crushed under all sorts of despotism (which more or less does weigh
upon all youth) the first employment of freedom, even though it be
expended upon nothing, lifts the soul with irrepressible buoyancy.
Several reasons combined to make that day one of enchantment. During
my school years I had never been taken to walk more than two or three
miles from a city; yet there remained in my mind among the earliest
recollections of my childhood that feeling for the beautiful which the
scenery about Tours inspires. Though quite untaught as to the poetry
of such a landscape, I was, unknown to myself, critical upon it, like
those who imagine the ideal of art without knowing anything of its
practice.

To reach the chateau of Frapesle, foot-passengers, or those on
horseback, shorten the way by crossing the Charlemagne moors,
--uncultivated tracts of land lying on the summit of the plateau which
separates the valley of the Cher from that of the Indre, and over
which there is a cross-road leading to Champy. These moors are flat
and sandy, and for more than three miles are dreary enough until you
reach, through a clump of woods, the road to Sache, the name of the
township in which Frapesle stands. This road, which joins that of
Chinon beyond Ballan, skirts an undulating plain to the little hamlet
of Artanne. Here we come upon a valley, which begins at Montbazon,
ends at the Loire, and seems to rise and fall,--to bound, as it were,
--beneath the chateaus placed on its double hillsides,--a splendid
emerald cup, in the depths of which flow the serpentine lines of the
river Indre. I gazed at this scene with ineffable delight, for which
the gloomy moor-land and the fatigue of the sandy walk had prepared
me.

"If that woman, the flower of her sex, does indeed inhabit this earth,