There is not in travel an interest more fascinating than that of noting with the eyes and proving by the memory and by books the exact place of great or decisive actions. So have I just done in many places. Here (I have said to myself) Abdul-ul-Rahman went up Aragon till he came to the head of the Pass. Here he first saw the plains of Gaul from a height and promised himself the conquest of all Europe for Islam. Here, where the two rivers meet somewhat north of Poitiers, the two hosts watched each other for a week, and that which was not ours was defeated.

Then again, in Toulouse it was amazing to collect, as one wandered through, the memories of so many centuries. Here were the shrine where the body of Saturninus was found dead, dragged to death by a bull through the streets of the city; the quarter from which the populace saw advancing the Northern Army that was to defeat the Visigoths; the site of the wall whence the retreat of the Saracen was noted, a flood of men pouring back towards the wall of the[Pg 84] Pyrenees; the flat heights beyond the city to the east, where the English Army came up from Spain in the defeats of Napoleon and drove back the resistance of the defence.

All these, and many more, a man notes in a travel of but few days, for all Europe—and no province more than this—is crammed with the story of its own past; but perhaps that which, in such reminiscences or resurrections, most moves one is to observe the obliteration of the last and most immediate of our efforts. The sites of the Revolution have disappeared.

One may walk about Paris—as I have walked to-day—and see stones and windows that are still alive with the long business of the city. There is the room where Madame de Sévigné wrote, there is the long gallery where Sully paced, recognising the new power of artillery and planning the greatness of his master. You may stand on the very floor where the priests stood when St. Louis held the Crown of Thorns above them, more than six hundred years ago; you may stand on the stone that covers Geoffrey Plantagenet before the altar of the Cathedral; you may touch the altar that the boatmen raised under Tiberius to their gods when our Lord was preaching in Galilee, and as you marvel at that stone you may note around you the little Roman bricks that stood in the same arches when Julian saw them, sitting at the Council that saved the Faith for the West.

All these old things remain in this moving, and yet[Pg 85] unchanging, town—except the things of its principal and most memorable feat of will.

The Revolution is even now not old. Its effects are still in movement; they are not yet accomplished. Of the fundamental quarrels which it raised (some five or six) one at least, that of religion, is by no means resolved.

It is not even old in time. I who write this have known some who saw it; many who remembered its soldiers or its victims. I have but to-day visited a room where a daughter of the Montgolfiers would tell me in her extreme old age how the mob poured on the Bastille, and her companion, nearer to me in blood, had seen, and in my boyhood talked to me of, Napoleon. How many all round me, to-day or yesterday, were filled with the light or fire of that time, saying, "My father died in such and such a battle," in Spain, or in Italy, or beyond the Vistula—at the ends of the world. It is not so very long ago. It was much the chief business, for good or evil, that Europe has known since the Empire accepted the Faith. And what visible relics of it remain?

Where the National Assembly sat at Versailles, the Salle des Menus Plaisirs, there are a few houses or barracks, a place in building. Where they sat in Paris, they and the first days of the Convention, wrestling with and throwing Necessity, the Riding School, that vast oval............