The superior comfort of the inhabitants may be estimated from the report of a traveler, who mentions as a circumstance worthy of note, that “most of their windows were made of white paper;” although in some of the better houses the upper part of the window was filled with glass. The smaller towns of France have all undergone a change more or less great: even those in the agricultural districts have outgrown their walls. At Boulogne-sur-Mer the lower town consisted of two or three convents and a few fishermen’s huts clustered round the Church of St. Nicholas. A populous suburb now covers the site of the old harbor. Dijon, now a mere provincial town, was once a great parliament centre: a little capital in Eastern France.[208] It had a vast ducal palace; churches and abbeys were crowded close together. Of the palace of Jean sans Peur, the fire has spared little beyond a tall tower and some precious fragments. Modern improvements and renovations have destroyed much of the old city; but that gem of the Renaissance La Maison Milsand, in the Rue des Forges, still remains as an unapproachable model of architectural decoration. The charming little town of Moulins in the Bourbonnais filled the space now enclosed by the inner promenade--the Cours Doujar, d’Aquin, and Berulle--constructed on the ditches of the old wall. None of the “curious birds and beasts” remain in the park; and of the magnificent chateau where Charles IX. held his court little has survived beyond the huge unbattlemented tower; and of the steeples for which the town was once so famous, only one (the clock-tower) still soars above the houses. The greatest change of all has taken place in the district that lies around the great manufacturing town of St. Étienne. In 1560 it was a pleasant wooded valley; no clanging engines disturbed its silence, no clouds of smoke defiled the air. Now it is one of the busiest centres of modern industry, and in noise and dirt may almost vie with Birmingham. Toulon, now the great arsenal of the French navy, was a small port containing only 637 houses, and covering an area of 660 acres. Its whole artillery consisted of two bombardes and twenty-five pounds of powder. Its naval importance dates from the reign of Henry IV. In 1543, when Barbarossa’s fleet was received into the harbor, the inhabitants were ordered to abandon the town for six months under pain of death, leaving their houses and all they could not remove at the mercy of the Turks.[209] From this imperfect sketch of the condition of France at the outbreak of the Religious Wars, the reader may in some degree be able to understand how such a crime as the St. Bartholomew massacre was possible. Although right and wrong are always the same, our appreciation of them depends in the main upon our education and the circumstances around us; and it would be unfair to judge the men of the sixteenth century by our nineteenth century standard. CHAPTER V.