LETTER LXVII.
PARIS AND LONDON—REASONS FOR LIKING PARIS—JOYOUSNESS OF ITS CITIZENS—LAFAYETTE'S FUNERAL—ROYAL RESPECT AND GRATITUDE—ENGLAND—DOVER—ENGLISH NEATNESS AND COMFORT, AS DISPLAYED IN THE HOTELS, WAITERS, FIRES, BELL-ROPES, LANDSCAPES, WINDOW-CURTAINS, TEA-KETTLES, STAGE-COACHES, HORSES, AND EVERYTHING ELSE—SPECIMEN OF ENGLISH RESERVE—THE GENTLEMAN DRIVER OF FASHION—A CASE FOR MRS. TROLLOPE.
It is pleasant to get back to Paris. One meets everybody there one ever saw; and operas and coffee, Taglioni and Leontine Fay, the belles and the Boulevards, the shops, spectacles, life, lions, and lures to every species of pleasure, rather give you the impression that, outside the barriers of Paris, time is wasted in travel.
What pleasant idlers they look! The very shopkeepers seem standing behind their counters for amusement. The soubrette who sells you a cigar, or ties a crape on your arm (it was for poor old Lafayette), is coiffed as for a ball; the frotteur who takes the dust from your boots, sings his lovesong as he brushes away, the old man has his bouquet in his bosom, and the beggar looks up at the new statue of Napoleon in the Place Vendome—everybody has some touch of fancy, some trace of a heart on the look-out, at least, for pleasure.
I was at Lafayette's funeral. They buried the old patriot like a criminal. Fixed bayonets before and behind his hearse, his own National Guard disarmed, and troops enough to beleaguer a city, were the honors paid by the "citizen king" to the man who had made him! The indignation, the scorn, the bitterness, expressed on every side among the people, and the ill-smothered cries of disgust as the two empty royal carriages went by, in the funeral train, seemed to me strong enough to indicate a settled and universal hostility to the government.
I met Dr. Bowring on the Boulevard after the funeral was over. I had not seen him for two years, but he could talk of nothing but the great event of the day—"You have come in time," he said, "to see how they carried the old general to his grave! What would they say to this in America? Well—let them go on! We shall see what will come of it? They have buried Liberty and Lafayette together—our last hope in Europe is quite dead with him!"
After three delightful days in Paris we took the northern diligence; and, on the second evening, having passed hastily through Montreuil, Abbeville, Boulogne, and voted the road the dullest couple of hundred miles we had seen in our travels, we were set down in Calais. A stroll through some very indifferent streets, a farewell visit to the last French café, we were likely to see for a long time, and some unsatisfactory inquiries about Beau Brummel, who is said to live here still, filled up till bedtime our last day on the continent.
The celebrated Countess of Jersey was on board the steamer, and some forty or fifty plebeian stomachs shared with her fashionable ladyship and ourselves the horrors of a passage across the channel. It is rather the most disagreeable sea I ever traversed, though I have seen "the Euxine," "the roughest sea the traveller e'er ——s," etc., according to Don Juan.
I was lying on my back in a berth when the steamer reached her moorings at Dover, and had neither eyes nor disposition to indulge in the proper sentiment on approaching the "white cliffs" of my fatherland. I crawled on deck, and was met by a wind as cold as December, and a crowd of rosy English faces on the pier, wrapped in cloaks and shawls, and indulging curiosity evidently at the expense of a shiver. It was the first of June!