Toward the end of the sixteenth century Saumur was one of the chief
strongholds of Protestantism in France and the seat of a Protestant
university.

But the revocation of the Edict of Nantes granting tolerance to the
Huguenots, brought great reverses upon Saumur, whose inhabitants were
driven into exile. And thereupon (1685) the town fell into a decline
which was not arrested until Louis XV, in the latter part of his reign,
caused this cavalry school to be established there.

It is a large school, with about four hundred soldiers always in
training as cavalry officers and army riding masters. And the riding
exhibitions which used to be given there in the latter part of August
were brilliant affairs, worth going many miles to see.

There Ferdinand Foch studied cavalry tactics, practiced "rough riding"
and--by no means least important--learned to know another type of
Frenchman, the men of old Anjou.

In our own country of magnificent distances and myriad racial strains
we are apt to think of French people as a single race: "French is
French."

This is very wide of the truth. French they all are, in sooth, with an
intense national unity surpassed nowhere on earth if, indeed, it is
anywhere equaled. But almost every one of them is intensely a
provincial, too, and very "set" in the ways of his own section of
country--which, usually, has been that of his forbears from time
immemorial.