A Spring Walk in Provence

by Archibald Marshall

I found a good inn where they gave me an excellent dinner and a delicious white wine. The dinner consisted of pea soup, a spit upon which was impaled alternate morsels of liver and bacon, a dish of little sausages with succulent cabbage, a dish founded on beef or mutton, I forget which, cream cheese, biscuits, oranges, and nuts, and the charge for this, including the wine, of which I drank a large quantity, was two francs. My bed, in a small clean room, was also two francs, and coffee and rolls the next morning fifty centimes. This comes to about three shillings and ninepence for a day's living, apart from what one consumes upon the road; and this was the chief hotel in a town of fifteen hundred inhabitants.

Such hotels are common all over southern France, and easy enough to find in a town not too large or too small. They are not so well furnished or so comfortable as an English inn of the same class, but it would be rare indeed to find an English inn where the food would be so good. An evening meal would have to be ordered or cooked specially, and one would consider oneself charged moderately in a bill that came to no more than three times as much. In the bigger towns such hotels are more difficult to find, but they are there if one knows where to look for them, and has learnt exactly what to look for. In the smaller places to which tourists go, and there is no choice, the charges are considerably higher; but one can usually get a bath, which is an unknown luxury in the ordinary way of things.

I wish very much that I had not left these wanderings on foot over foreign countries until middle age. I can imagine no more delightful experience for a young man, either alone or in company. If I could go back to undergraduate days, I would spend some part of every spring and summer vacation on foot in this way. Ready money is apt to be scarce at that happy age, but it need cost so little.

My own experiences, for various reasons, are no particular guide, but Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who is pastmaster in the art of seeing fresh country, is worth quoting on the subject. He wrote to me when I asked him for advice before setting out on this expedition:

"I think the thing is quite easy if one only remembers that the conditions, upon the Western Continent at least, that is, in France, Italy and Spain, are so different from those in England that no one asks questions and no one dreams of interfering with one's liberty. The rule is as simple as possible. Any inn whatsoever in France and almost any inn north of Naples in Italy gives you a tolerable bed, and on entering it you ask the price of a room and of coffee the next morning. They are accustomed to the process and bargain with you. I have been to dozens of places where I was charged no more than a franc.

"For your mid-day meal you will be wise to carry a leather bottle which the French call a Gourde and the Spaniards a Bota, holding wine, which again you must have filled in shops where wine is sold retail. You will again do well to ask before it is filled at what price the wine is sold. I have carried a half-gallon gourde of this kind over many journeys. It is slung from the shoulders by a strap and is purchasable in all the mountain countries. Bread is purchasable everywhere, and that kind of sausage which the French call by various names, which the Spaniards call 'Salpicon' and the Italians 'Salami' is common to all countries and is with cheese the accompaniment of the meal. Your night meal you must make the principal meal of the day, and if you wish to save money eat it at some place different from the place where you sleep. Thus accoutred you can live indefinitely at a rate of five francs a day and see all that there is to be seen. Always carry upon your person in such countries one good 'piece,' as they call it, for identification, the best of which is a passport issued by the British authorities wherever you are. Be careful to have it viséd by the consul of the countries where you are to travel. It is the visa that counts more than the passport. For instance, if you are starting from Switzerland get such a document viséd by the consul in some principal towns of France, Italy and Spain, then you have nothing to fear.

"Remember that telegrams or letters sent to you at one place poste restante do not tie you to going to that place. You have but to send a message to the post office to have them forwarded to another, and it will be done. But you cannot get your letters, still less your registered letters, at a poste restante without some such 'piece' as I mentioned.

"It is a good rule not to carry personal luggage except in the smallest amount in your sack, and to buy things as you need them. It is cheaper in the long run."

Now five francs a day is not quite thirty shillings a week, and for the price of a few days' revel "in town" an enterprising youngster might spend a fortnight walking through almost any beautiful stretch of country in nearer Europe, including his journey there and back to England. However it may have been in the past, it is now possible to travel third class on the Continent in no more discomfort than in England, and indeed in the holiday season third class is apt to be a good deal less crowded than second, on the fast trains in which third-class passengers are carried. They are not carried, of course, in all trains; but where the saving of shillings is an object it is no particular hardship to spend a few hours more on the way, and unless the journey is a very long one the time lost is small and the money saved considerable.

The burden to be carried is a more debatable matter. Mr. Belloc's advice is worth a good deal more than mine, but his early training in arms must have used him to a less fearful regard of discomfort than is possible with most of us. The less you carry the easier your walking will be, and I would never hamper myself with any protection against rain. Unless you can keep your legs as well as your body protected you must occasionally expect to be under the necessity of having something dried before a fire, and while you are about it you may as well go to bed and have everything dried. But I should not care to be without a spare shirt, at least one pair of spare socks, and a pair of light felt slippers, and with other small necessaries for comfort and a reasonable degree of cleanliness this already makes up a fair weight. Let every one choose for himself. My experience is that one very quickly gets used to a moderate pack strapped upon one's shoulders, and hardly notices it, except for a time after one may have taken a day off and walked about carrying nothing.