There is some
difficulty in conjecturing where the people by whom the whole is kept in
cultivation are housed; for the number of houses by the road-side is
inconsiderable; nor did we, for the first two-thirds of the ride, pass
through a single village, excepting Totes, which lies mid-way between
Dieppe, and Rouen, and is of no great extent. Yet things in France are
materially altered in this respect since 1814, when I remember that, in
going through Calais by the way of the Low Countries to Paris, and
returning by the direct road to Boullogne, the whole journey was made
without seeing a single new house erecting in a space of four hundred
miles. This is now far from being the case; there is every where an
appearance of comparative prosperity, and, were it not for the coins, of
which the copper bear the impress of the republic, and the gold and
silver chiefly that of Napoleon, a stranger would meet with but few
visible marks of the changes experienced in late years by the government
of France.
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