Then there is the spirit of towns; each town has a certain individuality, each has a spirit of its own derived from its historic past, and from its occupations in the present. One town may be a clerical and aristocratic little centre, where a republican (even under the Republic) has not the faintest chance of getting into society; a place where all public functionaries under the Government are socially boycotted; a place where all modern ideas are quietly ignored or despised, where reputations have no currency, and nothing is valued but conformity to a narrow local standard of the _comme il faut_. Thirty miles away, there is, perhaps, a busy commercial town, where all ideas are centred upon a pecuniary success, and people are esteemed exactly in proportion to their capital without regard to other considerations,--a town where all the fortunes are recent, and all have been acquired in trade. [Sidenote: Extremes in the same Place.] [Sidenote: Nîmes.] [Sidenote: Lyons.] [Sidenote: Michelet’s Description.] Another variety, very little understood out of France, is that of extremes meeting in the same town. This is sometimes especially striking in the southern towns, and it may be of very long standing, like the conflict between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism at Nîmes, a city that cannot be correctly described as either Protestant or Catholic; and yet there is more of each religion in it than there would be if the rival faith were extirpated. But the best example in France of a city combining the most opposite characteristics is Lyons. It is at the same time most republican and most clerical. “There is one town above all,” wrote Michelet, “where the antagonism of two ages, of the spirit of old times and the new spirit, strikes even the eyes in all its grandeur--that town is Lyons.... I leaned on the parapet on the steep of Fourvières, and said to myself, as I looked upon the opposite hill, gloomy, black below, under the cypresses of the Jardin des Plantes, colossal above in its piles of work-people’s houses, ten or fifteen storeys high,--I said, _These are not two hills; they are two religions_. The two towns of Lyons, that of the convents and that of the workshops, are the goals of pilgrimage for the poor. Some of them come to the Lyons of miracles and seek charity; these come to Fourvières.[91] But thou, good workman, wilt come to the hill of labour, the serious Croix Rousse. The part in the banquet which thou desirest is bread won by thine own hands.” I was reminded of these words of Michelet when, at Lyons, I said to a mechanic who was working on Sunday, “This task prevents you from going to mass.” The man paused an instant in his labour, looked up at me seriously, and answered, “It is not my custom to go to mass. He who works prays.” He then resumed his prayer with hearty strokes of a hammer. [Sidenote: The Nation of Paris.]