It had been my plan to make this journey resemble as much as possible an
excursion of pleasure and curiosity, in the hope of doing away the
melancholy impression of our sufferings and prison at Avignon. I said to
my family at Cannes, "It is ten leagues to Nice, but we will not make a
toil of it; we will divide the rest of our journey into two days, taking
an airing of fifteen miles each day before dinner." My agreement with my
coachman admitted of this arrangement; I was to pay him thirty francs a
day for each day of journey; eighteen francs for a day of rest; and
twenty-five francs a day for the six days required for his own return,
by the direct road to Avignon. He agreed to consider the two days to be
employed in going ten leagues, as one day of advance and one of repose.
After breakfast we basked on the sunny sandbank that rises from the
shore, and gathered sea-shells. By the by, Scipio and Laelius must have
had very bad sport in this way; for the Mediterranean, having no tide,
brings up very few of these pretty baubles; no wonder that they took to
ducks and drakes, as a supplementary recreation. We went to the little
town of Cannes, and saw a rope tied to the bell in the tower of the
church, and, most commodiously for the priest, conducted into his house
close by: "With that," said Antoine, "M. le Cure sonne les sourds."[91]
I met a very old man who asked for alms; I was in a disposition, not
only to grant his request, but to enter into conversation with him, and
inquired of him how old he was: "Quel age avez-vous?"[92] The words were
perfectly unintelligible to him. A lad of twelve years old, who had
heard the question, volunteered as interpreter: "Quanti anni ai?" said
he to the old man; and yet we were not in Italy. I have had frequent
occasion to remark that the language of France, as that country draws
near to Germany, Italy, or Spain, is shadowed off into the dialect of
those three great limitrophe nations: on the frontiers of every
continental nation, the same gradual melting of the languages of
neighbouring people into each other must necessarily take place. In
England, I believe the _patois_ of the several districts to have been
derived from the divisions of the Saxon Heptarchy; the midland
counties, or kingdom of Mercia, have nearly the same dialect; but the
language of Oxfordshire begins to resemble that of the west; while that
of Lincolnshire, (a proof of my skill in which I have already given,) is
like that of Yorkshire, except in the pronunciation of the vowels. We
set off at mid-day.
Our road lay on a low cliff near the sea. Antoine, who had crossed the
Rhine, the Elbe, the Danube, and the Rhone, had never seen the sea till
he came on this journey: he persisted in calling it the Rhone, and "this
Rhone," said he, "goes to England." "Yes," said I, "and to the other side
of France: you may embark on this Rhone, and land at Calais in Picardy,
your own country." He called it the Rhone, by the name of the last great
river he had seen; as I have read somewhere that the dispersed tribes
after the Deluge called every great river they came to, "Phraat,"
"Euphrates." I know not what idea was working in Antoine's mind: perhaps
it is natural to man to regard the sea as a river: it is to be presumed
that Homer so considered it, since, after mentioning the names of a few
of the great rivers known in his limited geography, he adds,
[Greek: Oude bathurreitao mega sthenos okeanoio.].
I remember mentioning this opinion of Homer to Archdeacon Paley. "Why,"
said he, "that is the modern theory of the tides; that the ocean is
nothing else but a great river, and that the tides are the current of
this river, which, having no where else to flow, flows into and upon
itself."--"Strange," said I, "that the extremes of ignorance and science
should thus meet!" I made an objection to the theory on account of the
increase and decrease of the tides according to the age of the moon: I
forget his reply: he had not proposed the notion as his own, and had no
need to defend it as such.
After proceeding about two miles, we perceived a large stone reared
upright on the beach: this rude pillar marked the landing-place of
Napoleon from Elba.
I care nothing about politics: I am of the opinion of Plato, that
mankind are not worthy that a wise man, (meaning himself or me,) should
meddle with their affairs: the history of the last war I read with the
same temper as I should read that of the three Punic or the
Peloponnesian: I will remark only that, if Napoleon was not to be
trusted, it was very silly to leave him at Elba; and, if he was to be
trusted, he should have been treated as trust-worthy, and every vestige
of resentment against him effaced, and nothing done that would make him
feel as if relegated into a little island, or give him reason to dread
further restraint: that the importance of leaving to him the title of
Emperor was not duly weighed; as it ought to have been evident, that, if
not honestly recognised by his enemies, this title would serve as a sign
of rallying to his friends.
This Emperor on landing summoned the fortress of Antibes: the officer
commanding the garrison for the time, in the absence of his superior,
returned an answer that he had received no orders. I was personally
acquainted with this officer; he was the general commanding the
department of Vaucluse during the former part of my residence at
Avignon. Failing in this attempt on Antibes, Napoleon immediately struck
into the country over the hills covered with olive trees, the high land
that rises above the beach. We proceeded to Antibes, which opened its
gate to us without any difficulty. We found a good inn, walked on the
fortifications and about the town till sunset, and, after an English
breakfast the next morning, (for we carried tea with us,) on the
thirteenth day after our departure from Avignon, set off for Nice: we
passed through a pleasant country, and soon arrived at the right bank
of the Var, the political, but not the natural limit of France.
I had some thoughts of making an apology for calling my book a narrative
of four years residence in France, when four months of that time were to
be passed out of that kingdom; but any one who will give himself the
trouble of coming to the banks of the Var, will see that all explanation
on this head is superfluous: or, if he does not like so much personal
fatigue, let him place himself there in imagination: he will see the
stony bed of a torrent half a mile broad, not a twentieth part of which
bed is covered with water. At two thirds of the distance from the right
bank he will see a stream large enough to be called a river, of no great
depth, but of great force and violence. Immediately beyond the left bank
he will see a fertile country resembling that he has just past, and
uniting with it but for the expanse of white stones. Let him then cast
his eyes on the awful, frowning barrier of Italy,--those Alps with their
rugged sides and lofty snow-covered tops, a barrier to all appearance
impervious to any thing but the flight of an eagle; he will allow that
it would be as easy to bring the Alps themselves to the left bank of the
Var, which, though they are but six miles off, would be an enterprise
of toil, as to imagine that he had left France on entering the county of
Nice.
We had time given to us to enjoy this magnificent spectacle, and to
feast our minds with the expectation of what we should see beyond those
"perpetual hills," those "everlasting mountains," which we already
wished to pass. We waited for the douanier, the custom-house officer, a
civil and intelligent man, who had nothing to do with us but to
countersign our passport: the more we took out of France, the better for
its manufacturers. It would not be difficult to prove,--Adam Smith has
proved it,--that it would be as wise to permit unrestricted, I do not
say untaxed, importation as exportation, nor to show that the
prohibition of it is an act of injustice towards the community at large;
but governments are balloted about by contending interests, and
compelled to interfere in things out of their province, alien from those
objects for which they are constituted.
While the French were in possession of the Department des Alpes
Maritimes, they began a stone bridge over the Var. The wall from which
the first arch was to spring is seen on their bank, and bears testimony
to their zeal for improvement. We went on the wooden bridge, and passed
a pallisade guarded by French sentinels.
We were now in the dominions of the King of Sardinia. The first man I
met was an intendant or surveyor of the carpenters, whom I saw in great
numbers at work on the bridge. He accosted me: "Monsieur, il faut
descendre de voiture, decharger la voiture, faire porter les malles et
mener les chevaux, et traverser a pied le pont; il est en l'air,
suspendu par des cordes."[93] The invitation, though very civilly given,
and with due regard to our safety as well as that of the bridge, was
somewhat alarming. The fact was that the storm of the twenty-seventh of
December had come in time to make us regret that the bridge of stone,
undertaken by the French had been left incomplete. This storm had broken
the wooden bridge, the parts of which were now tied together by cords
while undergoing reparation; so that it was necessary to divide and
lighten as much as possible the weight of our carriage. This was done;
and, with this measure of precaution, each portion of our load got well
over: yet I cannot help, in defiance of the proverb, speaking ill of the
bridge. The Var is not a military barrier: why do not the two
governments revive the abandoned enterprise of a stone bridge with a
tete de pont and toll at each end?
The approach to Nice on this side is through a quarter consisting almost
entirely of villas or country-houses let to visitants. The quarter is
called "de la Croix de Marbre," from a large marble crucifix placed at
the side of the road about a mile from Nice: it is situated lower, and
is, in consequence, warmer than the town; but the ground floors of the
houses are sometimes flooded by rains. Here we began to see all the
pride, pomp, and circumstance of an English watering-place;--carriages
open and close; ladies riding on donkies; parties on foot and on
horseback; footmen lounging at the doors of the houses; and grooms
dressing horses at the doors of the stables. We saw also orange trees
laden with fruit. We arrived at a bridge over another white and stony
bed of a torrent, in which we could hardly perceive any water; there was
a stream however over which people on foot were crossing by
stepping-stones. We were set down at the Hotel des Etrangers,--an
excellent inn.
The next day I went to the police to take my carte de surete, or sejour,
and was informed that there were at this time at Nice seventy foreign
families, of which forty families were English. I left my card at the
commandant's: he returned his card with a note, containing an invitation
to a weekly ball at the Hotel du Gouvernement. A certain sum is allowed
by the king for frais de reception. The acts of the government are in
the Italian language; but French is universally spoken, not only in
society, but in the shops and in the streets. In truth, I did not hear a
word of Italian spoken while I was at Nice, except by my children's
Italian master. The people have a patois, not quite such pure Italian as
I heard at Cannes.
Not liking the quarter of the Croix de Marbre on account of its distance
from the town, I took a house in an airy situation, looking towards the
sea, and into the great square, at one time called Place Napoleon, but
now Place Victor. The usual price for a house or lodging for a large
family for the whole of the season, from the first of November to the
first of May, is a hundred louis. I agreed to pay for mine twelve
hundred francs from the sixteenth of January to the end of the season.
Its proprietor was a French general, who had served with great
reputation in Italy and Egypt, had lost an arm, and had been appointed
commandant of Nice, where, second only to the prefet of the department,
he had given fetes and balls in this house, which he now found it
convenient to let, and live in a small one by the side of it. When the
French troops evacuated Nice, a party of them wanted to pillage the
town; he had prevented this evil, and, as a reward for the service thus
rendered, the King of Sardinia had permitted him to live in the city,
when other French officers were, of course, obliged to leave it. He told
me, "I am not ashamed to say, that all that I have gained, I have gained
on the field of battle." That all was not much,--his half-pay as
general, and the appointment annexed to the cross of the legion of
honour. When colonel, he had received a sabre d'honneur, to which a
pension of six thousand francs was attached; but the pension had been
withdrawn. He still was able to show the sabre; it was an ordinary arm,
with an inscription on it. He was an Alsatian by birth, and talked with
the accent of his country, saying of his former commander, whom he
enthusiastically admired, "Ponaparte etoit un crant sheneral." His
conversation and anecdotes were amusing.
It was now the beginning of Carnival. Our recent loss left us no
disposition, and our mourning dress made it unsuitable for us, to appear
in large societies. I used to go, without any of my family, and stay for
about an hour at those parties to which we were invited, that I might
not be wanting to attentions thus paid us. Promenades in the delightful
environs of Nice, lessons in music and Italian, and small companies in
the evening, occupied and amused us till the beginning of Lent. Balls
were then succeeded by concerts: even the gay were serious, and sadness
might partake of the sober diversions then going forwards. The daily
improving health and increasing strength of our convalescent gave us
continual satisfaction; and, though our abode at Nice was as dull as a
sojourn under such a sky can be supposed to be, yet we were contented to
perceive that we did not fail of the main purpose for which we had fled
the rough blasts of the north, and sought the soft breezes of this
sheltered situation and genial climate.