Numbers now throng the deck who have never made their appearance before. Pale, jaundiced, and crumpled, they have all the sea-sick look and haggard cheek of the real martyr—all except one, a stout, swarthy, brown-visaged man, of about forty, with a frame of iron, and a voice like the fourth string of a violincello. You wonder why he should have taken to his bed: learn, then, that he is his Majesty’s courier from the foreign office, going with despatches to Constantinople, and that as he is not destined to lie down in a bed for the next fourteen days, he is glad even of the narrow resemblance to one, he finds in the berth of a steam-boat. At length you are on shore, and marched off in a long string, like a gang of convicts to the Bureau de l’octroi, and here is begun an examination of the luggage, which promises, from its minuteness, to last for the three months you destined to spend in Switzerland. At the end of an hour you discover that the soi disant commissionaire will transact all this affair for a few francs; and, after a tiresome wait in a filthy room, jostled, elbowed, and trampled upon, by boors with sabots, you adjourn to your inn, and begin to feel that you are not in England.
Our little party had but few of the miseries here recounted to contend with. My “savoir faire,” with all modesty be it spoken, has been long schooled in the art and practice of travelling; and while our less experienced fellow-travellers were deep in the novel mysteries of cotton stockings and petticoats, most ostentatiously displayed upon every table of the Bureau, we were comfortably seated in the handsome saloon of the Hotel du Nord, looking out upon a pretty grass plot, surrounded with orange trees, and displaying in the middle a jet d’eau about the size of a walking stick.
“Now, Mr. Lorrequer,” said Mrs. Bingham, as she seated herself by the open window, “never forget how totally dependent we are upon your kind offices. Isabella has discovered already that the French of Mountjoy-square, however intelligible in that neighbourhood, and even as far as Mount-street, is Coptic and Sanscrit here; and as for myself, I intend to affect deaf and dumbness till I reach Paris, where I hear every one can speak English a little.”
“Now, then, to begin my functions,” said I, as I rung for the waiter, and ran over in my mind rapidly how many invaluable hints for my new position my present trip might afford me, “always provided” (as the lawyers say,) that Lady Jane Callonby might feel herself tempted to become my travelling companion, in which case—But, confound it, how I am castle-building again. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bingham is looking as hungry and famished as though she would eat the waiter. Ha! this is the “carte.”
“Allons faire petit souper.”
“Cotelettes d’Agneau.”
“Maionnaise d’homard.”
“Perdreaux rouges aux truffes—mark that, aux truffes.”
“Gelee au maraschin.”
“And the wine, sir,” said the waiter, with a look of approval at my selection, “Champagne—no other wine, sir?”