Moreover, the dearth of information narrowed not their opportunities merely, but their interests likewise. Carnac and Stonehenge were no doubt a long way out of their way, but the dolmen of Bagneux was no more than three-quarters of a mile from Saumur, where many of them stayed for weeks, or even months. Yet not a single one, apparently, went to see it. As for the opportunities, not only was Pompeii still buried for them, but Rome itself was, as Montaigne says, not so much ruins as a sepulchre of ruins. When, again, some one says of Lyons that the houses are fine but the streets so ill-smelling and dirty that one cannot stop to admire them, it may remind us that much that was nominally visible was practically invisible; whether through being what was, to them, a considerable distance off their routes, like Brou or Laon, or, as with most cathedrals, through houses being built up against them. Similarly, the Roman amphitheatre at Nîmes is a case in point; houses having been erected inside it so freely that in 1682 five hundred men capable of bearing arms were supposed to be dwelling there.[161] And along with these conditions of living went ideas to correspond; the total effect being half-prohibitive of the occupations of the artist, the historian, and the archæologist, and this at a period when a larger proportion of the greatest buildings of Europe coexisted than at any other period. In fact, so far as the Loire châteaux are concerned, it is clear that the modern tourist sees far more of some of the finest Renascence work than did its contemporaries, who were restricted here to a visit to Chambord and a glimpse of the outsides of Blois and Amboise. But after all deductions of this kind have been granted, they may well reply that their concern was not so much with that part of the present which we term the past, but with that which we term the future, their individual futures, in particular; and that their object was achieved; adding, moreover, that travel under these conditions was certainly superior to travel of the twentieth century, considered as a form of education in the wider sense of the word. For not only was it obligatory to share the life of the country and its language to an extent which is optional now, but a traveller was continually being thrown on his own resources and presence of mind in matters which concerned his self-respect, his health, and his safety, whereas now everything is merely a matter of cash.