One thing strikes you forcibly in these little country towns--the marvellously small degree of distinction of rank amid the people. No neighbouring magnate rattles through the lonely streets in the well-known carriage of the Hall or the Grange, graciously receiving the ready homage of the townspeople. No retired man of business, or bustling land-agent, trots his smart gig and cob--no half-pay officer goes gossipping from house to house, or from shop to shop. There is no banker's lady to lead the local fashions--no doctor, setting off upon his well-worked nag for long country rounds--no assemblage, if it be market day, of stout full-fed farmers, lounging, booted and spurred, round the Red Lion or the Plough. Working men in blouses, women of the same rank in the peasant head-dress of the country, and here and there a nondescript personage in a cap and shooting jacket, who generally turns up at the scantily-attended table d'hôte at dinner time--such are the items which make up the mass of the visible population. You hardly see an individual who does not appear to have been born and bred upon the spot, and to have no ideas and no desires beyond it. Left entirely to themselves, the people have vegetated in these dull streets from generation to generation, and, though clustered together in a quasi town--perhaps with octroi and mairie, a withered tree of liberty, and billiard tables by the half-dozen--the population is as essentially rural as though scattered in lone farms, unvisited, except on rent-day, by either landlord or agent. It often happens that a large landed proprietor has not even a house upon his ground. He lets the land, receives his rent, and spends it in Paris or one of the large towns, leaving his tenants to go on cultivating the ground in the jog-trot style of their fathers and their grandfathers before them. The French, in fact, have no notion of what we understand by the life of a country gentleman. A proprietor may pay a sporting visit to his land when partridge and quail are to be shot; but as to taking up his abode _au fond de ses terres_, mingling in what we would call county business, looking after the proceedings of his tenants, becoming learned, in an amateur way, in things bucolic, in all the varieties of stock and all the qualities of scientific manures--a life, a character, and a social position of this sort, would be in vain sought for in the rural districts of France. There are not, in fact, two more differing meanings in the world than those attached to our "Country Life," and the French _Vie de Chateau_. The French proprietor is a Parisian out of Paris. He takes the rents, shoots the quails, and the clowns do the rest.