We have descended at the Hôtel du Jura, which holds out a special inducement of "baths on every floor," an inducement I must confess, for aside from the greatest hotels in the largest cities, one finds no bathrooms in beautiful France,--and on arriving at an inn after a long auto ride, a bath is an absolute necessity, unless you are so utterly tired out, which I have never been, that nothing save bed is of the slightest importance. Where and how does the vast mass of the French nation bathe? I am not scoffing, I would like to know. It is a fact that until the advent of English and American tourists there were no baths in any hotel in France from Brest to Nice, and even with the building of the Hôtel Continental in Paris, in 1878, if one wanted a bath one must descend to the basement. In 1900, there were but one or two in all the hotel part of that vast establishment, and the rooms containing them were usually used as bedrooms. That condition is slowly improving, but even now they cannot understand the necessity of a bath with every bedroom. The plumbers' bills would drive them to drink, and even in the present Élysées Palace Hôtel, with all its paint, glass, and glitter, unless one has a large suite one has to walk a distance down the hall to the bath and often wait half an hour. The day may come when Europe will boast the convenience of such hotels as one finds in every American city, but she cannot do so now, and in Berlin it is reported that the Royal Palace has no bathrooms, that his Majesty's tub is behind a curtain at the end of a hall. The Empress is said to have exclaimed, when reading of a New York hotel, "I should think myself in heaven if I had such luxury around me." She evidently understood that luxury in its truest sense does not mean gorgeous pageants, pomp, and glitter, but a bathroom of your own less than a block away. How was it at Versailles in the days of the grand Louis? One reads much of the state function called "the toilet" where the King is represented as washing his eyes in some spirits of wine, but one has never read of a bath being part of the royal establishment, consequently one cannot but imagine that under all its pomp and majesty, the Court of France must have been a very dirty place. In fact it is necessary to look to the extremities of Europe, Turkey and Spain, to find evidences of the proper appreciation of fresh water as applied to the human frame. The Turks--though unspeakably vile in all other respects--do bathe and southern Spain holds mute testimony to the love of the Moors for water--a trait they certainly carried away with them when they crossed the straits. [Illustration: THE TOWER OF STATE, PALACE OF THE DUKES OF BOURGOGNE, AT DIJON By permission of Messrs. Neurdein]