The view from the descent into the vale of Grenoble is extremely fine, extending over the rich and fertile plain beneath; the cultivated hills rising around it, the woody mountains, occupying a still wider circuit, and the rocky Alps towering above all, and still retaining, and some of them always retaining, great beds of snow. It was indeed a magnificent perspective, yet not without some alloy; for the dense clouds and thick vapour very much obscured the prospect. I only saw at intervals, sometimes one, sometimes another part of the scene, and was led to imagine what the glorious whole would be in more favourable weather. The plain and the lower hills were always visible, sometimes a black mass of rocks would rise above the clouds, unconnected with any other earthly object; sometimes nothing was to be seen of a mountain but an illumined patch of snow shining through the mist. When I reached the bottom, I began to feel the weather very hot, and found they had been complaining much at Grenoble of the heat for the last two days.
Grenoble contains nothing interesting in point of architecture, but the cathedral claims our attention in another way, by preserving the tomb of Bayard, the chevalier “_sans peur, et sans reproche_,” a long tasteless Latin inscription records the fact; it begins,
Hic lapis superbit tumulo non titulo, Ubi sepultus Heros maximus suo ipsemet Sepulchro monumentum.
One would have wished something of a very different character.