Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

‘ [47] of the household of Louis the Sixteenth, and a Madame de Sailly, daughter of a celebrated advocate named Berryer, who was the defender of Marshal Ney in his impeachment for treason. There is also a young student of law here, who is my almost constant companion, and who corrects all my mistakes in speaking or writing the French. As he is not much older than I am, I do not feel so much embarrassed in speaking to him as I do in speaking to others. These are some of the advantages which I enjoy here, and you can easily imagine others which a country residence offers over that of a city, during the vacation of the literary institutions at Paris and the cessation of their lectures.’

It is to be noticed from the outset that the French villages disappointed him as they disappoint many others. In his letters he recalls ‘how fresh and cheerful and breezy a New England village is; how marked its features—so diferent from the town, so peculiar, so delightful.’ He finds a French village, on the other hand, to be like a deserted town, having ‘the same paved streets, the same dark, narrow alleys without sidewalks, the same dingy stone houses, each peeping into its neighbor's windows, the same eternal stone walls, shutting in from the eye of the stranger all the beauty of the place and opposing an inhospitable barrier to the lover ’