A steamboat was nicer than a diligence; and that really was the reason why people were always going up the Rhine. It was much the easiest way of getting to Switzerland and Italy. Going by the Rhine in 1855, my father notes that it was the seventeenth time that he had gone that way, either up or down the stream. That time he had his father with him, and chafed a little at the leisurely movements of the previous generation. But he never wished for anything more rapid than the steamboat on the Rhine, whereas I have found it tedious, and gone up by the train.
Looking at old diaries, I see that the cost of travelling on the Continent has varied very little in the last seventy or eighty years. There has been a decrease in the cost of transit; but this is counterbalanced by an increase in the charge for bedrooms. It used to be absurdly low; but the rooms were often very poor and sparsely furnished even at the best hotels. The charge for meals at table d’hôte remains about the same.
My own experience of foreign tables d’hôte now goes back fifty years, having begun at Paris, 15 September 1867, with a table d’hôte of four hundred people at the Louvre Hotel—then in the old building on the other side of the street. So far as I can judge, the meals used generally to be better than they are, and they certainly were more abundant. The decline had begun before my time. After dining at the table d’hôte at Meurice’s, my father notes in his diary, 3 September 1863:—“Not so good a dinner as they used to give there five-and-twenty years ago.” At the table d’hôte at Blinzler’s at Godesberg, 25 August 1852, the courses were:—“1, soup; 2, roast beef and potatoes; 3, mutton cutlets and vegetables; 4, fish and sauces; 5, ducks and salads; 6, hare and stewed fruits; 7, roast veal and salads; 8, shell-fish and puddings; 9, fruits, sweetmeats and cheese.”
Innkeepers have changed their policy. They used to make their profit on the table d’hôte, and they find they can do better now with people dining à la carte. In those days it literally was table d’hôte, mine host sitting at the head of the table, and being helped first to make quite sure that everything was good. I saw this done at the Cloche at Dijon so recently as 9 August 1912; but it was a long while since I had seen this anywhere else.
The queerest table d’hôte I ever saw, was at the Singe d’Or at Tournai, 26 March 1875. That was Good Friday; and it was a first-rate fish-dinner, lasting close upon three hours. There were eighty people there, mostly from the town, as there were few travellers about, and we were the only English. The citizens went steadily through the fifteen courses, and drank dozens of champagne, and then went home with a good conscience, feeling they had carried out the precepts of the Church in having a meatless day.
In ordering wine at small hotels my father had a rule, which I have followed with success:—Always order the wine of the country. You will get the wine of the country in any event, whatever you may have ordered; and, if you order it under its own name, you may get it unadulterated.
In travelling in Italy in 1851, my father took a chimney-pot hat to wear in the large towns, and he writes home on 9 September that another must be brought down to meet him on his reaching London, as he had given this away on going to the mountains. “It had become such an incumbrance that I gave it away to-day to a poor old man at Ala: he had a crowd soon around to see him in his new covering, for which he was very grateful.” He no longer took a chimney-pot, when I began to go abroad with him—1867—but I have seen chimney-pots since then in most unlikely places. On 20 March 1882 I met an American near Jericho with chimney-pot and black frock-coat and everything to match: he said it was the best costume God ever made. On 28 December 1909 I met a Hindu on the cone of Mount Vesuvius; and he wore a chimney-pot and a very loud check suit.
Writing from Interlaken on 17 August 1849, my father says, “You would be amused at seeing what monkies the fashionable gentlemen do make of themselves in dress: perhaps one dressed like a mountaineer, or William Tell, will wear white kid gloves, or thin patent boots, or some other incongruity equally ridiculous.” People do things better now: even invalids are fully dressed for climbing.
Accidents in travelling were commoner then than now, and people took them more as matters of course. In an old diary here one page reads as follows, July 1850:—“17, Schaffhausen. 18, Zurich. 19, Lucerne. 20, do. 21, Escholzmatt. 22, Interlaken. 23, Lauterbrunnen, here I had the misfortune to fall over the Wengern Alp and break my leg, and was confined to my bed at this place 11 days, and then at Interlaken till Septr. 21. Expenses at hotels 730 francs, surgeon 330 do.—1060. 21, left Interlaken for Berne. 22, Berne. 23, Soleure. 24, Basle.” Writing to my father on 26 July “on my bed at Lauterbrunnen,” he takes it all quite calmly, just adding, “I shall have seen enough of snow and waterfalls.... How much more beautiful is the sweet vale of Lustleigh.”
Plenty of people went to Switzerland at the time when I first went—1869—far more than when my father went there thirty years before, but nothing like the crowds that go there now. They kept more to peaks and passes then; and they were always talking of Hannibal’s passage of the Alps. Junius was talked out: Tichborne and Dreyfus were yet to come; and Hannibal filled the gap. I used to hear them at home as well as there; and they all had their pet routes for Hannibal—Col d’Argentière, Mont Genèvre, Mont Cenis, Little Mont Cenis, Little St Bernard and Great St Bernard, and even Simplon and St Gothard. In 1871 I went looking for traces of the vinegar on the Great St Bernard. My father upheld the Cenis routes as the only passes from which you can look down upon the plains of Italy. I doubt if Hannibal did look down. I think he may have shown his men their line of march upon a map, just as Aristagoras used a map to show the Spartans their line of march 282 years earlier.