This power within itself was undoubtedly all to the advantage of the city; but it was fatal to the unity of the kingdom, since it cut France up into a mass of separate states, any one of which could, on the occasion of a quarrel with the sovereign--and these quarrels were rather the rule than the exception--fortify itself by means of its count, its castle and its city walls, and defy the royal forces at its pleasure. While cathedral cities in England were drawing closer and closer to the king as their head, and thereby sinking their own strength in the unity of the Crown, those in France were striving at a power apart from the Crown, or, rather, striving to maintain a power which the Crown had never yet been able to incorporate with itself. Thus a city of France has a much more varied, a much more individual history than has the sister city in England; a story less bound up as part of the great whole of the history of the French kingdom, more concentrated within its own walls, and therefore more tangible, if it be desired to study it irrespective of that whole history. This, then, is the story of its growth from almost pre-historic days. Whether, as an individual city, it flourished after the Middle Ages had fortified and strengthened it, or whether it fell into a state of quiet, picturesque and peaceful decay, depended of course upon particular circumstances, but enough remains to make of the general history of the French city a fascinating though almost inexhaustible study, only surpassed by the study of each town in its separate case.
Wars and revolutions have done their best to destroy what Time had kindly tried to preserve for our delight; nevertheless, a cathedral town in France of to-day is a very pleasant place, and offers exceptional opportunity for the study of French life in almost every aspect. Our business here, however, is with the cathedrals and the historical side of the town, rather than with the lighter points of view; and such things as every traveller will encounter in the course of his journeys, the crowd outside the _cafés_, the weekly markets, the festivals, civil and ecclesiastical, the quaint ways and speech of the peasant folk and the _contretemps_ of hotel life have not only been described before, times without number, but are such as will be fairly obvious to the average observer, and, if he has never travelled before, will come all the more as a pleasant surprise if he is left to find them out for himself. If, as is more likely to be the case in this enlightened age, he is an experienced traveller, he will know them all by heart, and perhaps be inclined to cavil at having them set before him once again in a light which could not pretend to any novelty.