320 The Unknown River. 



CHAPTER X. 



THIS little etching gives a tolerably good notion 

 of the present condition of those fortifications 

 which, in the middle ages, were the citadel of Toulon- 

 sur-Arroux. The etching was made some time since ; 

 had it been executed during the last few weeks, I should 

 have run considerable risk of being ill-used as a Prus- 

 sian spy. For it is not safe, in this month of Septem- 

 ber, 1870, to draw so much as the wicket-gate of a 

 cottage garden anywhere in France, whether you are 

 a Frenchman or a foreigner ; and, if the latter, your 

 chances are so much the worse. It had formed part of 

 my plan to republish this series of papers with addi- 

 tional etchings on a larger scale, and I began these 

 additional plates in the month of July, intending to re- 

 visit the scenery of the whole river, and select about a 

 dozen of the finest subjects. I had done a few of these 

 when the great spy-mania took possession of all French 

 minds, at least in the lower classes, and there arose such 

 a hubbub about my doings over an extent of country 

 thirty miles in diameter, that it would have been abso- 

 lute madness to let myself be seen with any thing of 

 the nature of drawing materials about me. So the 

 larger etchings were brought to an abrupt termination. 

 The reader, who is by this time familiar with the slight 

 and purely artistic little plates which have illustrated 



