in the valleys below us, the clear sky, and the sweet air that comes
across the bay, make us linger here for the beauty of the scene alone;
regardless almost of the ancient history of Mortain, of the story of its
Pagan temples, of its thirteenth-century church, and almost unmindful of
the 'Abbaye de Savigny,' eight miles off, a building which is worthy of
a special visit.

And we come away, perforce, in the evening-time from all this lovely
landscape, from the pure air, from the cascades, the rocks, and the
ferns, from everything agreeable to the senses, to the most literal,
shameful, wallowing in the mire. We have spoken, so far, only of the
scene; let add a word in very truth, about 'man and his dwelling-place.'
How shall we describe it? We are at the _Hôtel de la Poste_, and we are
housed like pigs; we (some of us) eat like them, and live even as the
lower animals. We--'_Messieurs et Mesdames_,' lords and ladies of the
creation--hide our heads in a kennel; our dirty rooms 'give' on to the
odorous court-yard; we turn our backs upon the valley which the building
almost overhangs; we can neither breathe pure air nor see the bright
landscape. Any details of the domestic arrangements and surroundings of
the _Hôtel de la Poste_ at Mortain would be unfit for these pages;
suffice it that, we are in one of the second-rate old-fashioned inns of
France, the style of which our travelled forefathers may well
remember.[35]

We have more than once been censured for saying that the French people
have little natural love for scenery, and a stilted, not to say morbid,
theory of landscape; but whilst we stay in this inn, from which we might
have had such splendid views, we become confirmed in the opinion
(formed in the Pyrenees), that the French people _do not care_, and that
they think nothing of defiling Nature's purest places. At this hotel we