Val d'Amour. As we drew nearer to Besançon, each turn of the small streams, and each low rounded hill, might have served as an illustration to Cæsar's 'Commentaries.' Now at length it was seen how, whatever the result of a battle, there was always a _proximus collis_ for the conquered party to retire to; and it would have been easy to find many suitable scenes for the critical engagement, where the woods sloped down to a strip of grass-land between their foot and the stream. The Frenchman knew his Cæsar, but he put that general in the fourth century B.C. He made mistakes, too, in quoting him, which were easily detected by a memory bristling with the details of his phraseology, the indelible result of extracting the principal parts of his verbs, and the nominatives of his irregular nouns, from half a dozen generations of small boys. He promised me a rich Julian feast in Besançon, and was greatly affected when he found that the Englishman could give him Cæsar's description of his native town. He wholly denied the amphitheatre with which one of our handbooks has gifted it; and this denial was afterwards echoed by every one in Besançon, some even thinking it necessary to explain the difference between an amphitheatre and an arch of triumph, the latter still existing in the town. The Jesuit Dunod relates that the amphitheatre was to be seen at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the ruined state in which the Alans and Vandals had left it after their successful siege in 406. It seems to have stood near the present site of the Madeleine. It was a great satisfaction to find that the Frenchman had himself visited the glacière which was the object of my search, and was able to give some idea as to the manner of reaching it, for my information on the subject was confined to a vague notice that there was an ice-cave five leagues from Besançon. As so often happened in other cases, he advised me not to go to it, but rather, if I must see a cave, to go to the Grotto of Ocelles,[30] a collection of thirty or more caverns and galleries near the Doubs, below Besançon. Seeing, however, that I was bent on visiting the glacière, he advised me not to go on Sunday, for the Cardinal Archbishop had ordered the Trappists at the Chartreuse near not to receive guests on that day; while Saturday, he thought, was almost as bad, for nothing better than an omelette could be obtained on days of abstinence. Saturday, then, was clearly the day to be chosen.