CLIMATE OF PAU--STORMS--FINE WEATHER--PALASSOU--REASONS FOR GOING TO PAU--THE WINTER. ONE of the chief inducements to foreigners, particularly the English, to visit Pau for the winter, is the reputation of its climate for mildness and softness. When we arrived, in October, in a storm of rain, it was, we understood, the continuation of a series of wet weather, which, throughout the year, had made the whole country desolate, and the company at all the baths had, in consequence, left a month sooner than usual; for a fortnight after our establishment at Pau, nothing could be more agreeable than the season, precisely answering to the beautiful weather which my letters announced from different parts of England. During this time the mountains were rarely visible, and when seen appeared indistinctly. This charming fortnight, during which Pau seemed to deserve all the commendations so profusely bestowed on it, was a promise of the calm and peaceful winter which I was told was always to be found in these favoured regions; I bore the sarcasms against the fogs and, above all, the uncertainty of the climate of gloomy England, as well as I could; and my assertion that, till the first week in November, I had last year bathed in the sea at Brighton, was received with indulgent smiles of pity at my nationality, both by French and English; but of course not believed, for the air of France, I have always observed, has such a property of effacing the remembrance of sunny days passed on the other side of the channel, that, by degrees, our countrymen arrive at the belief that nothing but fog and rain are ever to be seen in our ill-fated island, and they imagine that, till they came abroad, their knowledge of blue sky or bright sun was obtained only in pictures, but had no existence on the banks of the Thames or elsewhere, in the desolate regions they had quitted.