Maine and Anjou, through which the Loire flows below Tours, were deserts to Arthur Young. Every tourist knows that these provinces now look as rich and prosperous as any spot in Europe. Miss Betham-Edwards gives us an almost idyllic picture of an Angevin farm-house, with its supper, merriment, and dance; and tells of Angevin peasants building themselves villas with eight rooms, a flower garden, parlour, kitchen, offices, and four airy bedrooms. 'The peasant wastes nothing and spends little; he possesses stores of homespun linen, home-made remedies, oil, vinegar, honey, cider, and wine of his own producing.' 'The poorest eat asparagus, green peas, and strawberries every day in season; and as everybody owns crops, nobody pilfers his neighbours'.' Universal ownership gives absolute security to property, and pauperism is unknown.
As in Berri, as in the Limousin, Poitou, Anjou, and Brittany, so elsewhere throughout France, we find the same astounding contrast between the tale told by the traveller of 1789 and the traveller of 1889. Paris amazes Arthur Young by its dirtiness and discomfort, and the silence and stagnation of life the instant he passes out of its narrow crooked streets! To those accustomed to the animation and rapid movement of England, says he, it is not possible to describe ' the dulness and stupidity of France!' To read these words in the year of the great Exhibition, 1889, with its 26,000,000 tickets bought by sight-seers! In Champagne he pronounces his famous diatribe against government. Now, we all know Champagne to be a thriving and wealthy country private tours istanbul.
Franche Comt
It was in Franche Comt that Arthur Young, being surrounded by an angry crowd, made his famous speech to them about French and English taxation, and explained the difference between a seigneur in France and in England. On which side would the difference lie, if he rose to make his speech in the Doubs to-day? Arthur Young crosses France from Alsace to Auvergne before he sees a field of clover; but in France to-day clover is as common as it is in England. Old Marseilles he thinks close, ill-built, and dirty; and 'the port itself is a horse pond.' He cannot find a conveyance between Marseilles and Nice. Such great cities in France, he says, have not the hundredth part of the means of communication common in much smaller places in England. He passes into the mountain region of Upper Savoy; and there he finds the people at their ease, and the land productive, in spite of the harsh climate and the barren soil. He asks the reason, and he learns that there are no seigneurs in Upper Savoy. In Lower Savoy he finds the people poor and miserable, for there stands a carcan, a seigneurial standard, with a chain and a heavy collar, an emblem of the slavery of the people.
At Lyons he meets the Rolands, though he failed to recognise the romantic genius that lay still hidden in the young and beautiful wife of the austere financier. At Lyons he is assured that ' the state of manufacture is melancholy to the last degree.' And, as the quarter now known as Perrache did not yet exist, he finds the city itself badly situated. As he passes along the Riviera from Antibes to Nice, he is driven to walk, for want of a conveyance, and a woman carries his baggage on an ass.
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