Talking of travel, we have been having a correspondence in _The Times_ on the lavatories and the closed windows on the P.L.M. I am not using that railway myself just now, and I confess I like to see that here again the French remain obstinately French. France is endeared to us, like any other friend, by its weaknesses as well as its virtues; it would, for many of us, not be the old friend that we know and love without its occasional stuffiness and its occasional smells. Louis Veuillot once wrote a book called “Les Odeurs de Paris.” We have all smelt them, and should hardly recognize our Paris without them—though they must have had more pungency, a more racy, romantic flavour in Balzac’s Paris, the Paris of our dreams. Nowadays for the rich Balzacian smells you will have to visit some of the provincial towns of his novels, and so your pilgrimage will combine a literary with all factory interest. I know of one old Burgundian town—I will not name it, for obvious reasons—not mentioned, I fancy, by Balzac, quite untouched by time, with pepper-pot towers, a river in a deep ravine, and well worth a literary pilgrimage if only for its associations with Mme. de Sévigné and the Président de Brosses, where you have the added delight of the richest medieval odours powerfully assisted by a tannery—an unrivalled combination! Why do so many Englishmen grumble at these things instead of appreciating them æsthetically, as accompaniments of the French scene, as part of that varied experience which we call “abroad”? Or why do they explain them on the illiberal assumption of some inherent inferiority in the French character?