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Protestantism early took root here, the Anabaptist Doctrine especially, and in the present day Montbeliard numbers several Protestant and only one Catholic church; the former belonging severally to the Reformed Church, the Lutheran, Anabaptists, also two or three so-called Oratoires, or Chapels of Ease, built and supported by private individuals.
Here we found thirty-five splendid Normandy and other cows, entirely kept for milking, the milk being all sent to Montbeliard, with a small number of bullocks, horses and pigs. The land looks poor, and gives no evidence of scientific farming, though very few improvements are made, new agricultural methods and implements introduced, and thus the resources of the land developed.
The case is very different with those travellers who are bent upon studying French life under its various aspects, for they will find at Montbeliard a wholly new phase. Much in domestic life reminds us of South Germany, yet no place is more eminently French.
Nearer Paris, you constantly encounter infants three day's old being dispatched with their foster-mother into some country place, there to be brought up by hand, in other words, to die; but here it is not so. We find on a small scale at Montbeliard that contrast between wealth and poverty seen in England, but wholly absent from the rural districts of France.
My friends had procured me a little lodging, rather, I should say, a magnificent appartement, consisting of spacious sitting and bedroom, for which I pay one franc a-day. It must not be supposed that Montbeliard is wanting in elegancies, or that the march of refinement is not found here.
They are also much cheaper, about L5 a year being charged for both house and garden, whereas, even in a little town like Montbeliard, accommodation is dear and difficult to be had.
Convent, or other schools, for young ladies, do not exist at Montbeliard, and those who study for the first and second diploma are generally prepared at Belfort and Besancon, where the examinations are held. There is also here an Ecole Normale, training school for teachers; also a Protestant training school, noted for its excellence.
On the whole, for a town of eight thousand inhabitants, Montbeliard must be considered rich in educational and intellectual resources. Much of the farming in these parts is tenant-farming on a fair scale, i.e., fifty to two or three hundred acres.
Leisurely travellers bound homeward from Mulhouse will do well to diverge from the direct Paris line and join it at Dijon, by way of Belfort the heroic city of Belfort, with its colossal lion, hewn out of the solid rock the little Protestant town of Montbeliard, and Besancon.
But the majority are capitalists on a large scale, as at Montbeliard, and I fear the workman's hours here are as long as at the latter place. The length of the day's labour in France is appalling, the one blot on a bright picture of thrift, independence, and a general well-being.
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