We left Paris in the Diligence, and arrived at Fontainbleau the first
night. The accommodations at the inn were indifferent, and not cheap.
The palace is a low straggling mass of very old buildings, having been
erected by St. Louis in the 12th century, whence he used to date his
Rescripts, ‘From my Deserts of Fontainbleau!’ It puts one in mind of
Monkish legends, of faded splendour, of the leaden spouts and uncouth
stone-cherubim of a country church-yard. It is empty or gaudy within,
stiff and heavy without. Henry IV. figures on the walls with the fair
Gabrielle, like the Tutelary Satyr of the place, keeping up the
remembrance of old-fashioned royalty and gallantry. They here shew you
the table (a plain round piece of mahogany) on which Buonaparte in 1814
signed _the abdication of the human race, in favour of the hereditary
proprietors of the species_. We walked forward a mile or two before the
coach the next day on the road to Montargis. It presents a long, broad,
and stately avenue without a turning, as far as the eye can reach, and
is skirted on each side by a wild, woody, rocky scenery. The
birch-trees, with their grey stems and light glittering branches,
silvered over the darker back-ground, and afforded a striking contrast
to the brown earth and green moss beneath. There was a stillness in the
woods, which affects the mind the more in objects whose very motion is
gentleness. The day was dull, but quite mild, though in the middle of
January. The situation of Fontainbleau is certainly interesting and
fine. It stands in the midst of an extensive forest, intersected with
craggy precipices and rugged ranges of hills; and the various roads
leading to or from it are cut out of a wilderness, which a hermit might
inhabit. The approach to the different towns in France has, in this
respect, the advantage over ours; for, from burning wood instead of
coal, they must have large woods in the neighbourhood, which clothe the
country round them, and afford, as Pope expresses it,
‘In summer shade, in winter fire.’
We dig our fuel out of the bowels of the earth, and have a greater
portion of its surface left at our disposal, which we devote not to
ornament, but use. A copse-wood or an avenue of trees however, makes a
greater addition to the beauty of a town than a coal-pit or a
steam-engine in its vicinity.
When the Diligence came up, and we took our seats in the _coupé_ (which
is that part of a French stage-coach which resembles an old shattered
post-chaise, placed in front of the main body of it) we found a French
lady occupying the third place in it, whose delight at our entrance was
as great as if we had joined her on some desert island, and whose
mortification was distressing when she learnt we were not going the
whole way with her. She complained of the cold of the night air; but
this she seemed to dread less than the want of company. She said she had
been deceived, for she had been told the coach was full, and was in
despair that she should not have a soul to speak to all the way to
Lyons. We got out, notwithstanding, at the inn at Montargis, where we
met with a very tolerable reception, and were waited on at supper by one
of those Maritorneses that perfectly astonish an English traveller. Her
joy at our arrival was as extreme as if her whole fortune depended on
it. She laughed, danced, sung, fairly sprung into the air, bounced into
the room, nearly overset the table, hallooed and talked as loud as if
she had been alternately ostler and chamber-maid. She was as rough and
boisterous as any country bumpkin at a wake or statute-fair; and yet so
full of rude health and animal spirits, that you were pleased instead of
being offended. In England, a girl with such boorish manners would not
be borne; but her good-humour kept pace with her coarseness, and she was
as incapable of giving as of feeling pain. There is something in the air
in France that carries off the _blue devils_!
The mistress of the inn, however, was a little peaking, pining woman,
with her face wrapped up in flannel, and not quite so inaccessible to
nervous impressions; and when I asked the girl, ‘What made her speak so
loud?’ she answered for her, ‘To make people deaf!’ This side-reproof
did not in the least moderate the brazen tones of her help-mate, but
rather gave a new fillip to her spirits; though she was less on the
alert than the night before, and appeared to the full as much bent on
arranging her curls in the looking-glass when she came into the room, as
on arranging the breakfast things on the tea-board.
We staid here till one o’clock on Sunday (the 16th,) waiting the arrival
of the Lyonnais, in which we had taken our places forward, and which I
thought would never arrive. Let no man trust to a placard stuck on the
walls of Paris, advertising the cheapest and most expeditious mode of
conveyance to all parts of the world. It may be no better than a snare
to the unwary. The Lyonnais, I thought from the advertisement, was the
_Swift-sure_ of Diligences. It was to arrive ten hours before any other
Diligence; it was the most compact, the most elegant of modern vehicles.
From the description and the print of it, it seemed ‘a thing of life,’ a
minion of the fancy. To see it stand in a state of disencumbered
abstraction, it appeared a self-impelling machine; or if it needed aid,
was horsed, unlike your Paris Diligences, by nimble, airy Pegasuses. To
look at the _fac-simile_ of it that was put into your hand, you would
say it might run or fly—might traverse the earth, or whirl you through
the air, without let or impediment, so light was it to outward
appearance in structure ‘fit for speed succinct’—a chariot for _Puck_ or
_Ariel_ to ride in! This was the account I had (or something like it)
from Messieurs the Proprietors at the _Cour des Fontaines_. ‘Mark how a
plain tale shall put them down.’ Those gentlemen came to me after I had
paid for two places as far as Nevers, to ask me to resign them in favour
of two Englishmen, who wished to go the whole way, and to re-engage them
for the following evening. I said I could not do that; but as I had a
dislike to travelling at night, I would go on to Montargis by some other
conveyance, and proceed by the Lyonnais, which would arrive there at
eight or nine on Sunday morning, as far as I could that night. I set out
on the faith of this understanding. I had some difficulty in finding the
Office _sur la place_, to which I had been directed, and which was
something between a stable, a kitchen, and a cook-shop. I was led to it
by a shabby _double_ or counterpart of the Lyonnais, which stood before
the door, empty, dirty, bare of luggage, waiting the Paris one, which
had not yet arrived. It drove into town four hours afterwards, with
three foundered _hacks_, with the postilion and _Conducteur_ for its
complement of passengers, the last occupying the left hand corner of the
_coupé_ in solitary state, with a whisp of straw thrust through a broken
pane of one of the front windows, and a tassel of blue and yellow fringe
hanging out of the other; and with that mixture of despondency and
_fierté_ in his face, which long and uninterrupted pondering on the
state of the way-bill naturally produces in such circumstances. He
seized upon me and my trunks as lawful prize; he afterwards insisted on
my going forward in the middle of the night to Lyons, (contrary to my
agreement,) and I was obliged to comply, or to sleep upon trusses of
straw in a kind of out-house. We quarrelled incessantly, but I could not
help laughing, for he sometimes looked like my old acquaintance, Dr. S.,
and sometimes like my friend, A—— H——, of Edinburgh. He said we should
reach Lyons the next evening, and we got there twenty-four hours after
the time. He told me for my comfort, the reason of his being so late
was, that two of his horses had fallen down dead on the road. He had to
raise relays of horses all the way, as if we were travelling through a
hostile country; quarrelled with all the postilions about an abatement
of a few sous; and once our horses were arrested in the middle of the
night by a farmer who refused to trust him; and he had to go before the
Mayor, as soon as day broke. We were quizzed by the post-boys, the
innkeepers, the peasants all along the road, as a shabby concern; our
_Conducteur_ bore it all, like another _Candide_. We stopped at all the
worst inns in the outskirts of the towns, where nothing was ready; or
when it was, was not eatable. The second morning we were to breakfast at
Moulins; when we alighted, our guide told us it was eleven: the clock in
the kitchen pointed to three. As he laughed in my face when I complained
of his misleading me, I told him that he was ‘_un impudent_,’ and this
epithet sobered him the rest of the way. As we left Moulins, the crimson
clouds of evening streaked the west, and I had time to think of Sterne’s
_Maria_. The people at the inn, I suspect, had never heard of her. There
was no trace of romance about the house. Certainly, mine was not a
Sentimental Journey. Is it not provoking to come to a place, that has
been consecrated by ‘famous poet’s pen,’ as a breath, a name, a
fairy-scene, and find it a dull, dirty town? Let us leave the realities
to shift for themselves, and think only of those bright tracts that have
been reclaimed for us by the fancy, where the perfume, the sound, the
vision, and the joy still linger, like the soft light of evening skies!
Is the story of Maria the worse, because I am travelling a dirty road in
a rascally Diligence? Or is it an injury done us by the author to have
invented for us what we should not have met with in reality? Has it not
been read with pleasure by thousands of readers, though the people at
the inn had never heard of it? Yet Sterne would have been vexed to find
that the fame of his Maria had never reached the little town of Moulins.
We are always dissatisfied with the good we have, and always punished
for our unreasonableness.
At Palisseau (the road is rich in melodramatic recollections) it became
pitch-dark; you could not see your hand; I entreated to have the lamp
lighted; our _Conducteur_ said it was broken (_cassé_). With much
persuasion, and the ordering a bottle of their best wine, which went
round among the people at the inn, we got a lantern with a rushlight in
it, but the wind soon blew it out, and we went on our way darkling; the
road lay over a high hill, with a loose muddy bottom between two hedges,
and as we did not attempt to trot or gallop, we came safe to the level
ground on the other side. We breakfasted at Rouane, where we were first
shewn into the kitchen, while they were heating a suffocating stove in a
squalid _salle à manger_. There, while I was sitting half dead with cold
and fatigue, a boy came and scraped a wooden dresser close at my ear,
with a noise to split one’s brain, and with true French _nonchalance_;
and a portly landlady, who had risen just as we had done breakfasting,
ushered us to our carriage with the airs and graces of a Madame
Maintenon. In France you meet with the court address in a stable-yard.
In other countries you may find grace in a cottage or a wilderness; but
it is simple, unconscious grace, without the full-blown pride and strut
of _mannered_ confidence and presumption. A woman in France is graceful
by going out of her sphere; not by keeping within it.—In crossing the
bridge at Rouane, the sun shone brightly on the river and shipping,
which had a busy cheerful aspect; and we began to ascend the Bourbonnois
under more flattering auspices. We got out and walked slowly up the
sounding road. I found that the morning air refreshed and braced my
spirits; and that even the continued fatigue of the journey, which I had
dreaded as a hazardous experiment, was a kind of seasoning to me. I was
less exhausted than the first day. I will venture to say, that for an
invalid, sitting up all night is better than lying in bed all day.
Hardships, however dreadful to nervous apprehensions, by degrees give us
strength and resolution to endure them: whereas effeminacy softens and
renders us less and less capable of encountering pain or difficulty. It
is the love of indulgence, or the shock of the first privation or
effort, that confirms almost all the weaknesses of body or mind. As we
loitered up the long, winding ascent of the road from Rouane, we
occasionally approached the brink of some Alpine declivity tufted with
pine trees, and noticed the white villas, clustering [or] scattered,
which in all directions spotted the very summits of that vast and
gradual amphitheatre of hills which overlooked the neighbouring town.
The Bourbonnois is the first large chain of hills piled one upon
another, and extending range beyond range, that you come to on the route
to Italy, and that occupy a wide-spread district, like a mighty
conqueror, with uniform and growing magnificence. To those who have
chiefly seen detached mountains or abrupt precipices rising from the
level surface of the ground, the effect is exceedingly imposing and
grand. The descent on the other side into Tarare is more sudden and
dangerous; and you avoid passing over the top of the mountain (along
which the road formerly ran) by one of those fine, broad,
firmly-cemented roads with galleries and bridges, which bespeak at once
the master-hand that raised them. Tarare is a neat little town, famous
for the manufacture of serges and calicoes. We had to stop here for
three-quarters of an hour, waiting for fresh horses; and as we sat in
the _coupé_ in this helpless state, the horses taken out, the sun
shining in, and the wind piercing through every cranny of the broken
panes and rattling sash-windows, the postilion came up and demanded to
know if we were English, as there were two English gentlemen who would
be glad to see us. I excused myself from getting out, but said I should
be happy to speak to them. Accordingly, my informant beckoned to a young
man in black, who was standing at a little distance in a state of
anxious expectation, and who coming to the coach-door said, he presumed
we were from London, and that he had taken the liberty to pay his
respects to us. His friend, he said, who was staying with him, was ill
in bed, or he would have done himself the same pleasure. He had on a
pair of wooden clogs, turned up and pointed at the toes in the manner of
the country (which he recommended to me as useful for climbing the hills
if ever I should come into those parts) warm worsted mittens, and had a
thin, genteel, shivering aspect. I expected every moment he would tell
me his name or business; but all I learnt was that he and his friend had
been here some time, and that they could not get away till spring, that
there were no entertainments, that trade was flat, and that the French
seemed to him a very different people from the English. The fact is, he
found himself quite at a loss in a French country-town, and had no other
resource or way of amusing himself, than by looking out for the
Diligences as they passed, and trying to hear news from England. He
stood at his own door, and waved his hand with a melancholy air as we
rode by, and no doubt instantly went up stairs to communicate to his
sick friend, that he had conversed with two English people.
Our delay at Tarare had deprived us of nearly an hour of daylight; and,
besides, the miserable foundered jades of horses, that we had to get on
with in this paragon of Diligences, were quite unequal to the task of
dragging it up and down the hills on the road to Lyons, which was still
twenty miles distant. The night was dark, and we had no light. I found
it was quite hopeless when we should reach our journey’s end (if we did
not break our necks by the way) and that both were matters of very great
indifference to Mons. _le Conducteur_, who was only bent on saving the
pockets of Messieurs his employers, and who had no wish, like me, to see
the Vatican! He affected to make bargains for horses, which always
failed and added to our delay; and lighted his lantern once or twice,
but it always went out. At last I said that I had intended to give him a
certain sum for himself, but that if we did not arrive in Lyons by ten
o’clock at night, he might depend upon it I would not give him a single
farthing. This had the desired effect. He got out at the next village we
came to, and three stout horses were fastened to the harness. He also
procured a large piece of candle (with a reserve of another piece of
equal length and thickness in his lantern) and held it in his hand the
whole way, only shifting it from one hand to the other, as he grew
tired, and biting his lips and making wry faces at this new office of a
_candelabrum_, which had been thrust upon him much against his will. I
was not sorry, for he was one of the most disagreeable Frenchmen I ever
met with, having all the indifference and self-sufficiency of his
countrymen with none of their usual obligingness. He seemed to me a
person out of his place (a thing you rarely discover in France)—a
broken-down tradesman, or ‘one that had had misfortunes,’ and who
neither liked nor was fit for his present situation of _Conducteur_ to a
Diligence without funds, without horses, and without passengers. We
arrived in safety at Lyons at eleven o’clock at night, and were
conducted to the _Hotel des Couriers_, where we, with some difficulty,
procured a lodging and a supper, and were attended by a brown, greasy,
dark-haired, good-humoured, awkward gypsey of a wench from the south of
France, who seemed just caught; stared and laughed, and forgot every
thing she went for; could not help exclaiming every moment—‘_Que Madame
a le peau blanc!_’ from the contrast to her own dingy complexion and
dirty skin, took a large brass-pan of scalding milk, came and sat down
by me on a bundle of wood, and drank it; said she had had no supper, for
her head ached, and declared the English were _braves gens_, and that
the Bourbons were _bons enfans_, started up to look through the
key-hole, and whispered through her broad strong-set teeth, that a fine
Madam was descending the staircase, who had been to dine with a great
gentleman, offered to take away the supper things, left them, and called
us the next morning with her head and senses in a state of even greater
confusion than they were over-night. The familiarity of common servants
in France surprises the English at first; but it has nothing offensive
in it, any more than the good natured gambols and freedoms of a
Newfoundland dog. It is quite natural.
Lyons is a fine, dirty town. The streets are good, but so high and
narrow, that they look like sinks of filth and gloom. The shops are mere
dungeons. Yet two noble rivers water the city, the Rhone and the
Saone—the one broad and majestic, the other more confined and impetuous
in its course, and join a little below the town to pour their friendly
streams into the Mediterranean. The square is spacious and handsome, and
the heights of St. Just, that overlook it, command a fine view of the
town, the bridges, both rivers, the hills of Provence, the road to
Chambery, and the Alps, with their snowy tops propping the clouds. The
sight of them effectually deterred me from attempting to go by Geneva
and the Simplon; and we were contented (for this time) with the humbler
passage of Mount Cenis. Here is the _Hotel de Notre Dâme de Piété_,
which is shewn you as the inn where Rousseau stopped on his way to
Paris, when he went to overturn the French Monarchy by the force of
style. I thought of him, as we came down the mountain of Tarare, in his
gold-laced hat, and with his _jet d’eau_ playing. If they could but have
known who was coming, how many battalions would have been sent out to
meet him; what a ringing of alarm-bells, what a beating of drums, what
raising of drawbridges, what barring of gates, what examination of
passports, what processions of priests, what meetings of magistrates,
what confusion in the towns, what a panic through the country, what
telegraphic despatches to the Court of Versailles, what couriers posting
to all parts of Europe, what manifestoes from armies, what a hubbub of
Holy Alliances, and all for what? To prevent one man from speaking what
he and every other man felt, and whose only fault was that the beatings
of the human heart had found an echo in his pen! At Lyons I saw this
inscription over a door: _Ici on trouve le seul et unique depôt de
l’encre sans pareil et incorruptible_—which appeared to me to contain
the whole secret of French poetry. I went into a shop to buy M.
Martine’s _Death of Socrates_, which I saw in the window, but they would
neither let me have that copy nor get me another. The French are not ‘a
nation of shopkeepers.’ They had quite as lieve see you walk out of
their shops as come into them. While I was waiting for an answer, a
French servant in livery brought in four volumes of the _History of a
Foundling_, an improved translation, in which it was said the _morceaux_
omitted by M. de la Place were restored. I was pleased to see my old
acquaintance Tom Jones, with his French coat on. The poetry of M.
Alphonse Martine and of M. Casimir de la Vigne circulates in the
provinces and in Italy, through the merit of the authors and the favour
of the critics. L. H. tells me that the latter is a great Bonapartist,
and talks of ‘the tombs of the brave.’ He said I might form some idea of
M. Martine’s attempts to be great and _unfrenchified_ by the
frontispiece to one of his poems, in which a young gentleman in an
heroic attitude is pointing to the sea in a storm, with his other hand
round a pretty girl’s waist. I told H. this poet had lately married a
lady of fortune. He said, ‘That’s the girl.’ He also said very well, I
thought, that ‘the French seemed born to puzzle the Germans.’ Why are
there not salt-spoons in France? In England it is a piece of barbarism
to put your knife into a salt-cellar with another. But in France the
distinction between grossness and refinement is done away. Every thing
there is refined!