With great expectation of pleasure I went to the Races at Chantilly, which are among the events of this week. This town is at ten leagues distance and has an elegant view, over the Seine, and a fine turf, which was trodden on this occasion by the prettiest little feet that ever went to Chantilly. And here were the full blooded coursers, which champed the bit and pawed the earth, and devoured the road and made gallant show and promise of their mettle. What a pity you had not been there You would have seen Miss Annette outstrip Volante; you would have been glad the one gained and the other lost without caring a pin for either, and you would have paid for a mutton chop the price of the whole sheep, and as for a bed, you would have got none either for love or money.
A little slice of hard fare is not without its advantages to pampered citizens, it works off the bad humours engendered by an idle life; and fits of poverty now and then in the country are grateful and genteel recreations of the rich, and have been praised by the poets,—You would have dreamed of slumbering by the waving pines, and soft murmurs of your little Schuylkills, and then of wandering alone in a foreign land, and then sitting the live-long night upon a chair in the stables of the Great Condé; of having jockeys and grooms for your chamber-maids and race horses for your bed curtains.—These stables, if you please, cost thirty millions, and it is an old saying in France, "que les cheveaux du Prince de Condé, sont mieux logés que les rois d'Angleterre." Famous knights used to mount here in full panoply, to carry terrors beyond the Duro and the Rhine. Alas, that stables should be sometimes the only memorials of one's earthly possessions! The castle of the Great Prince is demolished; the "magnifique maison de Plaisance," which opened its folding doors to a thousand guests of a night, is now with the house of Priam, and the grass has grown upon its altars:—
——“Where one seeks for Ilion’s walls,
The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls.”
Indeed, castles in general in France, may be written in the catalogue of its ruins. The French nobles and princes are no longer great feudal barons or idlers. The aristocracy of now-a-days has to attend to business—to the Chamber of Peers and Deputies—and to go to market. Even the retreats of monarchy are moss-grown with neglect. The nation murmurs at the expense, and lets its ruins go to wreck for want of repair. The number of royal palaces are a dozen, and their annual expense of keeping, 160,000 dollars. Fontainebleau is content with a yearly visit; and the magnificent Versailles has become a national museum. I looked all about here for the eloquent Bossuet, but he too is so broken up, you scarce find the fragments. His magnificent gardens, jets-d’eaux, and chestnut groves, are the commons of Chantilly—and
“Thriving plants, ignoble broomsticks made,
Now sweep the alleys they were born to shade.”
Paris and the neighbouring country poured out upon the plains of Chantilly, this day, such multitudes as never went to Troy. To obtain a vehicle to return in was impossible, and to stay another night at Chantilly was impossible also; but I had to set my foot upon this latter impossibility. I was so lucky as to meet Mr. —— of New York, and by a long search together we found lodgings for the night; and what we little thought of finding in a French village, a fat landlady; but so fat, she is silently taking leave of her knees; before this reaches you she will have seen them, perhaps, for the last time; and her husband, still more ill favoured, sat by, his lower lip hanging towards the waistband of his breeches. At the lady’s feet was a chubby baby, nearly naked, resembling an unfeathered owl.
My companion, a man of address, nursed this brat, and called it tender names to please the mother. One grows so polite in this country; besides what does not one do for a lodging at Chantilly? Also in the back ground was a female, acting in the double capacity of chambermaid and bonne, who had her share in the general effect. She had been frightened, when young, till her eyes had started out of her head, and had stayed there, staring ever since; and her lips being too short for her teeth, gave her a look of affability without the trouble of smiling. To complete the interest of her physiognomy, she had a long beaky nose with the tip red. She was so ugly, the child would not cry after her. These were the protections, which it pleased Providence to put around our honesty at the races of Chantilly.
I describe this family only to introduce with more interest, a domestic occurrence, which I am going to relate, in order to relieve a little the serious details of this letter.—Night already held its middle course in the heavens, and a lady, our fellow-lodger, tired of waiting the untimely hours of her husband, had retired for the evening to her chamber; and there, being relieved from the apparel of the day, she took a look under the bed; a prudent caution, which she always observed, and which she says, her mother had observed before her;—and what do you think she discovered under the bed? The legs of a man! She fled, and forgetting the nakedness of her condition, rushed into the hall, where we, in the midst of the family circle, sat over a mug of French beer, with long pipes, smoking and watching the curling smoke as it ascended gracefully towards the ceiling. In the precipitation of her flight she fell over a stool, at full length, upon the floor—exhibiting the incomprehensible mechanism of the human figure in all its proportions. It fell to my lot, being nearest, to bring her to, which I did, wrapping her in a cloak, placing her on a couch, and encouraging her to speak. As soon as she had explained, the alarm became general; pipes were extinguished, and candles lighted, and we proceeded into the suspicious bed-chamber; the “bonne,” with her eyes farther out, smiling nevertheless, and the fat madame, and her husband walking on his lip; one carried the poker, one the boot-jack, and one the flat-iron, and we moved on in close file to the bed-side; and here we made a halt. I felt, (I will confess it,) my respiration stop; I stood in the van, being unwillingly placed there by the pride of sustaining American bravery in a foreign country. I thought of my little children, and then moved aside the curtain, respectfully. You have, perhaps, seen a man kill a rattle-snake with a short stick.—And after all, what do you think it was? A pair of boots;—the lady’s husband having gone out in his shoes.
We retired now to our chambers, where Dr. B. and I were eaten up by bugs; and there was a Frenchman in the adjoining room, who passed also a melancholy night; we presumed from the same cause, for we heard him every now and then say——, which is the French for bug. So you see that not Americans alone are subject to these unsavoury afflictions—non soli dant sanguine pœnas. Get thee to Chantilly, Mrs. Butler. Indeed, I have learned from inquiry, and personal experience, too, that this kind of vermin and some others, creep higher up into good society here, than in the United States.
Our better houses, I mean, which keep servants, and pique themselves on their gentility, do not suffer such inmates at all. It is true, that the poorer sort of folks, and even the better sort of country taverns, do not care a straw for all the bugs of Christendom. They look upon them as the natural bleeders, provided for the poor, providentially, and a saving of expense, in cupping, leeching, and other kinds of phlebotomy.