For we have here in Bayonne--you notice that I already say "We,"--a simply splendid Gothic cathedral, the first one of my life. It is right up the street from where we live, and it is _won_derful. Chere amies, think what it means for a town to have in its midst such a marvelous thing! Think what people must be like who live right close to it, go in and out of it every day, and feel its "beauty and puissant power" (as Matthew Arnold says). The South Portal is especially fine, _starred by Baedeker_, which means a great deal, as you know. I make a pilgrimage there every day, to just _gaze_ at that South Portal. _I_ have a life-time of arrears to make up, not having lived with it from childhood, as these fortunate people have. It is no wonder that you meet here people absolutely _won_derful in their polish, like a lady who called on me the other day, the Marquise de Charmieres. Her husband's family dates back to the days of Louis XII. I am ashamed to say I had to go and look up who Louis XII was, after she had gone. She had with her a nun, who lives with her, by special permission, the dearest old thing with her sweeping black robes and the quaint, quilled, picturesque head-dress. I suppose they used, in the old days, the Charmieres did, to live in the _won_derful old castle, just across the street from us, which is another of my great admirations. Think of living across the street from a real castle! It was constructed in 1100, on the remains of the _old Roman wall_, if you please, for Bayonne is very, very old. And it is right there, just the way it always was, with battlements and a real drawbridge and everything, just as it was in feudal times. Many famous people have lived there, Richard Coeur de Lion, Louis Quatorze, and others. It was there that Catherine de Medicis planned the St. Bartholomew massacre, and in a house on this very street that Napoleon took the Spanish crown away from the King, and gave it to his brother. Isn't it marvelous to think of? I have had some of the curtains taken down in our _salon_ (the French simply swathe their windows in curtains, simply _swathe_ them!) and I often stand at the window and just gaze out at those old castle walls and try to imagine the splendid life that went on here then, the streets full of people in costumes and knights in armor and everything. I see the modern crowds coming and going under those massive walls, and I keep thinking how proud they must be of such an inheritance from the past, and how they must often wish the good old feudal days back again, when "life had color," as a writer said in a book I was reading the other day. No such inspiriting reminders of past glories in America! No such past glories! Nothing but what Ruskin calls the drab, dead level of democracy.