We left Paris yesterday from the Station Quai d'Orsay for our journey of three and a half hours to Tours. So near to Paris is this chateau land of Touraine that we wonder why we have not all been journeying this way full many a year, instead of waiting to be caught up and borne hither by the tide of fashion, especially as our route lay through a land filled with historic and romantic associations. It is impossible to pass through this flat but picturesque country, with its winding rivers and white roads shaded by tall poplars, and by such old gray towns as Etampes, Orleans, Blois, and Amboise, without recalling the delight with which we have wandered here in such goodly company as that of Brantome, Balzac, Dumas, and Madame de Sevigne. It was upon this same Loire, which winds around many a chateau before it throws itself into the sea, that Madame de Sevigne described herself as setting forth from Tours at 5 o'clock on a May morning, in a boat, and in the most beautiful weather in the world. These boats on the Loire, as described by Madame de Sevigne, were evidently somewhat like gondolas. "I have the body of my _grande carosse_ so arranged," she wrote, "that the sun could not trouble us; we lowered the glasses; the opening in front made a marvellous picture, all the points of view that you can imagine. Only the Abbe and I were in this little compartment on good cushions and in fine air, much at our ease, altogether like _cochons sur la paille_. We had _potage et du boulli_, quite warm, as there is a little furnace here; one eats on a ship's plank like the king and queen; from which you see how everything is _raffine_ upon our Loire!" Down this same river M. Fouquet, the great financier, fled from the wrath of his royal master and the bitter hatred of his rival Colbert. On the swift current the lighter sped, carried along by it and the eight rowers toward Nantes and Fouquet's own fortress of Belle Isle, only to be overtaken by Colbert's boat with its twelve sturdy oarsmen. Whatever may have been the sins of Fouquet, he had so many charming traits and was so beloved by the great writers of France--Moliere, La Fontaine, Madame de Sevigne, Pelisson, and all the rest whom he gathered around him at his chateau--that our sympathies are with him rather than with the cold and calculating Colbert. Putting their hands into the public coffers was so much the habit of the financiers and royal almoners of that period that we quite resent Fouquet's being singled out for the horrible punishment inflicted upon him, and after all he may not have been guilty, as justice often went far astray in those days, as in later times.