CHAPTER I - SUNDAY MORNING
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2010
Summary
To exchange Nuremburg for Paris, without intermediate pause — and Paris, too, convulsed by expectations of the Guizot ministry's début, was not altogether unlike passing from the calmness of a cloister to those mansions of Pandemonium, if there be such, where Hate, and Contention, and restless Ambition are allowed to wear the masks of Luxury and Civilisation. As my one travelling companion from Frankfort was French to the thorough warpoint, as impatient to arrive in time for the first-fruits of the crise as I should have been for the first night of Meyerbeer's long-deferred opera, it was a peculiar piece of good fortune that, besides the courtesy which belongs to an old name, he should also possess the eye of an artist, and the perception of a poet — nay, more, during a South German tour, have recently visited the church of St. Sebald, and St. John's burial-ground, and admired them little less fervently than myself. Thus, having contented himself with a significant “au revoir bientôt” to the fortifications of Mayence, for the rest of our forty-eight hours' ride we had abundant neutral ground to meet upon. We could admire, in concord, the beautiful old building upon the hill but a mile or two before the traveller in the mallepost reaches his dinner at Châlons sur-Marne.
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- Music and Manners in France and GermanyA Series of Travelling Sketches of Art and Society, pp. 231 - 256Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009First published in: 1841