Descending from this bridge I found a sign-post, that told me I had
walked thirty-two kilometres--which is twenty miles--from Toul; that
it was one kilometre to Flavigny, and heaven knows how much to a place
called Charmes. The sun rose in the mist that lay up the long even
trends of the vale, between the low and level hills, and I pushed on
my thousand yards towards Flavigny. There, by a special providence, I
found the entertainment and companionship whose lack had left me
wrecked all these early hours.

As I came into Flavigny I saw at once that it was a place on which a
book might easily be written, for it had a church built in the
seventeenth century, when few churches were built outside great towns,
a convent, and a general air of importance that made of it that grand
and noble thing, that primary cell of the organism of Europe, that
best of all Christian associations--a large village.

I say a book might be written upon it, and there is no doubt that a
great many articles and pamphlets must have been written upon it, for
the French are furiously given to local research and reviews, and to
glorifying their native places: and when they cannot discover folklore
they enrich their beloved homes by inventing it.

There was even a man (I forget his name) who wrote a delightful book
called _Popular and Traditional Songs of my Province,_ which book,
after he was dead, was discovered to be entirely his own invention,
and not a word of it familiar to the inhabitants of the soil. He was a
large, laughing man that smoked enormously, had great masses of hair,
and worked by night; also he delighted in the society of friends, and
talked continuously. I wish he had a statue somewhere, and that they
would pull down to make room for it any one of those useless bronzes