Pictures From Italy | Page 6

again. The brave Courier traverses all round the carriage once,
looks at the drag, inspects the wheels, jumps up, gives the word, and
away we go!
It is market morning. The market is held in the little square outside in
front of the cathedral. It is crowded with men and women, in blue, in
red, in green, in white; with canvassed stalls; and fluttering
merchandise. The country people are grouped about, with their clean
baskets before them. Here, the lace-sellers; there, the butter and
egg-sellers; there, the fruit-sellers; there, the shoe-makers. The whole
place looks as if it were the stage of some great theatre, and the curtain
had just run up, for a picturesque ballet. And there is the cathedral to
boot: scene- like: all grim, and swarthy, and mouldering, and cold: just
splashing the pavement in one place with faint purple drops, as the
morning sun, entering by a little window on the eastern side, struggles
through some stained glass panes, on the western.
In five minutes we have passed the iron cross, with a little ragged
kneeling-place of turf before it, in the outskirts of the town; and are
again upon the road.
CHAPTER II
--LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON

Chalons is a fair resting-place, in right of its good inn on the bank of
the river, and the little steamboats, gay with green and red paint, that
come and go upon it: which make up a pleasant and refreshing scene,
after the dusty roads. But, unless you would like to dwell on an
enormous plain, with jagged rows of irregular poplars on it, that look in
the distance like so many combs with broken teeth: and unless you
would like to pass your life without the possibility of going up-hill, or
going up anything but stairs: you would hardly approve of Chalons as a
place of residence.
You would probably like it better, however, than Lyons: which you

may reach, if you will, in one of the before-mentioned steamboats, in
eight hours.
What a city Lyons is! Talk about people feeling, at certain unlucky
times, as if they had tumbled from the clouds! Here is a whole town
that is tumbled, anyhow, out of the sky; having been first caught up,
like other stones that tumble down from that region, out of fens and
barren places, dismal to behold! The two great streets through which
the two great rivers dash, and all the little streets whose name is Legion,
were scorching, blistering, and sweltering. The houses, high and vast,
dirty to excess, rotten as old cheeses, and as thickly peopled. All up the
hills that hem the city in, these houses swarm; and the mites inside
were lolling out of the windows, and drying their ragged clothes on
poles, and crawling in and out at the doors, and coming out to pant and
gasp upon the pavement, and creeping in and out among huge piles and
bales of fusty, musty, stifling goods; and living, or rather not dying till
their time should come, in an exhausted receiver. Every manufacturing
town, melted into one, would hardly convey an impression of Lyons as
it presented itself to me: for all the undrained, unscavengered qualities
of a foreign town, seemed grafted, there, upon the native miseries of a
manufacturing one; and it bears such fruit as I would go some miles out
of my way to avoid encountering again.
In the cool of the evening: or rather in the faded heat of the day: we
went to see the Cathedral, where divers old women, and a few dogs,
were engaged in contemplation. There was no difference, in point of
cleanliness, between its stone pavement and that of the streets; and
there was a wax saint, in a little box like a berth aboard ship, with a
glass front to it, whom Madame Tussaud would have nothing to say to,
on any terms, and which even Westminster Abbey might be ashamed of.
If you would know all about the architecture of this church, or any
other, its dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it not written
in Mr. Murray's Guide- Book, and may you not read it there, with
thanks to him, as I did!
For this reason, I should abstain from mentioning the curious clock in
Lyons Cathedral, if it were not for a small mistake I made, in

connection with that piece of mechanism. The keeper of the church was
very anxious it should be shown; partly for the honour of the
establishment and the town; and partly, perhaps, because of his
deriving a percentage from the additional consideration. However that
may be, it was set in motion, and thereupon a host of little doors flew
open, and innumerable little figures staggered out of them, and