hotel; and when Colmar was without a railway, and was a great
posting-station on the high road from Strasbourg to Lyons, there was
some real business at the Hotel de la Poste in that town. At
present, though Colmar may probably have been benefited by the
railway, the inn has faded, and is in its yellow leaf. Travellers
who desire to see the statue which a grateful city has erected to
the memory of its most illustrious citizen, General Rapp, are not
sufficient in number to keep a first-class hotel in the glories of
fresh paint and smart waiters; and when you have done with General
Rapp, there is not much to interest you in Colmar. But there is the
hotel; and poor fat, unwieldy Madame Faragon, though she grumbles
much, and declares that there is not a sou to be made, still keeps
it up, and bears with as much bravery as she can the buffets of a
world which seems to her to be becoming less prosperous and less
comfortable and more exacting every day. In her younger years, a
posting-house in such a town was a posting-house; and when M.
Faragon married her, the heiress of the then owner of the business,
he was supposed to have done uncommonly well for himself. Madame
Faragon is now a childless widow, and sometimes declares that she
will shut the house up and have done with it. Why maintain a
business without a profit, simply that there may be an Hotel de la
Poste at Colmar? But there are old servants whom she has not the
heart to send away; and she has at any rate a roof of her own over
her head; and though she herself is unconscious that it is so, she
has many ties to the old business; and now, since her young cousin
George Voss has been with her, things go a little better. She is
not robbed so much, and the people of the town, finding that they
can get a fair bottle of wine and a good supper, come to the inn;
and at length an omnibus has been established, and there is a little
glimmer of returning prosperity.