the Hotel de France.

I was obliged to cultivate relations with the cuisine
of this establishment. Nothing could have been more
_meridional_; indeed, both the dirty little inn and Nar-
bonne at large seemed to me to have the infirmities
of the south, without its usual graces. Narrow, noisy,
shabby, belittered and encumbered, filled with clatter
and chatter, the Hotel de France would have been
described in perfection by Alphonse Daudet. For what
struck me above all in it was the note of the Midi,
as he has represented it, - the sound of universal talk.
The landlord sat at supper with sundry friends, in a
kind of glass cage, with a genial indifference to arriv-
ing guests; the waiters tumbled over the loose luggage
in the hall; the travellers who had been turned away
leaned gloomily against door-posts; and the landlady,
surrounded by confusion, unconscious of responsibility,
and animated only by the spirit of conversation, bandied
high-voiced compliments with the _voyageurs de com-
merce_. At ten o'clock in the morning there was a
table d'hote for breakfast, - a wonderful repast, which
overflowed into every room and pervaded the whole
establishment. I sat down with a hundred hungry
marketers, fat, brown, greasy men, with a good deal of
the rich soil of Languedoc adhering to their hands
and their boots. I mention the latter articles because
they almost put them on the table. It was very hot,
and there were swarms of flies; the viands had the
strongest odor; there was in particular a horrible mix-