Bought _Le Champ de Bataille de l’Epopée_, also _Le Mannequin d’Osier_, out of a huge stock of Anatole France’s books, who is evidently a favorite here. I passed through the old courtyard of the museum, hermetically sealed _depuis la campagne_, as the porter told me when I sought his lodge, from which the most savory of noonday smells was issuing. Uninteresting and entirely beside the point, Buddhist sculptures fill one side of the court, and then, passing through the portal of a seventeenth-century church, transported there when the church itself was being done away with, one finds oneself in a narrow passage on the walls of which are hung quaint old fire-backs, _plaques de foyer_. The first is of the eighteenth century, “_l’amour désarmé_” (love was nearly always disarmed in those days), and this one represented Cupid supporting a languorous lady. “_Le retour du marché_” of Louis XVI depicted a housewife returning with a full basket on her arm, and evoked the odor of the porter’s _pot-au-feu_. A French soldier wounded in the Crimea, 1855, with his colonel bending over him, might have been any one of a hundred thousand scenes of to-day. On one were the arms of the King of Spain, and the date 1608, and on another those of Maria Theresa and her consort, Francis III, Duke of Lorraine. Their origins were as diverse as the history of Lorraine itself, and I glimpsed family groups sitting about hearths, looking at them through the flames. _Later._