The American in Paris; vol. 1 of 2

by John Sanderson

But the great struggle of all is to become independent; and yet the very word implies the extinction of all foreign commerce. The greatest of all national blessings is assuredly that very dependence we are so eager to avoid. We cannot become dependent upon a foreign nation without laying it, at the same time, under a similar dependence. But in case of a war? This is the very way to make a war impossible. Men do not war against their own interests. We are dependent upon Lyons for her silks, and her petitions are now pouring in daily against the impending war with America; and many think they will go nigh to prevent it. Would not this war be more remote if the dependence were increased? If I wished to prevent all future wars with France and England, I would begin by building a railroad from Paris to London, and removing their commercial restrictions. Each country would then improve to the uttermost that industry to which it is most fitted. Intimacies, too, would be improved, prejudices effaced, and they would become, at length, so dependent upon each other, that even should a mad or silly government involve them in a war, their mutual interests would force them to discontinue it.

Of all methods of gathering taxes, that of the Custom-house seems to me the worst. What an expensive apparatus of buildings! what a fleet of vessels! what an army of spies! what courts of admiralty! and what an array of new crimes upon the statute book! A custom-house is a school for perjury and other vices, and where the first lessons are made easy for beginners. There is nothing one robs with so little compunction as one’s country. It is, at the worst, only robbing thirty millions of people. A sin loses its criminality by diffusion, and may be so expanded as to be no sin at all.

All the functions of a custom-house are in their nature odious and vexatious. The first injunction is, to refuse the traveller, wearied of the sea, the common rites of hospitality on setting his foot upon the land, to ransack even honest women by impudent police officers, and subject honourable men to a scrutiny practised elsewhere only upon thieves. I piqued a Frenchman on board our ship on the venality, which I had heard of, of the French ports. He replied, that he had been in the American trade for ten years, and accompanied each of his cargoes to our ports, for the express purpose of not paying the duties. Why, nothing is more easy. “There is an officer who examines; we know each other; he knocks off the top of the boxes, rummages the calico with great fuss and ceremony, and the silks and jewellery sleep quiet at the bottom. Whoever,” he says, “pays more than ten per cent. of his duties in any country, is unacquainted with his business.”

There is another item in European policy—the requirement of passports—the cost, the delays and vexatious ceremony attending it. This has incurred abundant reprehension, especially from American travellers; and there certainly is no other use in such a regulation than that a set of the most despicable creatures that creep upon the earth may get a living by it. But when one is used, for a long time, to see things done in a certain way, one does not conceive the possibility of their being done in any other way. When I informed an intelligent Frenchman, of forty years, that even a stranger did not carry a passport about with him in America, and that we dispensed with all this array of police officers, and spies, and other such impediments to travelling and the intercourse of nations, he inferred that there could be no personal security. That alone, he said, would deter him from residing in the United States. When I cited against him the example of England, he remained incredulous, and required the confirmation of a better authority.

Don’t you imagine that I am going to treat you hereafter to so vulgar a thing as politics. Events have not yet thickened upon my observation, and I am obliged to make use of all my resources. If I could afford to send you blank paper all the way across the Atlantic, I would have omitted these last pages—hand them over to your husband. The living here is about equal in the quality of food and price to your best houses of Philadelphia. The hotels are shabby in comparison with ours; the one I lodge in has not been washed since the year of the world 1656; but the cookery and service are altogether in favour of the French. A breakfast is two francs, a dinner three, and a chamber two. You may count your daily expenses at a dollar and a half in the best houses. The Havre is our first acquaintance on the continent, and its history cannot be without some interest, especially to ladies who are just sighing to go to Paris. Adieu.

Rouen, July 3rd, 1835.

What a curiosity of ugliness is a French diligence. It exceeds in this quality even our American stages. But beauty is sacrificed to convenience: it carries three tons of passengers and luggage, with a speed of seven miles an hour. The coupé, in front, has three seats, the intérieur, six, and the rotonde as many in the rear, the price decreasing in the same direction—from the whole, to about the half of our American prices. There are also three seats aloft. These divisions are invisible to each other, and represent the world outside—the rich, the middling, and the poor. If you feel very aristocratic, you take the whole coupé to yourself, or yourself and lady, and you can be as private as you please. Each seat is numbered, and the traveller has his number on the way-bill and in his pocket. A conducteur superintends luggage, &c., and is paid extra. The team has three horses abreast in front, and two in the rear, and upon one of the latter is mounted a postillion. This personage deserves a particular notice. He is immersed to his middle in a huge pair of boots, making each leg the diameter of his body; and his body, too, is squeezed into a narrow coat, which being buttoned to the chin, props his woeful countenance towards the firmament, so that he corresponds exactly with Ovid’s description of a man, or rather, he looks like the letter Y upside down. Cracking a whip he does not regard as an acquirement, but a virtue. He can crack several tunes; and, in a calm night, serenades a whole village.

The road to Rouen, in the diligence, has nothing in it agreeable. The land has the ordinary crops, but it is a wide waste of cultivation, without hedges, or barns, or cottages. The only relief is now and then a comfortless village, or a solitary and neglected chateau. You swallow a mouthful of dust at each breath, and you are disgusted at all the stopping-places by the wailing voices of beggars, old men and women recommending themselves by decrepitude, and children by rags and nakedness. The children often run before the diligence for a quarter of a mile in quest of the charitable sous. I soon got out of change, and then reasoned myself into a fit of uncharitableness. They may be unworthy, and I shall encourage vice; besides, charity only increases the breed. What I give to these vagabonds I take from somebody else. I should otherwise lay it out in some article of trade, and if all do so, we shall only make a new set of beggars by relieving the old—reduce the industrious to mendicity by encouraging the idlers. Moreover, I can’t help all, and I won’t help any, or, if I do help any, I will give to my own countrymen, and not to these ragamuffin Frenchmen. In this way, you get along without much affecting the tranquillity of your conscience. My advice is, that you come by the Seine and the steamboat. It is a passage of only eight hours, and every one says it will delight you with its beautiful and romantic scenery.

I suppose you know this is the birth-place of Racine and Fontenelle. It deserves a passing notice on their account, as also on its own. The residence of those truculent old Norman dukes who made the world shake with fear, and gave sovereigns to some of the best nations of Europe, cannot be an indifferent spot upon the globe. Indeed, we may trace to it many of our own institutions, as well as a good part of our language. Our terms of law, the very cries of our courts in Schuylkill county, are imported from this Old Normandy, of which Rouen is the capital. It is a fantastic old town, with earthenware tiles, and enclosed between two mountains, having a mixture of art and nature, which bring each other out finely into relief. One is delighted to see town in the country, and country in the town. Here is a large factory, or hotel, and there a set of gray and tawny-looking hovels, like a village of the Puttawattemies.

The peasants are seen amongst the tops and chimneys of the houses, cultivating their fields on the sides, and upon the summits, of the hills, which are arrayed in tufts of woodland, hedges, and pasturage; and all the avenues leading to the town are beautifully overshaded with chestnuts and elms. The Seine, too, has its fairy islands and weeping willows on its banks, and winds along through the middle of the town; and now and then a steamboat comes up the valley, with a puffing and fuss that would have made stare even the iron features of old Rollo. One can see such a town but once, and no one can see it so well as he who has been used to the fresh and glaring villages of our country. Rouen has ninety thousand inhabitants, a library of four thousand volumes, a gallery of paintings, and manufactures of all sorts of calico and other cotton stuffs; also of velvets, shawls, linen, and bombasins. More than half the population is engaged directly in these manufactures. My advice is, that you sleep here one night instead of in the diligence, in running post to Paris; and in your evening’s walk, I invite you to step out and see Napoleon’s bridge, which has, in the centre of it, a fine statue of Corneille.