Oct. 25.
I have discontinued my journal for three days to attend my friend, Mad. de ____, who has been ill. Uneasiness, and want of air and exercise, had brought on a little fever, which, by the usual mode of treatment in this country, has been considerably increased. Her disorder did not indeed much alarm me, but I cannot say as much of her medical assistants, and it seems to me to be almost supernatural that she has escaped the jeopardy of their prescriptions. In my own illness I had trusted to nature, and my recollection of what had been ordered me on similar occasions; but for Mad. de ____ I was less confident, and desirous of having better advice, begged a physician might be immediately sent for. Had her disorder been an apoplexy, she must infallibly have died, for as no person, not even the faculty, can enter, without an order from the municipal Divan, half a day elapsed before this order could be procured. At length the physician and surgeon arrived, and I know not why the learned professions should impose on us more by one exterior than another; but I own, when I saw the physician appear in a white camblet coat, lined with rose colour, and the surgeon with dirty linen, and a gold button and loop to his hat, I began to tremble for my friend. My feminine prejudices did not, however, in this instance, deceive me. After the usual questions, the patient was declared in a fever, and condemned to cathartics, bleeding, and "bon bouillons;" that is to say, greasy beef soup, in which there is never an oeconomy of onions.—When they were departed, I could not help expressing my surprize that people's lives should be entrusted to such hands, observing, at the same time, to the Baron de L____, (who is lodged in the same apartment with Mad. de ____,) that the French must never expect men, whose education fitted them for the profession, would become physicians, while they continued to be paid at the rate of twenty-pence per visit.— Yet, replied the Baron, if they make twenty visits a day, they gain forty livres—"et c'est de quoi vivre." [It is a living.] It is undeniably de quoi vivre, but as long as a mere subsistence is the only prospect of a physician, the French must be content to have their fevers cured by "drastics, phlebotomy, and beef soup."
They tell me we have now more than five hundred detenus in this single house. How so many have been wedged in I can scarcely conceive, but it seems our keeper has the art of calculating with great nicety the space requisite for a given number of bodies, and their being able to respire freely is not his affair. Those who can afford it have their dinners, with all the appurtenances, brought from the inns or traiteurs; and the poor cook, sleep, and eat, by scores, in the same room. I have persuaded my friend to sup as I do, upon tea; but our associates, for the most part, finding it inconvenient to have suppers brought at night, and being unwilling to submit to the same privations, regale themselves with the remains of their dinner, re-cooked in their apartments, and thus go to sleep, amidst the fumes of perdrix a l'onion, oeufs a la tripe, [Partridge a l'onion—eggs a la tripe.] and all the produce of a French kitchen.
It is not, as you may imagine, the Bourgeois, and less distinguished prisoners only, who indulge in these highly-seasoned repasts, at the expence of inhaling the savoury atmosphere they leave behind them: the beaux and petites mistresses, among the ci-devant, have not less exigent appetites, nor more delicate nerves; and the ragout is produced at night, in spite of the odours and disorder that remain till the morrow.
I conclude, notwithstanding your English prejudices, that there is nothing unwholesome in filth, for if it were otherwise, I cannot account for our being alive. Five hundred bodies, in a state of coacervation, without even a preference for cleanliness, "think of that Master Brook." All the forenoon the court is a receptacle for cabbage leaves, fish scales, leeks, &c. &c.—and as a French chambermaid usually prefers the direct road to circumambulation, the refuse of the kitchen is then washed away by plentiful inundations from the dressing-room—the passages are blockaded by foul plates, fragments, and bones; to which if you add the smell exhaling from hoarded apples and gruyere cheese, you may form some notion of the sufferings of those whose olfactory nerves are not robust. Yet this is not all—nearly every female in the house, except myself, is accompanied even here by her lap-dog, who sleeps in her room, and, not unfrequently, on her bed; and these Lesbias and Lindamiras increase the insalubrity of the air, and colonize one's stockings by sending forth daily emigrations of fleas. For my own part, a few close November days will make me as captious and splenetic as Matthew Bramble himself. Nothing keeps me in tolerable good humour at present, but a clear frosty morning, or a high wind.