Wisdom. Not less French the rich green midlands than the white and sunburnt south, the champagne vineyards eastward, and the rocky Cévennes rolling southward. Could anybody differ, more from the morose and inhospitable Lyonese, in whose eyes every outsider is the enemy against whom he sedulously barricades his doors, in whose esteem the pick of humanity is the prosperous silk-merchant, than the pushing, loud-mannered Marseillais, with what he would fain have us take for his heart so aggressively upon his sleeve, emotion so transparently transient ever on the surface, subtly disguising self-interest and calculation? For every diversity of character equal diversity of scenery—from the Alpine grandeur of the Dauphiny land to the beautiful lagoons of the Marais; the Vendean plain washed by the long blue roll of the Atlantic; Provence, land of salt lagoons and dead old cities of Greece and Rome; the central provinces, with their lovely rivers and chestnut woods; Celtic Brittany, half English; Normandy, with its glorious capital, one of the fairest of France; the radiant cities of the Loire, French river of romance; the bright and witching little kingdom of Béarn, exquisite Roussillon, with its old hum of wars and troubadour songs, its delicate sweetness of herb and leaf and bloom, its quaint old towns breathing of Spain, and its high air of legend; the east, with its mountains and dense pine forests, up to sunnier Ardennes. And the _patois_ of these so different districts are not less distinct than the scenery, the note of town and province, and the characteristics of each race. Shelley most seriously wrote that there was nothing worth seeing in France. Even the tourist will find more to delight his eye in going from one department to another than he will find place to record in the most voluminous note-book. Let him only content himself with such a province as Touraine, with its rich and pleasant landscape, its castles of undying interest, its river of thrilling associations. Or let him wander in summer amid the cherry orchards of the Jura country, with the rampart of mountains above the pine-tops and the touch of Swiss beauty around; or dream away the present in musing upon forgotten Mediterranean glories among the ruins of dead Provençal cities between the grey-green silver of the olive and the sapphire waters beyond the broad grey river bends.