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CHARACTER OF THE LANGROIS.

and there the red wines of Aï, Epernay, Versenay, Bonzy, Taisy, Cumières, Verzy, Mailly, Saint Bâsle, and Saint Thierry.

There are many jokes against the Champenois, which we have the less scruple in alluding to, as, at the present day, they are mere jokes. They are accused of possessing a simplicity of character which degenerates into absolute folly. "They are as silly," say these mauvais plaisanteurs, "as their own sheep;" and a story is then quoted from Cæsar, which the reader will look for in vain in the Commentaries to support the assertion. From this it appears, that when the Roman general conquered Gaul, he imposed a tax upon all the tricasses' who possessed a flock of a hundred sheep. This was doubtless a great hardship, and the cunning Champenois, for the purpose of eluding it, immediately resorted to the expedient of dividing their charges into droves of ninety-nine. This, however, would not do. The fiscal officer counted the shepherd with his flock, reckoning that ninety-nine sheep and one Tricassis made out a hundred beasts!

To this day the Dijonnais call their neighbours, the Langrois, fools of Langres; and we should not omit to mention that, in the days when such things were in fashion at the French court, Troyes enjoyed the exclusive honour and privilege of furnishing the king with fools. In our time the Champenois retains nothing of his original character, except a certain goodness and amiability of disposition which are supposed, in this wicked world, to be component parts of folly. He sings and dances-no one dances more; and his heart is as light and merry as his own sparkling, flashing wine. As for the Troyen, although we have not yet reached his ancient city, we think it our duty, by way of a per contra, The inhabitants of the country of Troyes in Champagne.

CHARACTER OF THE TROYEN.

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to present the reader with his eulogium drawn up by one of his own townsmen.

"The true Troyen is frank, earnest, determined in his opinion, obstinate in his tastes and purposes. His spirit, more ingenuous than fine, less brilliant than solid, is capable of any thing demanding application. Naif, easy, without stiffness in his commerce with society, he loves pleasantry, raillery, and noisy pleasures. Although frequently open to the defects and absurdities of his neighbours, he is only offended by foppery. Despising compliments, which to him appear the sure sign of falsehood, and detesting in the same degree pride and meanness, he suffers constraint with impatience. He is little adapted for servitude, and little skilled in gallantry and small-talk. An obliging friend, an amiable enemy, he is the first to seek reconciliation. Careful, attentive to his interests, he knows how to ally magnificence with economy. Capable of work, of care, of attention, of details, he yet dreads continued labour; he flies it from a certain softness of mind which sometimes leads him to indolence. In general, he is less capable of acquiring than of preserving. Attached to his country, his town, his fireside, he yet gives himself up to strangers, who occasionally make him their dupe. If ambition, interest, or views of gain, obtain the mastery over his mind, which, however, is rarely the case, he becomes laborious, active, indefatigable; he learns to flatter and insinuate; one would take him for a Gascon, if his speech did not betray him. For the rest, the circumstance is very rare, of a Troyen quitting his province with the firm purpose of making a fortune and not fulfilling that purpose."

NOGENT-SUR-SEINE.

JUST before entering Nogent, we obtained a very beautiful peep of the Seine stealing along between its rows of poplars. We then entered a busy bustling town, very well pleased with our journey, and the reflections it had given rise to.

Nogent-sur-Seine is nearly twice as large as Bray, and this is nearly all that it is necessary to say about it. It, however, notwithstanding the want of ready communication with the latter town, is considered to be the entrepôt of commerce for the whole department of the Aube; and in earlier times was a place of still more importance. The principal hôtel is very miserable, and as dirty as hôtel need be; and altogether, it was with considerable satisfaction we found ourselves the next morning walking briskly away from it across the fields, at the same moment that the lark began his matins.

The walks by the river side are very agreeable at both ends of the town, but more especially so in the direction we are now taking. The Seine is speedily to lose its character of a navigable river; and already its low green banks shelving over the water, or a bed between of sand and gravel, give it an appearance wholly different from any it has yet assumed. After a pleasant stroll of two leagues and a half, just sufficient to stretch the limbs before breakfast, we reached, to our great surprise, at Pont-sur-Seine, a very neat and entirely new suspension-bridge. The purpose of our present walk was to see this little town, and the ruins of a

remarkable château mentioned by Richard, after which we intended to rejoin the great road and wait for the diligence.

The contrast between the village of Pont-sur-Seine-for there must be some strange blunder in Richard's "petite ville sur la Seine, au confluent de cette rivière avec l'Aube -population deux milles,"-the contrast, we say, between the village and its bridge is one of the most curious imaginable. The former is a village of the middle ages, preserved even to this moment in uncontaminated antiquity; and the latter a trim, self-sufficient, mathematical specimen, in body and spirit, of the nineteenth century.

Where all the men were, Heaven knows, for we did not see a single face masculine except that of the toll-keeper of the bridge; and he, poor man! was followed from his den by his wife, and at least a dozen female children, to gape at the unaccustomed traveller. The inhabitants were women, with complexions of the deepest Asiatic hue, and all, we believe, without exception, considerably beyond the three score and ten years of human life. They sat at work, in parties of some half-dozen, not at their doors, but in the middle of the street, a fact which proves that the invention of wheeled carriages had not yet been adopted in Pont-sur-Seine.

After insinuating our way as gallantly as possible through those antiquities, we prepared to view, in the ruins of the ancient château, a monument as venerable as themselves. Alas! these ruins exist only in the book of M. Richard. They have now vanished, and on their site has arisen a great, glaring house, built in exceedingly bad taste. The view, however, after we regained the road, which we found on the top of a hill overlooking the village, was sufficient to compensate for the trouble of a much longer walk, and the rather that it afforded almost the only prospect worth noting till we reached

TROYES.

The approach to this ancient capital of Champagne would be fine at any rate, but coming in as a relief to the monotony of the route, one unconsciously exaggerates its beauty. Seated in the midst of a plain, however, covered with rich plantations, through which the Seine, dividing into numerous branches, rushes with energy, and surrounded by ditches and ramparts, above which appear the dark roofs and spires of the city, Troyes certainly breaks upon the traveller's view in a very imposing attitude.

It is all imposition. We no sooner enter the gates than we find ourselves in a mean and miserable town, without even that character of the picturesque which almost always belongs to antiquity. The houses, old without dignity, are chiefly built of wood, and the streets are narrow, without the grotesque irregularity which, in the ancient part of Rouen, for instance, so amply compensates for inconvenience. The only thing which can make the city tolerable at all as a place of residence is the walk round the ramparts; and even there, solitude is the principal charm. The ditch is in some places extravagantly wide, and considerable trees grow even at the bottom; while beyond, interminable groves and alleys shut in the view abruptly. Looking one way, you may fancy yourself in a wood; but you no sooner turn your head than the walls and roofs of houses, to which even those seen from the ramparts of Calais are palaces, produce a disagreeable conviction that you stand within the precincts of a city.

The cathedral is the edifice most worthy of notice. It is of vast extent; the vaults are more than commonly bold; and there is much grandeur in the general proportions.