I had ascertained that a fair would be held on a particular day at Falaise, and having time enough to make a long journey by land, and much curiosity to see Calais, I determined to go there: we reached that port early in the day.
“Well, then, I am in France,” said I, as we landed from the steamer on the pier; “here I am, actually on the Continent, looking at French soldiers, who won’t shoot me, stab me, nor take me prisoner, and on fishwomen, with kerchiefs tastily arranged on their heads, large ear-rings, and brown faces, and hearing a language altogether strange to me.” After staring about me there for half a day, and eating a very nice dinner in a very grand hotel, fitted up as if there was never any winter in that part of France, we moved onwards in a most extraordinary kind of coach: such a lumbering machine!—less than an entire troop of cavalry appeared to me insufficient to move its prodigious wheels; yet five miserable-looking horses, with dirty half rotten harness, were compelled to pull it along towards Boulogne at the rate of more than four miles an hour.
I know not how it happened—perhaps it was fatigue—possibly a dose of claret, which caused me to fall asleep in the cuppy[1] soon after I had passed the barriers of Calais. Be this as it may, while I was dreaming of home, there was a sudden stop, which aroused me. I could have sworn at the moment that I was upon a dreary part of the road between Wexford and Dungarvan; for, besides the general features of the locality, I saw on the door of a very Irish-like looking public-house, these words—“John Cullen sells beer and brandy.” “Where am I?” said I to myself; “surely not in France.” The matter was explained to me. There are several hundred families of English manufacturers, principally from Nottingham, employed at their trade in Calais and its vicinity; and John Cullen, who says he is a Yorkshireman, and has certainly been for more than twenty years established where he now is, and has married a Frenchwoman, finds it his interest to brew good beer, and to keep a public-house for the entertainment of his neighbours and the operatives of Calais, although the town is three miles distant. But at the moment I was fully impressed with the notion that John Cullen and his house were in the barony of Bargy, or in that of Forth.
As the horses at this place were not disposed to run away with the diligence, and the conductor had no indisposition to a glass of brandy, I contrived to enter John Cullen’s house, which certainly has nothing English about it, and asked for the landlord, who soon appeared—an apparently thoroughbred Irishman, and with a fry of half-bred youngsters at his heels, speaking the oddest jargon that ever man heard. At first I hoped that it might have been the old dialect of the barony of Forth, but I was grievously disappointed. Though John Cullen brews very good beer, which he sends regularly into Calais, and sells very fair brandy, it would be no harm, from what I could learn, if Father Mathew could spare time to make a morning visit to his neighbourhood.
The greater part of the way from Calais to Boulogne is bleak, open, and ill drained, and altogether more of a snipe-shooting country than a farmer would desire to see, with a good deal of wheat, however, here and there, but not in the regularly formed ridges which I had seen in England.
We reached Boulogne that night, and fixed ourselves quietly in an English kind of hotel, after having been well tormented, before we were fairly housed, by emissaries from half a dozen establishments, pressing us in French, English, and German, to patronise their respective employers. We started at five o’clock the next morning from a coach-office very like one of our own in its arrangement of desks, clerks, way-bills, and weighing machines.
On some parts of my journey, as we receded from the coast, the drill husbandry, the garden-like culture, and the open country entirely under tillage, resembled portions of England, especially in those districts where the rural population is confined to villages very distant from each other, and concealed from the road. The French peasants are very early risers; I saw many of them at their various labours at four o’clock in the morning; some women at that hour were leading cows by a string—three very frequently connected together—or a few wretched-looking sheep, to pasture on the margin of the road. The dresses of these people, and the appearance of the sheep, in those spots, informed me very unmistakeably that I was no longer in England. Sometimes, however, an entire flock of sheep met our observation. One of these, under the care of a shepherd, and two dogs which showed remarkable sagacity, we particularly noticed. The sheep, when I caught the first view of them, were huddled together in a fallow field, looking wistfully at, but not presuming to touch, a compartment of luxuriant clover within a few feet of them. The shepherd, leaving one of the dogs with the flock, and having the other at his heels, paced off a square of ten or twelve yards, slightly marking the limits with his foot; he then made a signal to the sentry dog, which at once allowed the sheep to pass on to the clover, while the other dog perambulated the prescribed limits, and prevented them from encroaching a single foot.
As I do not mean to trouble the reader with all the details of my journey, I need only say that I reached in safety the very heart of Normandy; and on the way, while admiring the woods, rivers, meadows, and undulating scenery through which we passed, I perceived a resemblance to the county of Wicklow, and many other well-wooded and fertile parts of Ireland.
I had been unable to reach Falaise the night before the fair, but I was there in time for an early breakfast; and certainly this breakfast was of an extraordinary kind. We had broth well thickened with vegetables; the bouilli from which the juices had been extracted made its appearance as a matter of course, and the whole company took a bit of it. Then came the liver of a sheep fried in oil, a dish of white beans well mashed and buttered, cheese, cider, and (though last not least appropriately to the breakfast table) coffee and boiled milk, with eggs and bread and butter. Many of the company, including some lady-like looking females, dipped their well-buttered bread into their coffee, and swallowed it in this nasty greasy manner with great apparent relish, and several of the party pocketed the lumps or sugar which they did not use with their coffee. But every country has its own fashions; and if people are here put upon an allowance in the article of sugar, and pay for a fixed quantity, why should they not take away that for which they pay, if they please?
I hastened away from the breakfast table to the place where the fair was held, and was surprised at the similarity of the scene before me to those which I have so often witnessed at home. It had nothing of the English character, excepting some wooden drinking-booths and caravans for showmen; there were no smart-looking horse-jockeys, no well-dressed grooms, not a white smock-frock, a laced buskin, a well-trimmed bonnet, nor a neatly appointed tax-cart or gig in view; but a crowd of men generally dressed in blue jackets and trousers and glazed hats, among whom were interspersed some wearing the blue blouse, and a cloth cap or red worsted nightcap, and a great number of women in their striped woollens, and high white linen or muslin coifs—nay some of these (on the heads of the rich farmers’ wives) were of lace, and worth scores of pounds sterling. The whole assemblage (combining with it groups of country fellows mounted on hardy ponies, with here and there a woman en croupe, or independently on a pad, with bags behind and before her, kicking away at the ribs of their horses with their heavy sabots) reminded me of what we see on a market-day in several parts of Ireland. Then, to render the similitude more striking, there were the clamour and jargon of persons buying and selling; and now and then a half drunken fellow singing in the lightness of his heart, or very noisy in argument; but generally courteous, and never daring to strike a blow, and a pedlar selling beads and almanacks amidst a din of oaths and imprecations, and the embarrassments occasioned by the movements of a team of four bullocks and three little horses in single file, dragging each other along with a huge tonneau of cider for the refreshment of the thirsty crowd, on a two-wheeled waggon, in the rear. We had passed this rude and very dirty vehicle, when the roll of a drum startled me. Thinks I to myself, “war is about to commence in earnest,” but it was only the preliminary flourish of a drummer, who immediately afterwards read out a notice that a celebrated dentist was about to appear in his voiture, for the purpose of relieving sufferers from those ailments which, alas! are incidental to us in every stage of life. Having raised his hat from respect to the majesty of the sovereign people, he moved off to an adjacent street, while the great operator himself appeared at hand in a showy kind of cab drawn by two horses (one in the shafts and the other in the outrigger style), with a tawdrily dressed postilion to guide them. Being in haste to reach the open square where the horse fair was held, I had little time for witnessing the operations of the tooth-drawer, who was flourishing his case of instruments in a most attractive way. When he had trapped his victim, he blew a long loud blast upon a horn to intimate that he was going to operate before the crowd, and after keeping the sufferer in an agony of suspense and nervousness, he pulled out one or more teeth with a large nail (sometimes a screw) in the twinkling of an eye, and with a degree of dexterity which I had conceived impossible. I was afterwards told that he had several patients in succession, from whom as they sat backwards in the cab, within view of hundreds of spectators, he extracted teeth at the rate of sixpence each. This practitioner, however, was not without a rival: another dentist was mounted on a high, raw-boned horse, with his case of instruments, and some physic for curing the rheumatism, in a leathern portmanteau strapped upon the pommel of his saddle: his dress was of a military character—his coat being braided like an undress frock; his bridle and saddle of the cavalry form; his headpiece, a forage cap; and his boots and spurs like those of a dragoon in the days of the Duke of Marlborough; a coronet hung from his saddle-bow; and whenever the other dentist sounded his bugle, this man blew from beneath the overhanging cover of thick hair on his upper lip, a longer and a louder strain. But the peculiarity of his style of operating was really striking: instead of dismounting and removing the tooth, he remained steadily in his saddle, examined the mouths of the patients who presented themselves for relief, and from his vantage ground pulled or rather pushed out the diseased grinder. While I was looking on, he poked out three with a hooked nail for one sous, saying, successively, as he drew them in a few seconds (as my companion translated his expressions for me), “Here’s a long one; here’s a longer; and here’s the longest of all.”