He alighted, and the brigands dispersed, one only mounting one of the horses, and driving off at a gallop.
"Valentine, what is to be done?" said the Baron to his servant.
"I really do not know," replied the latter; "perhaps the wisest step is to go back to the château."
Thither they turned, and two hours of most fatiguing walking brought them to it. The gates were open, there were no servants in the courts, and none in the ante-rooms. He entered the drawing-room, and not a soul was in it. But what did his eyes first fall upon? His two watches and their chains were hanging to the chimney-piece! Whilst he was gazing on them, immense shouts of laughter arose, and the bandits of quality crowded into the room in their several disguises. Such was the method devised to bring back the agreeable Baron de Bezenval.
Having described coaching in England, it may not be uninteresting to give a brief notice of French coaching. It is now two hundred years ago that La Fontaine wrote the following lines, which began his fable "La Coche et la Mouche:—"
"Dans un chemin, montant, sablonneux, malaisé,
Et de tous les côtés au soleil exposé,
Six forts chevaux tiroient une coche."
At that time public and private vehicles had not yet undergone any very notable improvements. When an inhabitant of Bordeaux or Maçon took his departure for Paris he made his will, leaving among other things "son corps à la diligence."
Eighty years previous, in the middle of the sixteenth century, private vehicles were not very numerous, if we judge by the predicament in which Henry IV., King of France and Navarre, found himself when he wrote to Sully, "Je n'ai pas pu aller vous voir hier, ma femme ayant pris ma coche." That coche which we in England still call coach, and the driver of which has obtained the name of coacher—coachman was either coche de terre or a coche d'eau, both conveying travellers and goods. The coche d'Auxerre alone survived in France until our days. The steamboats have sunk it, in despite of its heroic resistance. It was only in the first year of the seventeenth century that coches or voitures, were first ornamented, and provided with leather braces; they then assumed the generic name of carrosses, derived from char and charrette.