I.
Every man who has the use of his eyes and ears ought, in travelling, to climb up to the imperial. The highest places are the most beautiful; ask those who occupy them. You break your neck if you fall from them; consult the same people about this. But you enjoy yourself while you are there.
In the first place, you see the landscape, which produces descriptions that you offer to the public. In the coupé, your only spectacle is the harness of the horses; in the interior, you see through a tiny window the trees trooping by like soldiers carrying arms; in the rotunda, you are in a cloud of dust that dims the landscape and strangles the traveller.
In the second place, at the top you will have comedy. In the lower places, the people preserve decorum and are silent. The peasants here perched aloft, who are your companions, the postilion and the conductor, make open-hearted confidences: they talk of their wives, their children, their property, trade, neighbors, and above all of themselves; so that at the end of an hour you imagine their housekeeping and their life as clearly as if you were at home with them. It is a novel of manners that you skim through on the road. Not one of them gives ideas so vivid and so truthful. You get to know the people only by living with them, and the people from three-quarters of the nation. These bits of conversation teach you the number of their ideas and the hue of their passions; now, on these ideas and passions depend all the great events. Besides their rude manners, their loud bursts of laughter, their frank respect for bodily strength, their acknowledged inclination for the pleasure of eating and drinking, offer a contrast to the humbug of our politeness and our affectation of refinement. The conductor told the postilion how the evening before they had eaten the half of a sheep among three of them. It was good, fat mutton; they served up no better at the Hotel of the Great Sun: there were sirloins, cutlets, a neat leg of mutton. They had emptied six bottles. The other made him tell it over, and seemed to eat in imagination, by the reaction, by recoil, as it were.
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After the banquet, he had made the horses gallop; he had passed by Ribettes. Ribettes had swallowed dust for a whole hour; Ribettes wanted to get ahead again, but wasn’t able. Ribettes grew very angry. They had dared Ribettes. The story of Ribettes and the mutton was told eight times in an hour, and seemed the last time as delightful and as new as the first. They laughed like the blest.
In the third place, that is the only spot where you can breathe. The other divisions are sweating-rooms whose partitions and black cushions hold and concentrate the heat. Now, there is no man, no matter how he may love colors and lines, who can enjoy a landscape shut up in a box without air. When the creature is cramped, the soul is cramped. Admiration presupposes comfort, and when you are broiled by the sun you curse the sun.