The custom of picnic lunches is one that I recommend to all travellers in Burgundy, including those to whom the saving of a five-pound note, at the end of a month's holiday, is a matter of no moment whatever. The Burgundians feed more richly, perhaps, than any other people of Europe, and their dinners, like the country's monuments--rich rather than dainty--need a healthy appetite to do them justice. Further, the secrecy that these picnic methods necessarily involve--for you cannot proclaim your intention to a maître d'hôtel, whose luncheon tables groan beneath their burden of good things appointed for you to eat,--will titillate deliciously the insatiable curiosity of the lady his wife, who passes hours in wondering where and how you lunched. [Illustration: A Burgundian Welcome] "Monsieur et Dame will not be in to lunch to-day?" "No, Madame." "Monsieur et Dame were not in to lunch yesterday." "No, Madame." A pause, during which our hostess, screwing up her courage for the plunge, eyed us with a glance, half-timid, half-amused. "Where did Monsieur et Dame lunch yesterday?" The speaker looked at my wife; my wife looked at me. I looked innocently at Madame. "On a wall, Madame." Madame's eyebrows rose slightly. She could make nothing of it. "But it was raining all day yesterday, Monsieur!" "Not on the wall, Madame. The fact is, we never lunch at an hotel--even when it rains." "Vous faites bien" was what she said to us. What she said to her husband, an hour later, I leave to the reader to guess. But we parted excellent friends. These picnic lunches, of course, are rather scrappy. Things get blown away sometimes, or are fastened upon by ants. Il faut souffrir pour bien vivre. While I have been writing these notes, my wife has left the bench of Roman stone that is our table, and is seated on the grass half way down towards the orchestra, where she is exercising her not inconsiderable powers of imagination in recreating the traditions of the spot. Also she is proving, unwittingly, the excellent acoustic properties of the natural theatre, constructed in the Greek, rather than in the Roman method; that is to say, by hollowing out of the hill, not building up upon the plain. The keeper of the buvette told us that a play is to be given in the theatre next June (1911) and "a little bull-fight." Going back to the hotel that day, we noticed, among the crisp leaves of the Promenade des Marbres, many a handful of confetti,--souvenirs of the great fair or festival of St. Lazare, that, for nearly the whole of September, disturbs the tranquillity of Autun. Let the traveller, therefore, see the Roman city before September, or after it.