the most important university centers of France, and bears with credit
the proud title of "the learned city." With two distinguished members
of the faculty, the late Dr. Nicholas Joly and Professor Moliner of the
law school, I often had most interesting discussions on all the great
questions of the hour. That three heretics--I should say, six, for my
daughter, son, and his wife often joined the circle--could thus sit in
perfect security, and debate, in the most unorthodox fashion, in these
holy precincts, all the reforms, social, political, and religious, which
the United States and France need in order to be in harmony with the
spirit of the age, was a striking proof of the progress the world has
made in freedom of speech. The time was when such acts would have cost
us our lives, even if we had been caught expressing our heresies in the
seclusion of our own homes. But here, under the oaks of a Catholic
convent, with the gray-robed sisters all around us, we could point out
the fallacies of Romanism itself, without fear or trembling. Glorious
Nineteenth Century, what conquests are thine!

I shall say nothing of the picturesque streets of antique Toulouse;
nothing of the priests, who swarm like children in an English town;
nothing of the beautifully carved stone façades of the ancient mansions,
once inhabited by the nobility of Languedoc, but now given up to trade
and commerce; nothing of the lofty brick cathedrals, whose exteriors
remind one of London and whose interiors transfer you to "the gorgeous
East"; nothing of the Capitol, with its gallery rich in busts of the
celebrated sons of the South; nothing of the museum, the public garden,
and the broad river winding through all. I must leave all these
interesting features of Toulouse and hasten up into the Black
Mountains, a few miles away, where I saw the country life of modern
Languedoc.