Our visits were always long, as most of the châteaux were at a certain distance, and we were obliged to stay an hour and a half, sometimes longer, to rest the horses. It was before the days of five-o'clock tea. A tray was brought in with sweet wine (Malaga or Vin de Chypre) and cakes (ladies'-fingers) which evidently had figured often before on similar occasions. Conversation languished sometimes, though Mme. A. was wonderful, talking so easily about everything. In the smaller places, when people rarely went to Paris, it ran always in the same grooves--the woods, the hunting (very good in the Villers-Cotterets forest), the schoolmaster (so difficult to get proper books for the children to read), the curé, and all local gossip, and as much about the iniquities of the republic as could be said before the wife of a republican senator. Wherever we went, even to the largest châteaux, where the family went to Paris for the season, the talk was almost entirely confined to France and French interests. Books, politics, music, people, nothing existed apparently au-delà des frontières. America was an unknown quantity. It was strange to see intelligent people living in the world so curiously indifferent as to what went on in other countries. At first I used to talk a little about America and Rome, where I had lived many years and at such an interesting time--the last days of Pio Nono and the transformation of the old superstitious papal Rome to the capital of young Italy--but I soon realized that it didn't interest any one, and by degrees I learned to talk like all the rest.