as familiar friends, the changes of the elements, and, in short, to have
realised, in a natural life the 'mens sana in corpore sano'? Would she
be willing to repeat the follies of her ancestors in the days of the
_Trianon_ and Louis XIV.? Would she complete the fall which began when
knights and nobles turned courtiers--and roués? Let us read history to
her and remind her what centralization did for old France; let us
whisper to her, whilst there is time, what Paris is like in our own day.

Do we exaggerate the evils of over-centralization? We only at present,
half know them; but the next generation may discover the full meaning
of the word. There is exaggeration, no doubt; some men have lived so
long in the country that they speak of towns as a 'seething mass of
corruption,' pregnant of evil; and of villages as of an almost divine
Arcadia, whence nothing but good can spring; but the evils of
centralization can scarcely be overrated in any community. The social
system even in France, cannot revolve for ever round one sun.




CHAPTER VII.

_AVRANCHES--MONT ST. MICHAEL._

There are some places in Europe which English people seem, with one
consent, to have made their own; they take possession of them,
peacefully enough it is true, but with a determination that the
inhabitants find it impossible to resist. Thus it is that
Avranches--owing principally, it may be, to its healthiness and
cheapness of living, and to the extreme beauty of its situation--has