UNCULTIVATED FRANCE. 17 



It is less easy in France, at least to discover the old shadowy, 

 leafy, almost impervious forest. The most celebrated that of Fon- 

 tainebleau despite its enormous trees, its rudely broken surface, its 

 stags and roebucks reserved for imperial sport, despite its few adders 

 and problematical vipers, is now little better than a rendezvous for 

 amateur artists and listless idlers. Its well-kept avenues resound 

 with rapid wheels, and you can scarcely stir a step without finding 

 the associations of the place interrupted by the stalls of vendors of 

 cakes or the apparatus of itinerant gamblers. This profanation is 

 surely to be regretted, for the Forest exhibits many landscapes of 

 surpassing interest, as the rocks of Franchart, the glens of Apremont, 

 and, above all, that Sahara in miniature, the sands of Arbonne. Nor 

 would one willingly forget the historical memories which immortalize 

 the famous palace where Francis I. received his after-time conqueror, 

 Charles V.; where the wayward and half-insane Christina of Sweden 

 listened with cruel delight to the groans of the murdered Monaldeschi; 

 where Madame Du Barry lavished her shameless graces ; where Pope 

 Pius VII. lingered through two years of gilded captivity ; and where 

 Napoleon bade farewell to his dreams of universal empire.* 



Among the uncultivated regions of France we may mention the 

 marshes of the Bresse, of Forez, of the Sologne, of Upper Brittany, and 

 of Picardy. The greater portion of these marshes, owing to the peat 

 which forms their bed, is vigorously and not unsuccessfully worked. 

 They are traversed by trenches dug at right angles, and on whose 

 border are placed the turf-cutter's little hut, and the furnace in which 

 the peat is baked. Their lagoons, and the canals which connect them, 

 swarm with flat-bottomed boats. Man, in a word, has taken posses- 

 sion of them ; braving the unhealthy vapours which enfeeble his 

 frame and shorten his life, he builds his squalid abode on the rising 

 ground left uncovered by the waters. The largest of these peat-bogs 

 are those of Montoir and the Grand Briere, near Savenay, in the 

 department of the Loire Infe'rieure. They occupy a considerable area 



* The forest covers an area of about sixty-four square miles. The chateau, originally 

 founded by Robert the Pious in 975-990, was rebuilt in the twelfth century by Louis VII. 



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