Havre--Description of the Town--The Mapseller--Manners of the
People--Law of Inheritance--State of Agriculture--Town and Country
Poverty--Foreign Trade--The Custom House, a School for
Perjury--System of Passports--The French Diligence--Rouen--The
Cathedral--Joan of Arc.
_June 30th, 1835._
I have half a mind to describe this town to you. It has twenty thousand
inhabitants, is at the mouth of the Seine, and twenty-four hours from
Paris. The houses are high, and mostly of black slate, and patched often
till nothing is seen but the patches, and mushrooms, and other
vegetables, grow through the cracks. Villages in America have an air of
youth and freshness harmonising with their dimensions. Small things
should never look old. This town presents you with the ungracious image
of a wrinkled and gray-headed baby. The streets, except one, have no
side walks; they are paved with rough stone, and are without gutters and
common sewers; the march of intellect not having arrived at these
luxuries. The exception is the “_Rue de Paris_;” it has “_trottoirs_,” a
theatre, a public square, a market-house, a library with six thousand
volumes, and a church very richly furnished, the organ presented by
Cardinal Richelieu. I have been to the church this morning, to pay the
Virgin Mary the pound of candles I owed, for my preservation at sea. The
prettiest improvement I have seen (and it is no miracle for a town of so
much commercial importance) is a dock, cut in from the bay along the
channel of an old creek, which contains three or four hundred ships, a
goodly number of which wear the American flag; it runs through the midst
of the town, and brings the vessels into a pleasant sociability with the
houses. When the tide is high, these vessels ride in their own element;
when low, you see a whole fleet wallowing in the mud; and passengers, to
get to sea, have to wait the complaisance of both wind and tide often a
whole week.
But step out through the _Rue de Paris_, a little to the north, and you
will see a compensation for all this ugliness. It is a hill, running
boldly up to the water’s edge, whose south side, several hundred feet
high, is smothered with houses, which seem to be scrambling up the
acclivity to get a look at the town; and the entire summit is covered
with beautiful villas, and gardens rich with trees and shrubbery, and
hedges, which at this season are a most luxurious ornament. Many
American families, having grown rich here by commerce, are perched
magnificently upon this hill. The view from the top is charming! The old
town, in its motley livery of houses, ships, and fortifications, spreads
itself out at your feet; on the west, there is an open view of the
channel, and all the pretty images of a commercial port, such as vessels
in the near and distant prospect, coming into harbour and going out upon
their voyages; and on the south, and beyond the bay into which the Seine
flows, is a fine romantic country of field and woodland, which runs
gradually up, undulating like the sea, till it meets the blue sky. It is
charming, too, in the night; for as soon as Mercury has hung out his
lamps above, these Havrians light up theirs in the town, and set up a
little opposition to the heavens; and there you are between two
firmaments, which of a fine evening is a fantastic and gorgeous
spectacle. This is the Havre. It is the first thing I ever described,
and I am out of breath.
And now the customs and manners. I have had dealings with
hackney-coachmen, porters, pedlars, and pickpockets, and have found them
eminently qualified in their several departments. In strolling last
evening through the streets, going only to frank a letter at the post
office, I remarked a person crying maps by a wall side. He walked up and
down with arms folded, and had a grave and respectable face:--“_A trente
sous seulement! C’est incroyable! A trente sous!_” I wished to look
after a place in Normandy called Helleville; the very place where
Guiscard and, that other choicest of all ladies’ heroes, Tancred were
born. Only think of Tancred being born in the department of Coutance,
and being nothing but a Frenchman; and only think, too, of the
possibility of taking a piece of gold out of a man’s waistcoat pocket at
mid-day, the owner being wide awake, and in full enjoyment of his
senses. I had no sooner made my wants known to this polite auctioneer
than, with a _civilité toute Française_, he placed the map before my
eyes--that is, between the eyes and the waistcoat pocket, and
himself just behind the left shoulder, and assisted me in the
search--“_Hell--Hell--Hell--Helleville!--le voilà, monsieur!_” He then
resumed his walk and looked out for new customers; and I, with a return
of his bow and smile, and a grateful sense of his politeness, took
leave, and pursued my way contentedly, “not missing what was stolen,” to
the post-office. Here I took out my letter, had it stamped, and put my
hand complacently in my pocket, and then went home very much disgusted
with the French nation. To be robbed at the Havre brings no excuse for
one’s wit or understanding: in Paris, it is what one expects from the
civilization of the capital.
The porters, coachmen, draymen, boatmen, and such like, about the Havre,
are wrangling and noisy to excess. They burst out into a fury every few
minutes, but it always terminates innocently. It reminds one of our
militia musketry; there is a preliminary, and then a general explosion,
and then a few scattering cartridges, and all ends in smoke. They seldom
resort to duelling, and boxing is considered vulgar; and as for oaths,
they make no sort of figure in French. In the article of swearing, we
are ahead, I believe, of all other nations. In their common
intercourse, however, these people are much more respectful than we are
to their betters and to one another. Mr. Boots, for no other reason than
bringing your shoes in well polished, insists on your “pardon for having
deranged you;” and the beggar takes leave of his fellow-beggar with his
“respects to madam.” But these respects, I have heard, do not bear the
test of any twopenny interest. There is no civility that stands against
sixpence.
This common world is more social, and in appearance more joyous, than
with us. It huddles together in public places, with wonderful
conversation and merriment, till a late hour of the night; and what a
quantity of green old age! grandmothers of sixty with their hair _en
papillote_, are playing hide and go-seek with twenty-five. After all,
what signifies the degree of poverty or age, if one is happy? Another
remarkable thing is, the respect paid to property. Benches on the public
squares are handed down to posterity with no other marks than the
natural wear and tear of sitting on them; vegetables grow by the
way-side untrodden, and gardens and fields offer their fruits without
hedge or fence, or any visible protection. I have talked these matters
over with a Frenchman, who says, that it is the last generation only
that lives at this rate, and that the present one dies off at a very
reasonable age. The truth I believe is, that we, in our country, keep
old persons inside the house; we wrap them up and lay them on the shelf,
and ennui and neglect, no doubt, abridge a little their duration.
As for the security of property, he ascribes it entirely to a certain
shepherdly swain, very common here, who wears red breeches, and is
coiffed in a cocked hat, with one of the cocks exactly over his nose,
called a _Garde Champêtre_, who watches day and night over the safety of
the fields. A curiosity of the place is the peasant women, whom you will
see mixed fantastically with the citizens in the market, and flocking in
and out in great numbers at the town gate. Labour and the sun have worn
all the feminine charms out of their faces, and they have mounted up
over these ugly faces starched and white caps two stories high, in which
they encounter all sorts of weather; they are seated on little asses, a
large basket at each side, in which they carry vegetables to market, and
carry back manure for the crops of the next year. The American
intercourse is so quickened by railroads and steamboats, that the
characteristics of town and country are almost effaced; here they wear
yet their distinct liveries.
And now the antiquities. I visited, this morning, a trumpery old palace
of Charles V.; also a round tower, built, they say, by that great tower
builder, Julius Cæsar; and returning through a solitary alley, I
stumbled accidentally upon a monument of more precious memory, the
birthplace of the author of Paul and Virginia. It is a scrubby old hut,
with a bit of marble in front containing his name and day of nativity.
Genius seems to have but mean notions of the dignity of birth; Pindar
was born in the slough and vapours of Bœotia, and St. Pierre in this
filthy alley of the Havre.
And now the politics. The children here are apportioned equally, and
cannot be disinherited. All the father can dispose of by will, is a
half, third, or fourth, of the estate, according as he has one, two, or
more heirs. This kind of succession cuts up the land into small patches,
and thus brings poverty on both town and country. Families being without
capital to improve their agricultural resources, have but little to
spare to the town, and can, therefore, buy but little of its stores and
manufactures; and, from inability to supply the raw materials and
provisions cheap, buy this little at an enhanced price. In this way the
two parties mutually beggar each other. Besides, under this system of
minute divisions, the farming population increases enormously, poverty
increasing in the same ratio.
Two-thirds of the French are already farmers; and in England, where
farming is in so much greater perfection, the ratio is one-third. This
law, too, in rendering the children independent of the father, destroys
his authority and his check upon their conduct; it weakens the motives
to exertion, which arise from fear of want or prospects of future good,
and is consequently unfavourable to intellect and morals. The English
system makes one son only a fool, the French besots the whole family. A
redundant population is the great curse of all these old countries, and
under this system of subdivision, a nation, unless the blessings of war
or the plague intervene, becomes as multitudinous as the Chinese, eating
dogs, and cats, and potatoes, and hutting with cows and pigs; a plough,
as in Ireland, becoming a joint stock possession, and a horse belonging
to a whole neighbourhood.
The French, in spite of the Moscows and Waterloos, have added between
five and six millions to their population of 1789. Agriculture, to be
sure, was improved by the Revolution, by the divisions amongst the
peasantry of the national domains and confiscated property of the
nobles, by the abolition of tithes and game laws, and by bringing the
waste lands into cultivation; but this condition is, or must soon be, on
the reverse. In America, the abundance of idle and cheap land prevents
this calamity for the present. I have travelled a few miles in the
country, and have squeezed what sense I could out of the peasants. I
find that, in all branches of husbandry, a labourer here performs a
fourth less work daily than in America; and in ploughing and reaping,
nearly a third. The French implements, too, are clumsy and bungling;
oxen are yoked by the horns, harrows have wooden teeth, and the plough,
mostly of wood, scratches up the earth instead of turning a furrow.
Another great evil in French politics is, the centralization of every
thing in the metropolis. In our country, each borough or township is an
independent community, and manages its concerns with scarce a sense of
any foreign superintendence. An individual recommends himself to favour
first in his village, then in his county, next in his state, and finally
in the United States; and none glimmer in the last sphere who have not
shone in the first. Here this condition is reversed--there is a
converging of all the rays into one general focus. Paris is the centre,
and there is none but delegated authority any where else. So the French
provinces are out at the heels and elbows, and Paris wears its elegant
and fashionable wardrobe. Your Pottsville has a hundred miles of
railroad, whilst the Havre transports the whole trade of the capital by
a two-wheeled operation she calls the “_roulage_,” and her boats upon
the channel carrying on the intercourse between the two greatest cities
of the world, are about equal to yours, in which you cross over into
Jersey to eat creams with mother Heyle.
A third reason of village and country poverty is, the neglect of
machinery, by which production may be increased with a diminution of
labour. Not a railroad has yet shewn its nose in this place, though it
is the outlet to the foreign trade of one third of the French territory,
including the capital, with its almost a million of inhabitants. They
are cleaning their great dock to-day with a hundred or two of men armed
with spades, whilst a machine is doing the same work upon the Delaware
with three or four negroes. The economists of the French school reason
thus: If this clumsy apparatus is superseded, our workmen will be out of
employ; besides, it is known that the increase of consumers always keeps
pace with the increase of production, and you end where you began.--But
you increase also your strength. Yes, and the difficulties of
government.--You give life to a greater number of human beings. And
little obligations have they for the gift, if they are to run the risk
of being corrupted in this world and punished in the next; and the means
of corruption are greater in a crowded than a thin population; greater
amongst an idle and luxurious, than a simple and laborious people.
The American public was more happy and virtuous with its three millions
than with its ten millions and its railroads. If this is all true, then
the country which has least fertility of soil, and least skill in the
arts of agriculture, is the most favoured by Providence; and the best
system of economy is that which teaches us to procure the least possible
produce with the greatest possible labour. The best employment, too, for
the labourers, would be to plant cucumbers in summer, and extract the
sunbeams out of them, to keep themselves warm in winter. I like the
system which teaches us to increase the sum of human comforts. I think
it is better to live in an improved country, with clean streets and neat
dwellings, than to have the same means of living with a destitution of
such conveniences. I like even to starve with decent accommodations.
A fourth great cause of poverty is, the restriction which these nations
have imposed upon their mutual intercourse, and the produce of each
other’s industry. There is a total disagreement between natural reason
and the custom of all countries on this subject. Nature, by giving us a
diversity of soils, climates, and products, has pointed out the right
objects of industry, and laid all nations under obligations of
dependence and intimacy upon each other; and there is a general struggle
amongst all to counteract this benevolent design. France, for example,
has a natural fitness for wines, and the land producing this wine is
unsuited to any other culture; yet she has so managed as to keep her
wine trade stationary for the last fifty years. England buys her wine,
of inferior quality, from Portugal and Spain, and carries on a greater
trade with the Chinese, her Antipodes, than with France, her next-door
neighbour. All proclaim the benefits of foreign trade, and all legislate
directly to get rid of their foreign customers. In what more direct way
could France prevent the sale of her wines to Russia, Sweden, and
England, than by refusing their coal, iron, woollen manufactures, and
other products, for which they have a natural advantage in return?
But the great struggle of all is to become independent; and yet the very
word implies the extinction of all foreign commerce. The greatest of all
national blessings is assuredly that very dependence we are so eager to
avoid. We cannot become dependent upon a foreign nation without laying
it, at the same time, under a similar dependence. But in case of a war?
This is the very way to make a war impossible. Men do not war against
their own interests. We are dependent upon Lyons for her silks, and her
petitions are now pouring in daily against the impending war with
America; and many think they will go nigh to prevent it. Would not this
war be more remote if the dependence were increased? If I wished to
prevent all future wars with France and England, I would begin by
building a railroad from Paris to London, and removing their commercial
restrictions. Each country would then improve to the uttermost that
industry to which it is most fitted. Intimacies, too, would be improved,
prejudices effaced, and they would become, at length, so dependent upon
each other, that even should a mad or silly government involve them in a
war, their mutual interests would force them to discontinue it.
Of all methods of gathering taxes, that of the Custom-house seems to me
the worst. What an expensive apparatus of buildings! what a fleet of
vessels! what an army of spies! what courts of admiralty! and what an
array of new crimes upon the statute book! A custom-house is a school
for perjury and other vices, and where the first lessons are made easy
for beginners. There is nothing one robs with so little compunction as
one’s country. It is, at the worst, only robbing thirty millions of
people. A sin loses its criminality by diffusion, and may be so expanded
as to be no sin at all.
All the functions of a custom-house are in their nature odious and
vexatious. The first injunction is, to refuse the traveller, wearied of
the sea, the common rites of hospitality on setting his foot upon the
land, to ransack even honest women by impudent police officers, and
subject honourable men to a scrutiny practised elsewhere only upon
thieves. I piqued a Frenchman on board our ship on the venality, which I
had heard of, of the French ports. He replied, that he had been in the
American trade for ten years, and accompanied each of his cargoes to our
ports, for the express purpose of not paying the duties. Why, nothing is
more easy. “There is an officer who examines; we know each other; he
knocks off the top of the boxes, rummages the calico with great fuss and
ceremony, and the silks and jewellery sleep quiet at the bottom.
Whoever,” he says, “pays more than ten per cent. of his duties in any
country, is unacquainted with his business.”
There is another item in European policy--the requirement of
passports--the cost, the delays and vexatious ceremony attending it.
This has incurred abundant reprehension, especially from American
travellers; and there certainly is no other use in such a regulation
than that a set of the most despicable creatures that creep upon the
earth may get a living by it. But when one is used, for a long time, to
see things done in a certain way, one does not conceive the possibility
of their being done in any other way. When I informed an intelligent
Frenchman, of forty years, that even a stranger did not carry a passport
about with him in America, and that we dispensed with all this array of
police officers, and spies, and other such impediments to travelling and
the intercourse of nations, he inferred that there could be no personal
security. That alone, he said, would deter him from residing in the
United States. When I cited against him the example of England, he
remained incredulous, and required the confirmation of a better
authority.
Don’t you imagine that I am going to treat you hereafter to so vulgar a
thing as politics. Events have not yet thickened upon my observation,
and I am obliged to make use of all my resources. If I could afford to
send you blank paper all the way across the Atlantic, I would have
omitted these last pages--hand them over to your husband. The living
here is about equal in the quality of food and price to your best houses
of Philadelphia. The hotels are shabby in comparison with ours; the one
I lodge in has not been washed since the year of the world 1656; but the
cookery and service are altogether in favour of the French. A breakfast
is two francs, a dinner three, and a chamber two. You may count your
daily expenses at a dollar and a half in the best houses. The Havre is
our first acquaintance on the continent, and its history cannot be
without some interest, especially to ladies who are just sighing to go
to Paris. Adieu.
_Rouen, July 3rd, 1835._
What a curiosity of ugliness is a French diligence. It exceeds in this
quality even our American stages. But beauty is sacrificed to
convenience: it carries three tons of passengers and luggage, with a
speed of seven miles an hour. The _coupé_, in front, has three seats,
the _intérieur_, six, and the _rotonde_ as many in the rear, the price
decreasing in the same direction--from the whole, to about the half of
our American prices. There are also three seats aloft. These divisions
are invisible to each other, and represent the world outside--the rich,
the middling, and the poor. If you feel very aristocratic, you take the
whole _coupé_ to yourself, or yourself and lady, and you can be as
private as you please. Each seat is numbered, and the traveller has his
number on the way-bill and in his pocket. A _conducteur_ superintends
luggage, &c., and is paid extra. The team has three horses abreast in
front, and two in the rear, and upon one of the latter is mounted a
postillion. This personage deserves a particular notice. He is immersed
to his middle in a huge pair of boots, making each leg the diameter of
his body; and his body, too, is squeezed into a narrow coat, which being
buttoned to the chin, props his woeful countenance towards the
firmament, so that he corresponds exactly with Ovid’s description of a
man, or rather, he looks like the letter Y upside down. Cracking a whip
he does not regard as an acquirement, but a virtue. He can crack several
tunes; and, in a calm night, serenades a whole village.
The road to Rouen, in the diligence, has nothing in it agreeable. The
land has the ordinary crops, but it is a wide waste of cultivation,
without hedges, or barns, or cottages. The only relief is now and then a
comfortless village, or a solitary and neglected chateau. You swallow a
mouthful of dust at each breath, and you are disgusted at all the
stopping-places by the wailing voices of beggars, old men and women
recommending themselves by decrepitude, and children by rags and
nakedness. The children often run before the diligence for a quarter of
a mile in quest of the charitable _sous_. I soon got out of change, and
then reasoned myself into a fit of uncharitableness. They may be
unworthy, and I shall encourage vice; besides, charity only increases
the breed. What I give to these vagabonds I take from somebody else. I
should otherwise lay it out in some article of trade, and if all do so,
we shall only make a new set of beggars by relieving the old--reduce the
industrious to mendicity by encouraging the idlers. Moreover, I can’t
help all, and I won’t help any, or, if I do help any, I will give to my
own countrymen, and not to these ragamuffin Frenchmen. In this way, you
get along without much affecting the tranquillity of your conscience. My
advice is, that you come by the Seine and the steamboat. It is a passage
of only eight hours, and every one says it will delight you with its
beautiful and romantic scenery.
I suppose you know this is the birth-place of Racine and Fontenelle. It
deserves a passing notice on their account, as also on its own. The
residence of those truculent old Norman dukes who made the world shake
with fear, and gave sovereigns to some of the best nations of Europe,
cannot be an indifferent spot upon the globe. Indeed, we may trace to it
many of our own institutions, as well as a good part of our language.
Our terms of law, the very cries of our courts in Schuylkill county, are
imported from this Old Normandy, of which Rouen is the capital. It is a
fantastic old town, with earthenware tiles, and enclosed between two
mountains, having a mixture of art and nature, which bring each other
out finely into relief. One is delighted to see town in the country, and
country in the town. Here is a large factory, or hotel, and there a set
of gray and tawny-looking hovels, like a village of the Puttawattemies.
The peasants are seen amongst the tops and chimneys of the houses,
cultivating their fields on the sides, and upon the summits, of the
hills, which are arrayed in tufts of woodland, hedges, and pasturage;
and all the avenues leading to the town are beautifully overshaded with
chestnuts and elms. The Seine, too, has its fairy islands and weeping
willows on its banks, and winds along through the middle of the town;
and now and then a steamboat comes up the valley, with a puffing and
fuss that would have made stare even the iron features of old Rollo. One
can see such a town but once, and no one can see it so well as he who
has been used to the fresh and glaring villages of our country. Rouen
has ninety thousand inhabitants, a library of four thousand volumes, a
gallery of paintings, and manufactures of all sorts of calico and other
cotton stuffs; also of velvets, shawls, linen, and bombasins. More than
half the population is engaged directly in these manufactures. My advice
is, that you sleep here one night instead of in the diligence, in
running post to Paris; and in your evening’s walk, I invite you to step
out and see Napoleon’s bridge, which has, in the centre of it, a fine
statue of Corneille.
I went to see that famous piece of venerable antiquity, the Cathedral.
You have its picture in all the “Penny Magazines.” Our guide, who knows
it by heart, told us his tale as follows:--“Gentlemen, this is the tomb
of Rollo, first duke of Normandy; no horse could carry him; had to walk
on foot; died 917. Gentlemen, this is William Longsword, his son and
successor; was on the point of taking the frock to be a monk, but was
basely assassinated by Arnaud, Count of Flanders.” (And the devil a monk
was he.) “Gentlemen, this is Pierre de Breze, Grand Seneschal of Anjou
and Normandy; fell in the battle of Montilherry, 1467; and this is
John, Duke of Bedford, Viceroy of Normandy, who died in 1438. In this
tomb, gentlemen (come a little nearer)--in this tomb is deposited the
heart of Richard Cœur de Lion! (a tremor ran through our bones.) His
heart is in this tomb, his brains are in Poictiers, and the other parts
of him in Kent, in Great Britain. The man who took out his brains died
of it. This is the last man Richard killed, and he had killed more than
one.” Here our Cicerone ran down, and his features, just now so
animated, were suddenly collapsed, the natural effect of inspiration.
We looked then at the great bell, and the organs, and the statues of
saints, most of them mutilated in the Revolution. One, without a nose,
they told us was St. Dunstan; the Devil and the Jacobins having
retaliated. There is a headless trunk, too, they might very well pass
for St. Denis. One of the remarkable features of this church is the
painting on glass, representing scriptural scenes, of which the colours
seem to have grown more vivid by time, though time has destroyed the
secret of their composition. The architecture is Gothic, and the
grandest specimen of this order in France. Its immense fluted columns,
near a hundred feet high and ten or twelve in diameter--its images of
Christ and the Virgin, and the pictures of the apostles and saints, are
both sublime and beautiful. The lightning has thought it worthy of a
visit, and has overturned one of its huge towers.
Poor Joan of Arc! Here is her monument in the midst of the market
square, where she was burnt. It is a pedestal of twenty feet, surmounted
by her statue. Alongside of this trophy of French and English barbarism,
instead of blushing for shame, they shew you, for sixpence, the room in
which she was imprisoned. It is damp, and has only glimmerings of light,
and is altogether a horrid remnant of antiquity. Farewell to Rouen.