In this village, however, dreary as it was, I found a _café_ and a billiard-table. Where, indeed, in France will you not? Except in the merest jumble of hovels, you can hardly traverse a hamlet without seeing the crossed cues and balls figuring on a gaily painted house. You may not be able to purchase the most ordinary articles a traveller requires, but you can always have a game at pool. I have frequently found billiard-rooms in filthy little hamlets, inhabited entirely by persons of the rank of English agricultural labourers. At home, we associate the game with great towns, and, perhaps, with the more dissipated portion of the life of great towns. Here, even with the thoroughly rustic portion of the population, the game seems a necessary of life. And there are, too--contrary to what might have been expected--few or no make-shift-looking, trumpery tables. The _cafés_ in the Palais Royal, or in the fashionable Boulevards, contain no pieces of furniture of this description more massive or more elaborately carved and adorned than many I have met with in places hardly aspiring to the rank of villages. It has often struck me, that the billiard-table must have cost at least as much as the house in which it was erected; but the thing seemed indispensable, and there it was in busy use all day long. A correct return of the number of billiard-tables in France would give some very significant statistics relative to the social customs and lives of our merry neighbours. It would be an odd indication of the habits of the people, should there be found to be five times as many billiard-tables in France as there are mangles; and I for one firmly believe that such would be the result of an impartial perquisition. Besides the _billard_ and the newspapers--little provincial rags, with which an English grocer would scorn to wrap up an ounce of pigtail--there are, of course, cards and dominoes for the frequenters; and they are in as great requisition all day as the balls and cues. I like--no man likes better--to see the toilers of the world released from their labours, and enjoying themselves; but after all there is something, to English ways of thinking, desperately idle in the scene of a couple of big, burly working men, sitting in the glare of the sunlight the best part of the day, wrangling over a greasy pack of cards, or rattling dominoes upon the little marble tables. I once remarked this to an old French gentleman. "True--too true," he replied; "it was Bonaparte did the mischief. He made--you know how great a proportion of the country youth of France--soldiers. When they returned--those who did return--they had garrison tastes and barrack habits; and those tastes and habits it was which have brought matters to the pass, that you can hardly travel a league, even in rural France, without hearing the click of the billiard balls." CHAPTER XII.