Mops, brooms, and scrubbing brushes are not in the catalogue of the necessaries of a French inn. Bells there are none; the fille must always be bawled for; and when she appears, is neither neat, well dressed, nor handsome. The kitchen is black with smoke; the master commonly the cook, and the less you see of the cooking the more likely you are to have a stomach to your dinner. The mistress rarely classes civility or attention to her guests among the requisites of her trade. We are so unaccustomed in England to live in our bed-chambers that it is at first awkward in France to find that people live nowhere else. Here I find that everybody, let his rank be what it may, lives in his bed-chamber.
August 27. Cherbourg. Not a place for a residence longer than is necessary. I was here fleeced more infamously than at any other town in France.
Sept. 5. To Montauban. The poor people seem poor indeed; the children terribly ragged, if possible worse clad than if with no clothes at all; as to shoes and stockings, they are luxuries. A beautiful girl of six or seven playing with a stick, and smiling under such a bundle of rags as made my heart ache to see her. One-third of this province seems uncultivated, and nearly all of it in misery. What have kings, and ministers, and parliaments, and states, to answer for their prejudices, seeing millions of hands that would be industrious, idle and starving through the execrable maxims of despotism, or the equally detestable prejudices of a feudal nobility. Sleep at the "Lion d'Or," at Montauban, an abominable hole.
The 8th. Enter Bas Bretagne. One recognises at once another people, meeting numbers who know no French. Enter Guingamp by gateways, towers, and battlements, apparently the oldest military architecture; every part denoting antiquity, and in the best preservation. The habitations of the poor are miserable heaps of dirt; no glass, and scarcely any light; but they have earth chimneys.
Sept. 21. Came to an improvement in the midst of sombre country. Four good houses of stone and slate, and a few acres run to wretched grass, which have been tilled, but all savage, and become almost as rough as the rest. I was afterwards informed that this improvement, as it is called, was wrought by Englishmen, at the expense of a gentleman they ruined as well as themselves. I demanded how it had been done? Pare and burn, and sow wheat, then rye, and then oats. Thus it is for ever and ever! The same follies, blundering, and ignorance; and then all the fools in the country said as they do now, that these wastes are good for nothing. To my amazement I find that they reach within three miles of the great commercial city of Nantes.
The 22nd. At Nantes, a town which has that sign of prosperity of new buildings that never deceives. The quarter of the Comédie is magnificent, all the streets at right angles and of white stone. Messrs. Epivent had the goodness to attend me in a water expedition, to view the establishment of Mr. Wilkinson, for boring cannon, in an island on the Loire, below Nantes. Until that well-known English manufacturer arrived, the French knew nothing of the art of casting cannon solid, and then boring them.
Nantes is as enflammé in the cause of liberty as any town in France can be. The conversations I have witnessed here prove how great a change is effected in the mind of the French, nor do I believe it will be possible for the present government to last half a century longer. The American revolution has laid the foundation of another in France, if government does not take care of itself. On the 23rd one of the twelve prisoners from the Bastille arrived here—he was the most violent of them all—and his imprisonment has not silenced him.
Author's Note.[—It wanted no great spirit of prophecy to foretell this revolution; but later events have shown that I was very wide of the mark when I talked of fifty years. The twelve gentlemen of Bretagne deputed to Versailles, mentioned above, were sent with a denunciation of the ministers for their suspension of provincial parliaments. They were at once sent to the Bastille. It was this war of the king and the parliaments that brought about the assembly of the States General, the step being decided on by the assembly of Grenoble, July 21, 1788.]