LETTER LXVI.
PRACTICAL BATHOS OF CELEBRATED PLACES—TRAVELLING COMPANIONS AT THE SIMPLON—CUSTOM-HOUSE COMFORTS—TRIALS OF TEMPER—CONQUERED AT LAST!—DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF FRANCE, ITALY, AND SWITZERLAND—FORCE OF POLITENESS.
Whether it was that I had offended the genius of the spot, by coming in an omnibus, or from a desire I never can resist in such places, to travesty and ridicule the mock solemnities with which they are exhibited, certain it is that I left Ferney, without having encountered, even in the shape of a more serious thought, the spirit of Voltaire. One reads the third canto of Childe Harold in his library, and feels as if "Lausanne and Ferney" should be very interesting places to the traveller, and yet when he is shown Gibbon's bower by a fellow scratching his head and hitching up his trousers the while, and the nightcap that enclosed the busy brain from which sprang the fifty brilliant tomes on his shelves, by a country-girl, who hurries through her drilled description, with her eye on the silver douceur in his fingers, he is very likely to rub his hand over his eyes, and disclaim, quite honestly, all pretensions to enthusiasm. And yet, I dare say, I shall have a great deal of pleasure in remembering that I have been at Ferney. As an English traveller would say, "I have done Voltaire!"
Quite of the opinion that it was not doing justice to Geneva to have made but a three days' stay in it, regretting not having seen Sismondi and Simond, and a whole coterie of scholars and authors, whose home it is, and with a mind quite made up to return to Switzerland, when my beaux jours of love, money, and leisure, shall have arrived, I crossed the Rhone at sunrise, and turned my face toward Paris.
The Simplon is much safer travelling than the pass of the Jura. We were all day getting up the mountains by roads that would make me anxious, if there were a neck in the carriage I would rather should not be broken. My company, fortunately, consisted of three Scotch spinsters, who would try any precipice of the Jura, I think, if there were a lover at the bottom. If the horses had backed in the wrong place, it would have been to all three, I am sure, a deliverance from a world in whose volume of happiness,
"their leaf
By some o'er-hasty angel was misplaced."
As to my own neck and my friend's, there is a special providence for bachelors, even if they were of importance enough to merit a care. Spinsters and bachelors, we all arrived safely at Rousses, the entrance to France, and here, if I were to write before repeating the alphabet, you would see what a pen could do in a passion.
The carriage was stopped by three custom-house officers, and taken under a shed, where the doors were closed behind it. We were then required to dismount and give our honors that we had nothing new in the way of clothes; no "jewelry; no unused manufactures of wool, thread, or lace; no silk of floss silk; no polished metals, plated or varnished; no toys, (except a heart each); nor leather, glass, or crystal manufactures." So far, I kept my temper.
Our trunks, carpet-bags, hat-boxes, dressing-cases, and portfeuilles, were then dismounted and critically examined—every dress and article unfolded; shirts, cravats, unmentionables and all, and searched thoroughly by two ruffians, whose fingers were no improvement upon the labors of the washerwoman. In an hour's time or so we were allowed to commence repacking. Still, I kept my temper.
We were then requested to walk into a private room, while the ladies, for the same purpose, were taken, by a woman, into another. Here we were requested to unbutton our coats, and, begging pardon for the liberty, these courteous gentlemen thrust their hands into our pockets, felt in our bosoms, pantaloons, and shoes, examined our hats, and even eyed our "pet curls" very earnestly, in the expectation of finding us crammed with Geneva jewelry. Still, I kept my temper.
Our trunks were then put upon the carriage, and a sealed string put upon them, which we were not to cut till we arrived in Paris. (Nine days!) They then demanded to be paid for the sealing, and the fellows who had unladen the carriage were to be paid for their labor. This done, we were permitted to drive on. Still, I kept my temper!
We arrived, in the evening, at Morez, in a heavy rain. We were sitting around a comfortable fire, and the soup and fish were just brought upon the table. A soldier entered and requested us to walk to the police-office. "But it rains hard, and our dinner is just ready." The man in the mustache was inexorable. The commissary closed his office at eight, and we must go instantly to certify to our passports, and get new ones for the interior. Cloaks and umbrellas were brought, and, bon gre, mal gre, we walked half a mile in the mud and rain to a dirty commissary, who kept us waiting in the dark fifteen minutes, and then, making out a description of the person of each, demanded half a dollar for the new passport, and permitted us to wade back to our dinner. This had occupied an hour, and no improvement to soup or fish. Still, I kept my temper—rather!
The next morning, while we were forgetting the annoyances of the previous night, and admiring the new-pranked livery of May by a glorious sunshine, a civil arretez vous brought up the carriage to the door of another custom-house! The order was to dismount, and down came once more carpet-bags, hat-boxes, and dressing-cases, and a couple of hours were lost again in a fruitless search for contraband articles. When it was all through, and the officers and men paid as before, we were permitted to proceed with the gracious assurance that we should not be troubled again till we got to Paris! I bade the commissary good morning, felicitated him on the liberal institutions of his country and his zeal in the exercise of his own agreeable vocation, and—I am free to confess—lost my temper! Job and Xantippe's husband! could I help it!
I confess I expected better things of France. In Italy, where you come to a new dukedom every half-day, you do not much mind opening your trunks, for they are petty princes and need the pitiful revenue of contraband articles and the officer's fee. Yet even they leave the person of the traveller sacred; and where in the world, except in France, is a party, travelling evidently for pleasure, subjected twice at the same border to the degrading indignity of a search! Ye "hunters of Kentucky"—thank heaven that you can go into Tennessee without having your "plunder" overhauled and your pockets searched by successive parties of scoundrels, whom you are to pay "by order of the government," for their trouble!
The Simplon, which you pass in a day, divides two nations, each other's physical and moral antipodes. The handsome, picturesque, lazy, unprincipled Italian, is left in the morning in his own dirty and exorbitant inn; and, on the evening of the same day, having crossed but a chain of mountains, you find yourself in a clean auberge, nestled in the bosom of a Swiss valley, another language spoken around you, and in the midst of a people, who seem to require the virtues they possess to compensate them for more than their share of uncomeliness. You travel a day or two down the valley of the Rhone, and when you are become reconciled to cretins and goitres, and ill-dressed and worse formed men and women, you pass in another single day the chain of the Jura, and find yourself in France—a country as different from both Switzerland and Italy, as they are from each other. How is it that these diminutive cantons preserve so completely their nationality? It seems a problem to the traveller who passes from one to the other without leaving his carriage.
One is compelled to like France in spite of himself. You are no sooner over the Jura than you are enslaved, past all possible ill-humor, by the universal politeness. You stop for the night at a place, which, as my friend remarked, resembles an inn only in its in-attention, and after a bad supper, worse beds, and every kind of annoyance, down comes my lady-hostess in the morning to receive her coin, and if you can fly into a passion with such a cap, and such a smile, and such a "bon jour," you are of less penetrable stuff than man is commonly made of.
I loved Italy, but detested the Italians. I detest France, but I can not help liking the French. "Politeness is among the virtues," says the philosopher. Rather, it takes the place of them all. What can you believe ill of a people whose slightest look toward you is made up of grace and kindness.
We are dawdling along thirty miles a day through Burgundy, sick to death of the bare vine-stakes, and longing to see a festooned vineyard of Lombardy. France is such an ugly country! The diligences lumber by, noisy and ludicrous; the cow-tenders wear cocked hats; the beggars are in the true French extreme, theatrical in all their misery; the climate is rainy and cold, and as unlike that of Italy as if a thousand leagues separated them, and the roads are long, straight, dirty, and uneven. There is neither pleasure nor comfort, neither scenery nor antiquities, nor accommodations for the weary—nothing but politeness. And it is odd how it reconciles you to it all.