A. was wonderful, talking so easily about everything. In the smaller
places, when people rarely went to Paris, it ran always in the same
grooves--the woods, the hunting (very good in the Villers-Cotterets
forest), the schoolmaster (so difficult to get proper books for the
children to read), the curé, and all local gossip, and as much about
the iniquities of the republic as could be said before the wife of a
republican senator. Wherever we went, even to the largest châteaux,
where the family went to Paris for the season, the talk was almost
entirely confined to France and French interests. Books, politics,
music, people, nothing existed apparently au-delà des frontières.
America was an unknown quantity. It was strange to see intelligent
people living in the world so curiously indifferent as to what went on
in other countries. At first I used to talk a little about America and
Rome, where I had lived many years and at such an interesting
time--the last days of Pio Nono and the transformation of the old
superstitious papal Rome to the capital of young Italy--but I soon
realized that it didn't interest any one, and by degrees I learned to
talk like all the rest.

I often think of one visit to a charming little Louis XV château
standing quite on the edge of the forest--just room enough for the
house, and the little hamlet at the gates; a magnificent view of the
forest, quite close to the lawn behind the château, and then sweeping
off, a dark-blue mass, as far as one could see. We were shown into a
large, high room, no carpet, no fire, some fine portraits, very little
furniture, all close against the wall, a round table in the middle
with something on it, I couldn't make out what at first. Neither
books, reviews, nor even a photographic album--the supreme resource of
provincial salons. When we got up to take leave I managed to get near
the table, and the _ornament_ was a large white plate with a piece of