CHAPTER XIII
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!