Sadi Carnot was that his features were wooden, and that he was but a very
ordinary man--intellectually. I pass this opinion with hesitation. When
dried possibly the sparks of genius may be discovered and may flare up;
they were all but extinguished in the downpour when I saw him.

That cheerful king, Rene of Anjou and Provence, paid a visit to Marseilles
in 1437, and made his royal entry on Sunday, December 15th. He was
delighted with the reception accorded him, and in a gush of kindly feeling
promised to make Marseilles his headquarters. But he forgot his promise, or
circumstances were against his keeping it. He never revisited Marseilles.
On January 22, 1516, Francis I. entered the town and was received by
children carrying banners and garlands, and troupes of young girls in
white, then followed archers, arquebusiers, the consuls, and the clergy
bearing the relics of S. Lazarus and S. Victor. A theatre was erected at
every street corner, on which were presented to his sight incidents from
the life of S. Louis. The procession ended with a battle of oranges and
lemons, in which the king gave and received a good many blows on the head
with the golden fruit.

At the head of the Allees des Capucins, a fine street planted with trees
and with a handsome fountain in the place where the Allees de Meilhan
unites with it, is a really fine modern Gothic church with twin west spires
of open tracery. They are perhaps too thin, a usual fault with modern work,
but otherwise the church is very good and stately. It is as fine within
as without, but sorely disfigured by the coloured glass, which is garish.
French painted glass is very bad. It is precisely the sort of stuff that
was turned out by English glass-painters about thirty years ago, the
colours crude and distressing to the eye--windows that our more cultured
taste cannot now endure. But the French artists have not advanced, the
windows put in to-day are as detestable as those they put in at the