FOUR YEARS IN FRANCE.
CHAP. I.
The English are assuredly a most enterprising and restless people: they form establishments at the Antipodes, and plant colonies on the banks of the Loire, in an enemy's country, after a war of twenty years: their merchant-vessels cover the seas, and their opulent and unoccupied gentry inundate the continent of Europe: their hardy mariners search out the north-west passage, and the idle and curious among them strive, with no less difficulty, to discover lakes, mountains, and cascades, unvisited by former adventurers,
———qua nulla priorum
orbita.———
English reading-rooms are set up at Tours and in other great towns; English seminaries of education are founded in France, Switzerland, and Italy; and English horse-races are exhibited at Naples. Fox-hunters and fox-hounds penetrate to covers where even the foxes never saw them before; where, coming from their holes, they gaze quietly upon them; where there is no sport, because no pursuit; no pursuit, because no flight; no flight, because no fear; no fear, because no experience of former enmity.
The French calculated, with some degree of satisfaction, that, during the occupation of their frontier by the army of observation, the English spent as much money at Paris as was contributed by themselves to the support of that army. At Florence, towards the end of the year 1822, I was informed by good authority, that there were twelve thousand foreigners in the city, of whom seven thousand were English.
By a migration, very much resembling the flight of birds of passage, they usually leave their country in the spring, and after a few weeks at Paris, set off to pass the summer in Switzerland, arrive in Italy in the autumn, cross the Apennines before the winter; the beginning of which season they spend at Florence: they go to Rome for the Carnival, to Naples for a month or five weeks of Lent, return to Rome for the holy week, and then, much edified and instructed, they find their way home, during the ensuing summer, through France or Germany. I asked Lady A. at Rome, when she went to Naples: "I don't know;—when the others go:" so much is this route recognised as a matter of course.
The route is in truth admirably well traced, and eighteen months might thus be passed to great advantage by a well-prepared and impartial traveller. Rarely however are these English sufficiently acquainted with the languages of the countries through which they pass, to be able to sustain a conversation: they carry with them their insular prejudices, their pride of wealth, their unpliant manners, their attachment to their own customs, amusements, and cookery: though treated with indulgence and even civil attentions by the governments of the continent, they are suffered, rather than received by the inhabitants. For their choice of the objects of curiosity they visit, and the opinion to be formed upon them, they are at the mercy of guides and ciceroni: for society, they are guided by instinct, and reduced by necessity, to herd together. An Italian lady at Florence opened her salon for the reception of a mixed company of Florentines and English: the English occupied, first one corner, and then a whole side, of the salon, their numbers increasing, but the chasm between them and the natives still remaining. The lady, fatigued with doing the honours of her house to two separate companies on the same evenings, and disgusted with these appearances of distrust and resiliency, invented some decent pretext for receiving no more.
Observing this propensity in the English to associate with each other, foreigners seem persuaded that Yorick alone did not quit England to seek Englishmen. I was asked if I had been at Tours, because there were so many of my countrymen there. "My countrymen," said I, "choose well; Touraine is said to be the garden of France." My interlocutor recurred to the idea with which he had first proposed the question. "Il y a là tant de vos compatriotes."—"Il y en a encore plus en Angleterre:"[3] and Sterne's argument prevailed.