But such trifles, after all, are merely the "petit désagréments" of travel--remembered only with a smile; relics of primitivism, such as was the service de la gare--omnibuses still running, not so much as varnished since the French Revolution. "C'est ancien" said a hotel porter, with a wave of the hand. "C'est un monument historique," added a bystander. The porter smiled, as his hand closed mechanically over a franc. We rode, that first afternoon, to Cezenat, on the slopes of the Jura. The aspect of the country round was harsher than that of central Burgundy, and the light fiercer; the landscape, as a whole, lacks the soft charm of the vine-clad Côte d'Or, without attaining to the romantic quivering whiteness of the vrai midi. It was very delightful to rest before the café opposite to the church of Revonnat, and watch the shapely, creamy cattle, following the swarthy maid to the water-trough beneath the virgin-crowned fountain. They drank steadily, until a long stick, rattling about their shiny muzzles, made them raise mildly-protesting heads. They walked home with unruffled dignity, a processional frieze of madonnas--their faces veiled, as befits holiness. More, and then more, came tinkling by, driven by a diminutive boy. They disappeared down a winding lane, and were followed by four horses, harnessed tandem, wearing the three-horned attelage of the Midi, and stamping, swishing their tails, and tossing heads, till all the village was vocal with their music. After them waddled a fat woman, leaking seed, and followed by a hundred hungry fowls. Last of all, two piebald oxen, harnessed in front of a skinny pony, tugged wearily up the hill the household goods of a whole family piled upon a creaking cart. With the exception of a few old houses and the world-famous Brou, there is very little architecture worth seeing in Bourg. Or, if there is, it did not detain us long. We made at once for Princess Margaret's Church, rather more than a kilometre distant from the lower part of the town, at the end of a long, straight, squalid road. There we found it--this jewel ill-set. The authorities, with the cynical apathy, or ignorance, that characterises French ecclesiasticism, have surrounded the building, on the west and north, with a gravelled open space, like the playground of a board-school, adorned with a tawdry crucifix, and a lavatory, the whole enclosed within an ignoble wall. Why the French public tolerate such outrages is a mystery! [Illustration: ·IN THE STREET·] I suppose that, in this case, darkness is just ignorance.[198] Yet before their very eyes are evidences that it was not always so. The pictures in their church show that the "parvis" was originally planted with shrubs, which would grow as readily to-day as they did then; failing a grassy lawn, and the money or men to keep it green and trim.