Paris is notoriously congenial to the upper classes of America; and yet between Paris and New York there is one subtle and pervading difference. Paris has behind it in its buildings and the ways of its people what New York has not--a thousand years of history. The influence of the past is even more apparent in Brittany; and New York became something hardly credible when I found myself in a little hotel--at which I had engaged rooms--an hotel girdled by the ramparts and medieval towers of Dinan. I remained there for six weeks, during which time my book, to which I gave the name _A Critical Examination of Socialism_, was very nearly completed. In spite, however, of my labor, I from time to time found leisure for pilgrimages to moated chateaux, which seemed still to be enjoying a siesta of social and religious peace, unbroken by revolutions and even undisturbed by republics. Of these chateaux one was the home of Chateaubriand. Another, which I traveled a hundred miles to see, was the Chateau de Kerjaen, its gray gates approached by three huge converging avenues, and the outer walls by which the chateau itself is sheltered measuring seven hundred by four hundred feet. Though parts of it are habitable and inhabited, Kerjaen is partly ruinous, but its ruin was not due to violence. It was due to an accidental fire which took place when Robespierre was still in his cradle and even in his dreams was "guiltless of his country's blood." Coming, as I did, fresh from the New World, there was for me in Brittany something of the magic of Hungary.