This little business disgusted our father of Naples, and he resolved to repair to a pure moral air. Naples is a very different place now; so is all the Italy frequented by travellers, and spoiled by railways and officialdom.
In 1881 a distinguished officer, and a gentleman allied to Royalty, wrote as follows: "You threw some doubts on the efficiency of the Italian posts, and I believe you; I don't think I was ever so glad to get home. At Malta it looks so clean after the filth of Naples. I think Italy, the Italians, their manners, customs, and institutions, more damnable every time I see them, and feel sure you will meet with less annoyance during your travels on the Gold Coast, than I met with coming through Italy. Trains crowded, unpunctual; starvation, filth, incivility, and extortion at every step; and, were it not that there are so many works of art and of interest to see, I doubt if any one would care to visit the country a second time."
(Here is an account of a purchase made to transfer home.) "A small table was packed in a little case, and firmly nailed down. At the station they refused to let it go in the luggage van, unless it were corded, lest it might be opened en route. The officials offered to cord it for bakshish, which was paid, but the cord not put on. They cut open my leather bag, and tried to open my portmanteau, but when I called this fact to the notice of the station-master at Rome, he simply turned on his heel and declined to answer. At Naples they opened the little case, because furniture was subject to octroi; and, on leaving, the case was again inspected, lest it might contain a picture (they were not allowed to leave the country)." It is no longer the classical Italy of Landor, nor the romantic Italy of Leigh Hunt, nor the ideal Italy of the Brownings, nor the spiritualized Italy of George Eliot, nor the everyday Italy of Charles Lever. They thought they were going to be everything when they changed Masters, but they have only succeeded in making it a noisy, vulgar, quarrelsome and contentious, arrogant, money-grasping Italy, and the sooner it receives a sound drubbing from France or Austria the better for it. It will then reform itself.
The family left Naples in the spring of 1836. The usual mountain of baggage was packed in the enormous boxes of the period, and the Custom House officers never even opened them, relying, as they said—and did in those good old days—upon the word of an Englishman, that they contained nothing contraband. How different from the United Italy, where even the dressing-bag is rummaged to find a few cigars, or an ounce of coffee. The voyage was full of discomforts. My mother, after a campaign of two or three years, had been persuaded to part with her French maid Eulalie, an old and attached servant, who made our hours bitter, and our faces yellow. The steamer of the day was by no means a floating palace, especially the English coasting steamers, which infested the Mediterranean. The machinery was noisy and offensive. The cabins were dog-holes, with a pestiferous atmosphere, and the food consisted of greasy butter, bread which might be called dough, eggs with a perfume, rusty bacon, milkless tea and coffee, that might be mistaken for each other, waxy potatoes, graveolent greens cuite à l'eau, stickjaw pudding, and cannibal haunches of meat, charred without, and blue within.
The only advantage was that the vessels were manned by English crews, and in those days the British sailor was not a tailor, and he showed his value when danger was greatest.
We steamed northwards in a good old way, puffing and panting, pitching and rolling, and in due time made Marseille.
The town of the Canebière was far from being the splendid City that it is now, but it always had one great advantage, that of being in Provence. I always had a particular propensity for this bit of Africa in Europe, and in after life in India for years, my greatest friend, Dr. Steinhaüser, and myself indulged in visions of a country cottage, where we would pass our days in hammocks, and our nights in bed, and never admit books or papers, pens or ink, letters or telegrams. This retreat was intended to be a rest for middle age, in order to prepare for senility and second childhood. But this vision passed into the limbo of things imagined (in fact, the vision of two hard-working and overworked men), and I little thought that at fifty-five I should be a married man, still in service, still knocking about the world, working hard with my wife, and poor Steinhaüser dead fifteen years ago.
To return. However agreeable Provence was, the change from Italians to French was not pleasant. The subjects of Louis Philippe, the Citizen-King, were rancorous against Englishmen, and whenever a fellow wanted to get up a row he had only to cry out, "These are the misérables who poisoned Napoleon at St. Helena." This pleasant little scene occurred on board a coasting steamer, between Marseille and Cette, when remonstrance was made with the cheating steward, backed by the rascally captain. Cette was beginning to be famous for the imitation wines composed by the ingenuity of Monsieur Guizot, brother of the austère intrigant. He could turn out any wine, from the cheapest Marsala to the choicest Madeiran Bual.
But he did his counterfeiting honestly, as a little "G" was always branded on the bottom of the cork, and Cette gave a good lesson about ordering wines at hotels. The sensible traveller, when in a strange place, always calls for the carte, and chooses the cheapest; he knows by sad experience, by cramp and acidity of stomach, that the dearest wines are often worse than the cheapest, and at best that they are the same with different labels. The proprietor of the hotel at Cette, had charged his dame de comptoir with robbing the till. She could not deny it, but she replied with a tu quoque: "If I robbed you I only returned tit for tat. You have been robbing the public for the last quarter of a century, and only the other day you brought a bottle of ordinaire and escamoté'd it into sixteen kinds of vins fin." The landlord thought it better to drop the proceedings. From Cette we travelled in hired carriages (as Dobbin and the carriages had been sold at Naples) to Toulouse. We stayed at Toulouse for a week, and I was so delighted with student life there, that I asked my father's leave to join them. But he was always determined on the Fellowship at Oxford. Our parents periodically fell ill with asthma, and we young ones availed ourselves of the occasion, by wandering far and wide over the country. We delighted in these journeys, for though the tutor was there, the books were in the boxes. My chief remembrances of Toulouse were, finding the mistress of the hotel correcting her teeth with table d'hôte forks, and being placed opposite the model Englishman of Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue. The man's face never faded from my memory. Carroty hair, white and very smooth forehead, green eyes, a purple-reddish lower face, whiskers that had a kind of crimson tinge, and an enormous mouth worn open, so as to show the protruding teeth.