My friends of the Commanderie have founded and endowed a cottage hospital, a perfect model of cheerfulness and hygiene. With its wide windows, its inner gallery for walking, its charming white bedrooms, its cane armchairs and sofas set about in the garden, whence the woods and vines are always fair to see, with its friendly Sisters in their white _cornettes_, and its mild fresh air, the _Hospitalité_ of Ballan appears, less a place to be ill in, than most evidently a place to get well in. There is an operating theatre (as bright and speckless as the rest) with a private bedroom for paying guests: and this is by no means the least service rendered, for the farmers of Touraine, well off and independent, are wholly without provision in their homes for the weeks which follow, for instance, the necessary infliction of any large flesh wound: too often in their homes the microbe finds out that open door. In the winter and spring, when pneumonia and influenza work their will, the little hospital can contain some ten or eleven invalids. It is emptied in the warm summer months, and serves, when there are no sick in Ballan, as a convalescent home for many a worn-out shop-girl or dressmaker’s apprentice from Paris. Sometimes, in that little hospital, I see a vision of social peace which still seems too far removed from this lovely, humane, courteous, beneficent, and yet, in so far as politics are concerned (and here religion is a branch of politics), this most choleric and disputatious land of France. Built and endowed by a Jewess, visited and approved by the Archbishop of Tours, its white dormitories show the Sisters of St. Joseph and the Socialist doctor standing hand-in-hand round the bedside of the sick. “Ah me!” say I, “might I live to see the day when the whole of France should imitate this manor in Touraine!” But history tells me that (in France, at least) the lion will never lie down with the lamb--for at heart the lion is afraid lest its neighbour take advantage of the situation. THE FRENCH PEASANT, BEFORE AND SINCE THE REVOLUTION The first time we meet him, to my knowledge, is just about the end of the twelfth century. Who can forget the sombre figure that strides across the dainty scene of _Aucassin et Nicolette_? Aucassin, on his courser, dreamy and lost in thought, goes riding towards the greenwood to find his true love, Nicolette. At the edge of the forest he passes the little herdboys, sitting on their mantles on the grass, as they break bread at nones by the fountain’s edge. These are mere children. It is far later, when the sun is sinking, while the tears course down the callow cheeks of Aucassin at the thought of his poor strayed love still unfound, it is deep in the forest glades that he meets the real French peasant.