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 CHAPTER XIII

We left Paris in the Diligence, and arrived at Fontainbleau the first

night. The accommodations at the inn were indifferent, and not
cheap. The palace is a low straggling mass of very old buildings,
having been erected by St. Louis in the 12th century, whence he used
to date his Rescripts, ‘From my Deserts of Fontainbleau!’ It puts one
in mind of Monkish legends, of faded splendour, of the leaden spouts
and uncouth stone-cherubim of a country church-yard. It is empty or
gaudy within, stiff and heavy without. Henry IV. figures on the walls
with the fair Gabrielle, like the Tutelary Satyr of the place, keeping
up the remembrance of old-fashioned royalty and gallantry. They
here shew you the table (a plain round piece of mahogany) on which
Buonaparte in 1814 signed the abdication of the human race, in
favour of the hereditary proprietors of the species. We walked
forward a mile or two before the coach the next day on the road to
Montargis. It presents a long, broad, and stately avenue without a
turning, as far as the eye can reach, and is skirted on each side by a
wild, woody, rocky scenery. The birch-trees, with their grey stems
and light glittering branches, silvered over the darker back-ground,
and afforded a striking contrast to the brown earth and green moss
beneath. There was a stillness in the woods, which affects the mind
the more in objects whose very motion is gentleness. The day was
dull, but quite mild, though in the middle of January. The situation
of Fontainbleau is certainly interesting and fine. It stands in the
midst of an extensive forest, intersected with craggy precipices and
rugged ranges of hills; and the various roads leading to or from it are
cut out of a wilderness, which a hermit might inhabit. The approach
to the different towns in France has, in this respect, the advantage
over ours; for, from burning wood instead of coal, they must have
large woods in the neighbourhood, which clothe the country round
them, and afford, as Pope expresses it,
 ‘In summer shade, in winter fire.’

We dig our fuel out of the bowels of the earth, and have a greater
portion of its surface left at our disposal, which we devote not to
ornament, but use. A copse-wood or an avenue of trees however,
makes a greater addition to the beauty of a town than a coal-pit or a
steam-engine in its vicinity.
When the Diligence came up, and we took our seats in the coupé
(which is that part of a French stage-coach which resembles an old
shattered post-chaise, placed in front of the main body of it) we
found a French lady occupying the third place in it, whose delight at
our entrance was as great as if we had joined her on some desert
island, and whose mortification was distressing when she learnt we
were not going the whole way with her. She complained of the cold of
the night air; but this she seemed to dread less than the want of
company. She said she had been deceived, for she had been told the
coach was full, and was in despair that she should not have a soul to
speak to all the way to Lyons. We got out, notwithstanding, at the inn
at Montargis, where we met with a very tolerable reception, and were
waited on at supper by one of those Maritorneses that perfectly
astonish an English traveller. Her joy at our arrival was as extreme as
if her whole fortune depended on it. She laughed, danced, sung,
fairly sprung into the air, bounced into the room, nearly overset the
table, hallooed and talked as loud as if she had been alternately ostler
and chamber-maid. She was as rough and boisterous as any country
bumpkin at a wake or statute-fair; and yet so full of rude health and
animal spirits, that you were pleased instead of being offended. In
England, a girl with such boorish manners would not be borne; but
her good-humour kept pace with her coarseness, and she was as
incapable of giving as of feeling pain. There is something in the air in
France that carries off the blue devils!
The mistress of the inn, however, was a little peaking, pining woman,
with her face wrapped up in flannel, and not quite so inaccessible to
nervous impressions; and when I asked the girl, ‘What made her
speak so loud?’ she answered for her, ‘To make people deaf!’ This
side-reproof did not in the least moderate the brazen tones of her
help-mate, but rather gave a new fillip to her spirits; though she was
less on the alert than the night before, and appeared to the full as
much bent on arranging her curls in the looking-glass when she
came into the room, as on arranging the breakfast things on the tea-
board.
We staid here till one o’clock on Sunday (the 16th,) waiting the
arrival of the Lyonnais, in which we had taken our places forward,
and which I thought would never arrive. Let no man trust to a
placard stuck on the walls of Paris, advertising the cheapest and most
expeditious mode of conveyance to all parts of the world. It may be
no better than a snare to the unwary. The Lyonnais, I thought from
the advertisement, was the Swift-sure of Diligences. It was to arrive
ten hours before any other Diligence; it was the most compact, the
most elegant of modern vehicles. From the description and the print
of it, it seemed ‘a thing of life,’ a minion of the fancy. To see it stand
in a state of disencumbered abstraction, it appeared a self-impelling
machine; or if it needed aid, was horsed, unlike your Paris
Diligences, by nimble, airy Pegasuses. To look at the fac-simile of it
that was put into your hand, you would say it might run or fly—might
traverse the earth, or whirl you through the air, without let or
impediment, so light was it to outward appearance in structure ‘fit
for speed succinct’—a chariot for Puck or Ariel to ride in! This was
the account I had (or something like it) from Messieurs the
Proprietors at the Cour des Fontaines. ‘Mark how a plain tale shall
put them down.’ Those gentlemen came to me after I had paid for
two places as far as Nevers, to ask me to resign them in favour of two
Englishmen, who wished to go the whole way, and to re-engage them
for the following evening. I said I could not do that; but as I had a
dislike to travelling at night, I would go on to Montargis by some
other conveyance, and proceed by the Lyonnais, which would arrive
there at eight or nine on Sunday morning, as far as I could that night.
I set out on the faith of this understanding. I had some difficulty in
finding the Office sur la place, to which I had been directed, and
which was something between a stable, a kitchen, and a cook-shop. I
was led to it by a shabby double or counterpart of the Lyonnais,
which stood before the door, empty, dirty, bare of luggage, waiting
the Paris one, which had not yet arrived. It drove into town four
hours afterwards, with three foundered hacks, with the postilion and
Conducteur for its complement of passengers, the last occupying the
left hand corner of the coupé in solitary state, with a whisp of straw
thrust through a broken pane of one of the front windows, and a
tassel of blue and yellow fringe hanging out of the other; and with
that mixture of despondency and fierté in his face, which long and
uninterrupted pondering on the state of the way-bill naturally
produces in such circumstances. He seized upon me and my trunks
as lawful prize; he afterwards insisted on my going forward in the
middle of the night to Lyons, (contrary to my agreement,) and I was
obliged to comply, or to sleep upon trusses of straw in a kind of out-
house. We quarrelled incessantly, but I could not help laughing, for
he sometimes looked like my old acquaintance, Dr. S., and
sometimes like my friend, A—— H——, of Edinburgh. He said we
should reach Lyons the next evening, and we got there twenty-four
hours after the time. He told me for my comfort, the reason of his
being so late was, that two of his horses had fallen down dead on the
road. He had to raise relays of horses all the way, as if we were
travelling through a hostile country; quarrelled with all the postilions
about an abatement of a few sous; and once our horses were arrested
in the middle of the night by a farmer who refused to trust him; and
he had to go before the Mayor, as soon as day broke. We were
quizzed by the post-boys, the innkeepers, the peasants all along the
road, as a shabby concern; our Conducteur bore it all, like another
Candide. We stopped at all the worst inns in the outskirts of the
towns, where nothing was ready; or when it was, was not eatable.
The second morning we were to breakfast at Moulins; when we
alighted, our guide told us it was eleven: the clock in the kitchen
pointed to three. As he laughed in my face when I complained of his
misleading me, I told him that he was ‘un impudent,’ and this epithet
sobered him the rest of the way. As we left Moulins, the crimson
clouds of evening streaked the west, and I had time to think of
Sterne’s Maria. The people at the inn, I suspect, had never heard of
her. There was no trace of romance about the house. Certainly, mine
was not a Sentimental Journey. Is it not provoking to come to a
place, that has been consecrated by ‘famous poet’s pen,’ as a breath, a
name, a fairy-scene, and find it a dull, dirty town? Let us leave the
realities to shift for themselves, and think only of those bright tracts
that have been reclaimed for us by the fancy, where the perfume, the
sound, the vision, and the joy still linger, like the soft light of evening
skies! Is the story of Maria the worse, because I am travelling a dirty
road in a rascally Diligence? Or is it an injury done us by the author
to have invented for us what we should not have met with in reality?
Has it not been read with pleasure by thousands of readers, though
the people at the inn had never heard of it? Yet Sterne would have
been vexed to find that the fame of his Maria had never reached the
little town of Moulins. We are always dissatisfied with the good we
have, and always punished for our unreasonableness.
At Palisseau (the road is rich in melodramatic recollections) it
became pitch-dark; you could not see your hand; I entreated to have
the lamp lighted; our Conducteur said it was broken (cassé). With
much persuasion, and the ordering a bottle of their best wine, which
went round among the people at the inn, we got a lantern with a
rushlight in it, but the wind soon blew it out, and we went on our way
darkling; the road lay over a high hill, with a loose muddy bottom
between two hedges, and as we did not attempt to trot or gallop, we
came safe to the level ground on the other side. We breakfasted at
Rouane, where we were first shewn into the kitchen, while they were
heating a suffocating stove in a squalid salle à manger. There, while
I was sitting half dead with cold and fatigue, a boy came and scraped
a wooden dresser close at my ear, with a noise to split one’s brain,
and with true French nonchalance; and a portly landlady, who had
risen just as we had done breakfasting, ushered us to our carriage
with the airs and graces of a Madame Maintenon. In France you
meet with the court address in a stable-yard. In other countries you
may find grace in a cottage or a wilderness; but it is simple,
unconscious grace, without the full-blown pride and strut of
mannered confidence and presumption. A woman in France is
graceful by going out of her sphere; not by keeping within it.—In
crossing the bridge at Rouane, the sun shone brightly on the river
and shipping, which had a busy cheerful aspect; and we began to
ascend the Bourbonnois under more flattering auspices. We got out
and walked slowly up the sounding road. I found that the morning
air refreshed and braced my spirits; and that even the continued
fatigue of the journey, which I had dreaded as a hazardous
experiment, was a kind of seasoning to me. I was less exhausted than
the first day. I will venture to say, that for an invalid, sitting up all
night is better than lying in bed all day. Hardships, however dreadful
to nervous apprehensions, by degrees give us strength and resolution
to endure them: whereas effeminacy softens and renders us less and
less capable of encountering pain or difficulty. It is the love of
indulgence, or the shock of the first privation or effort, that confirms
almost all the weaknesses of body or mind. As we loitered up the
long, winding ascent of the road from Rouane, we occasionally
approached the brink of some Alpine declivity tufted with pine trees,
and noticed the white villas, clustering [or] scattered, which in all
directions spotted the very summits of that vast and gradual
amphitheatre of hills which overlooked the neighbouring town. The
Bourbonnois is the first large chain of hills piled one upon another,
and extending range beyond range, that you come to on the route to
Italy, and that occupy a wide-spread district, like a mighty
conqueror, with uniform and growing magnificence. To those who
have chiefly seen detached mountains or abrupt precipices rising
from the level surface of the ground, the effect is exceedingly
imposing and grand. The descent on the other side into Tarare is
more sudden and dangerous; and you avoid passing over the top of
the mountain (along which the road formerly ran) by one of those
fine, broad, firmly-cemented roads with galleries and bridges, which
bespeak at once the master-hand that raised them. Tarare is a neat
little town, famous for the manufacture of serges and calicoes. We
had to stop here for three-quarters of an hour, waiting for fresh
horses; and as we sat in the coupé in this helpless state, the horses
taken out, the sun shining in, and the wind piercing through every
cranny of the broken panes and rattling sash-windows, the postilion
came up and demanded to know if we were English, as there were
two English gentlemen who would be glad to see us. I excused myself
from getting out, but said I should be happy to speak to them.
Accordingly, my informant beckoned to a young man in black, who
was standing at a little distance in a state of anxious expectation, and
who coming to the coach-door said, he presumed we were from
London, and that he had taken the liberty to pay his respects to us.
His friend, he said, who was staying with him, was ill in bed, or he
would have done himself the same pleasure. He had on a pair of
wooden clogs, turned up and pointed at the toes in the manner of the
country (which he recommended to me as useful for climbing the
hills if ever I should come into those parts) warm worsted mittens,
and had a thin, genteel, shivering aspect. I expected every moment
he would tell me his name or business; but all I learnt was that he
and his friend had been here some time, and that they could not get
away till spring, that there were no entertainments, that trade was
flat, and that the French seemed to him a very different people from
the English. The fact is, he found himself quite at a loss in a French
country-town, and had no other resource or way of amusing himself,
than by looking out for the Diligences as they passed, and trying to
hear news from England. He stood at his own door, and waved his
hand with a melancholy air as we rode by, and no doubt instantly
went up stairs to communicate to his sick friend, that he had
conversed with two English people.
Our delay at Tarare had deprived us of nearly an hour of daylight;
and, besides, the miserable foundered jades of horses, that we had to
get on with in this paragon of Diligences, were quite unequal to the
task of dragging it up and down the hills on the road to Lyons, which
was still twenty miles distant. The night was dark, and we had no
light. I found it was quite hopeless when we should reach our
journey’s end (if we did not break our necks by the way) and that
both were matters of very great indifference to Mons. le Conducteur,
who was only bent on saving the pockets of Messieurs his employers,
and who had no wish, like me, to see the Vatican! He affected to
make bargains for horses, which always failed and added to our
delay; and lighted his lantern once or twice, but it always went out.
At last I said that I had intended to give him a certain sum for
himself, but that if we did not arrive in Lyons by ten o’clock at night,
he might depend upon it I would not give him a single farthing. This
had the desired effect. He got out at the next village we came to, and
three stout horses were fastened to the harness. He also procured a
large piece of candle (with a reserve of another piece of equal length
and thickness in his lantern) and held it in his hand the whole way,
only shifting it from one hand to the other, as he grew tired, and
biting his lips and making wry faces at this new office of a
candelabrum, which had been thrust upon him much against his
will. I was not sorry, for he was one of the most disagreeable
Frenchmen I ever met with, having all the indifference and self-
sufficiency of his countrymen with none of their usual obligingness.
He seemed to me a person out of his place (a thing you rarely
discover in France)—a broken-down tradesman, or ‘one that had had
misfortunes,’ and who neither liked nor was fit for his present
situation of Conducteur to a Diligence without funds, without horses,
and without passengers. We arrived in safety at Lyons at eleven
o’clock at night, and were conducted to the Hotel des Couriers,
where we, with some difficulty, procured a lodging and a supper, and
were attended by a brown, greasy, dark-haired, good-humoured,
awkward gypsey of a wench from the south of France, who seemed
just caught; stared and laughed, and forgot every thing she went for;
could not help exclaiming every moment—‘Que Madame a le peau
blanc!’ from the contrast to her own dingy complexion and dirty
skin, took a large brass-pan of scalding milk, came and sat down by
me on a bundle of wood, and drank it; said she had had no supper,
for her head ached, and declared the English were braves gens, and
that the Bourbons were bons enfans, started up to look through the
key-hole, and whispered through her broad strong-set teeth, that a
fine Madam was descending the staircase, who had been to dine with
a great gentleman, offered to take away the supper things, left them,
and called us the next morning with her head and senses in a state of
even greater confusion than they were over-night. The familiarity of
common servants in France surprises the English at first; but it has
nothing offensive in it, any more than the good natured gambols and
freedoms of a Newfoundland dog. It is quite natural.
Lyons is a fine, dirty town. The streets are good, but so high and
narrow, that they look like sinks of filth and gloom. The shops are
mere dungeons. Yet two noble rivers water the city, the Rhone and
the Saone—the one broad and majestic, the other more confined and
impetuous in its course, and join a little below the town to pour their
friendly streams into the Mediterranean. The square is spacious and
handsome, and the heights of St. Just, that overlook it, command a
fine view of the town, the bridges, both rivers, the hills of Provence,
the road to Chambery, and the Alps, with their snowy tops propping
the clouds. The sight of them effectually deterred me from
attempting to go by Geneva and the Simplon; and we were contented
(for this time) with the humbler passage of Mount Cenis. Here is the
Hotel de Notre Dâme de Piété, which is shewn you as the inn where
Rousseau stopped on his way to Paris, when he went to overturn the
French Monarchy by the force of style. I thought of him, as we came
down the mountain of Tarare, in his gold-laced hat, and with his jet
d’eau playing. If they could but have known who was coming, how
many battalions would have been sent out to meet him; what a
ringing of alarm-bells, what a beating of drums, what raising of
drawbridges, what barring of gates, what examination of passports,
what processions of priests, what meetings of magistrates, what
confusion in the towns, what a panic through the country, what
telegraphic despatches to the Court of Versailles, what couriers
posting to all parts of Europe, what manifestoes from armies, what a
hubbub of Holy Alliances, and all for what? To prevent one man from
speaking what he and every other man felt, and whose only fault was
that the beatings of the human heart had found an echo in his pen!
At Lyons I saw this inscription over a door: Ici on trouve le seul et
unique depôt de l’encre sans pareil et incorruptible—which appeared
to me to contain the whole secret of French poetry. I went into a shop
to buy M. Martine’s Death of Socrates, which I saw in the window,
but they would neither let me have that copy nor get me another. The
French are not ‘a nation of shopkeepers.’ They had quite as lieve see
you walk out of their shops as come into them. While I was waiting
for an answer, a French servant in livery brought in four volumes of
the History of a Foundling, an improved translation, in which it was
said the morceaux omitted by M. de la Place were restored. I was
pleased to see my old acquaintance Tom Jones, with his French coat
on. The poetry of M. Alphonse Martine and of M. Casimir de la Vigne
circulates in the provinces and in Italy, through the merit of the
authors and the favour of the critics. L. H. tells me that the latter is a
great Bonapartist, and talks of ‘the tombs of the brave.’ He said I
might form some idea of M. Martine’s attempts to be great and
unfrenchified by the frontispiece to one of his poems, in which a
young gentleman in an heroic attitude is pointing to the sea in a
storm, with his other hand round a pretty girl’s waist. I told H. this
poet had lately married a lady of fortune. He said, ‘That’s the girl.’ He
also said very well, I thought, that ‘the French seemed born to puzzle
the Germans.’ Why are there not salt-spoons in France? In England
it is a piece of barbarism to put your knife into a salt-cellar with
another. But in France the distinction between grossness and
refinement is done away. Every thing there is refined!
 CHAPTER XIV

There was a Diligence next day for Turin over Mount Cenis, which
went only twice a week (stopping at night) and I was glad to secure
(as I thought) two places in the interior at seventy francs a seat, for
240 miles. The fare from Paris to Lyons, a distance of 360 miles, was
only fifty francs each, which is four times as cheap; but the difference
was accounted for to me, from there being no other conveyance,
which was an arbitrary reason, and from the number and expense of
horses necessary to drag a heavy double coach over mountainous
roads. Besides, it was a Royal Messagerie, and I was given to
understand that Messrs. Bonnafoux paid the King of Sardinia a
thousand crowns a year for permission to run a Diligence through his
territories. The knave of a waiter (I found) had cheated me; and that
from Chambery there was only one place in the interior and one in
the coupé, which turned out to be a cabriolet, a place in front with a
leathern apron and curtains, which in winter time, and in travelling
over snowy mountains and through icy valleys, was not a situation
‘devoutly to be wished.’ I had no other resource, however, having
paid my four pounds in advance at the over-pressing instances of the
Garçon, but to call him a coquin, (which being a Milanese was not
quite safe) to throw out broad hints (à l’Anglais) of a collusion
between him and the Office, and to arrange as well as I could with
the Conducteur, that I and my fellow-traveller should not be
separated. I would advise all English people travelling abroad to take
their own places at coach-offices, and not to trust to waiters, who will
make a point of tricking them, both as a principle and pastime; and
further to procure letters of recommendation (in case of disagreeable
accidents on the road) for it was a knowledge of this kind, namely,
that I had a letter of introduction to one of the Professors of the
College at Lyons, that procured me even the trifling concession
above-mentioned, through the influence which the landlady of the
Hotel had with the Conducteur: otherwise, instead of being stuck in
the cabriolet, I might have mounted on the imperial, and any signs of
vexation or impatience I might have exhibited, would have been
construed into ebullitions of the national character, and a want of
bienseance in Monsieur l’Anglois. The French, and foreigners in
general, (as far as I have seen) are civil, polite, easy-tempered,
obliging; but the art of keeping up plausible appearances stands
them in lieu of downright honesty. They think they have a right to
cheat you if they can (a compliment, a civil bow, a shrug, is worth the
money!) and the instant you find out the imposition or begin to
complain, they turn away from you as a disagreeable or wrong-
headed person, and you can get no redress but by main force. It is
not the original transgressor, but he who declares he is aggrieved,
that is considered as guilty of a breach of good manners, and a
disturber of the social compact. I think one is more irritated at the
frequent impositions that are practised on one abroad, because the
novelty of the scene, one’s ignorance of the ways of the world, and
the momentary excitement of the spirits and of the flush of hope,
have a tendency to renew in one’s mind the unsuspecting simplicity
and credulity of youth; and the petty tricks and shuffling behaviour
we meet with on the road are a greater baulk to our warm, sanguine,
buoyant, travelling impulses.
Annoyed at the unfair way in which we had been treated, and at the
idea of being left to the mercy of the Conducteur, whose ‘honest,
sonsie, bawsont face’ had, however, no more of the fox in it than
implied an eye to his own interest, and might be turned to our own
advantage, we took our seats numerically in the Royal Diligence of
Italy, at seven in the evening (January 20) and for some time
suffered the extreme penalties of a French stage-coach—not indeed
‘the icy fang and season’s difference,’ but a very purgatory of heat,
closeness, confinement, and bad smells. Nothing can surpass it but
the section of a slave-ship, or the Black-hole of Calcutta. Mr.
Theodore Hook or Mr. Croker should take an airing in this way on
the Continent, in order to give them a notion of, and I should think, a
distaste for the blessings of the Middle Passage. Not only were the six
places in the interior all taken, and all full, but they had suspended a
wicker basket (like a hen-coop) from the top of the coach, stuffed
with fur-caps, hats, overalls, and different parcels, so as to make it
impossible to move one way or other, and to stop every remaining
breath of air. A negociant at my right-hand corner, who was inclined
to piece out a lengthened recital with a parce que and a de sorte que
at every word, having got upon ticklish ground, without seeing his
audience, was cut short in the flower of his oratory, by asserting that
Barcelona and St. Sebastian’s in Spain were contiguous to each other.
‘They were at opposite sides of the country,’ exclaimed in the same
breath a French soldier and a Spaniard, who sat on the other side of
the coach, and whom he was regaling with the gallant adventures of a
friend of his in the Peninsula, and not finding the usual excuse
—‘C’est égal‘—applicable to a blunder in geography, was contented to
fall into the rear of the discourse for the rest of the journey. At
midnight we found that we had gone only nine miles in five hours, as
we had been climbing a gradual ascent from the time we set out,
which was our first essay in mountain-scenery, and gave us some
idea of the scale of the country we were beginning to traverse. The
heat became less insupportable as the noise and darkness subsided;
and as the morning dawned, we were anxious to remove that veil of
uncertainty and prejudice which the obscurity of night throws over a
number of passengers whom accident has huddled together in a
stage-coach. I think one seldom finds one’s-self set down in a party
of this kind without a strong feeling of repugnance and distaste, and
one seldom quits it at last without some degree of regret. It was the
case in the present instance. At day-break, the pleasant farms, the
thatched cottages, and sloping valleys of Savoy attracted our notice,
and I was struck with the resemblance to England (to some parts of
Devonshire and Somersetshire in particular) a discovery which I
imparted to my fellow-travellers with a more lively enthusiasm than
it was received. An Englishman thinks he has only to communicate
his feelings to others to meet with sympathy, and is not a little
disconcerted if (after this amazing act of condescension) he is at all
repulsed. How should we laugh at a Frenchman who expected us to
be delighted with his finding out a likeness of some part of England
to France? We English are a nation of egotists, say what we will; and
so much so, that we expect others to swallow the bait of our self-love.
At Pont Beau-Voisin, the frontier town of the King of Sardinia’s
dominions, we stopped to breakfast, and to have our passports and
luggage examined at the Barrier and Custom-house. I breakfasted
with the Spaniard, who invited himself to our tea-party, and
complimented Madame (in broken English) on the excellence of her
performance. We agreed between ourselves that the Spaniards and
English were very much superior to the French. I found he had a
taste for the Fine Arts, and I spoke of Murillo and Velasquez as two
excellent Spanish painters. ‘Here was sympathy.’ I also spoke of Don
Quixote—‘Here was more sympathy.’ What a thing it is to have
produced a work that makes friends of all the world that have read it,
and that all the world have read! Mention but Don Quixote, and who
is there that does not own him for a friend, countryman, and
brother? There is no French work, at the name of which (as at a
talisman) the scales of national prejudice so completely fall off; nay
more, I must confess there is no English one. We were summoned
from our tea and patriotic effusions to attend the Douane. It was
striking to have to pass and repass the piquets of soldiers stationed
as a guard on bridges across narrow mountain-streams that a child
might leap over. After some slight dalliance with our great-coat
pockets, and significant gestures as if we might or might not have
things of value about us that we should not, we proceeded to the
Custom-house. I had two trunks. One contained books. When it was
unlocked, it was as if the lid of Pandora’s box flew open. There could
not have been a more sudden start or expression of surprise, had it
been filled with cartridge-paper or gun-powder. Books were the
corrosive sublimate that eat out despotism and priestcraft—the
artillery that battered down castle and dungeon-walls—the ferrets
that ferreted out abuses—the lynx-eyed guardians that tore off
disguises—the scales that weighed right and wrong—the thumping
make-weight thrown into the balance that made force and fraud, the
sword and the cowl, kick the beam—the dread of knaves, the scoff of
fools—the balm and the consolation of the human mind—the salt of
the earth—the future rulers of the world! A box full of them was a
contempt of the constituted Authorities; and the names of mine were
taken down with great care and secrecy—Lord Bacon’s ‘Advancement
of Learning,’ Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ De Stutt-Tracey’s ‘Ideologie,’
(which Bonaparte said ruined his Russian expedition,) Mignet’s
‘French Revolution,’ (which wants a chapter on the English
Government,) ‘Sayings and Doings,’ with pencil notes in the margin,
‘Irving’s Orations,’ the same, an ‘Edinburgh Review,’ some ‘Morning
Chronicles,’ ‘The Literary Examiner,’ a collection of Poetry, a Volume
bound in crimson velvet, and the Paris edition of ‘Table-talk.’ Here
was some questionable matter enough—but no notice was taken. My
box was afterwards corded and leaded with equal gravity and
politeness, and it was not till I arrived at Turin that I found it was a
prisoner of state, and would be forwarded to me anywhere I chose to
mention, out of his Sardinian Majesty’s dominions. I was startled to
find myself within the smooth polished grasp of legitimate power,
without suspecting it; and was glad to recover my trunk at Florence,
with no other inconvenience than the expense of its carriage across
the country.[36]
It was noon as we returned to the inn, and we first caught a full view
of the Alps over a plashy meadow, some feathery trees, and the tops
of the houses of the village in which we were. It was a magnificent
sight, and in truth a new sensation. Their summits were bright with
snow and with the midday sun; they did not seem to stand upon the
earth, but to prop the sky; they were at a considerable distance from
us, and yet appeared just over our heads. The surprise seemed to
take away our breath, and to lift us from our feet. It was drinking the
empyrean. As we could not long retain possession of our two places
in the interior, I proposed to our guide to exchange them for the
cabriolet; and, after some little chaffering and candid
representations of the outside passengers of the cold we should have
to encounter, we were installed there to our great satisfaction, and
the no less contentment of those whom we succeeded. Indeed I had
no idea that we should be steeped in these icy valleys at three o’clock
in the morning, or I might have hesitated. The view was cheering, the
clear air refreshing, and I thought we should set off each morning
about seven or eight. But it is part of the sçavoir vivre in France, and
one of the methods of adding to the agrémens of travelling, to set out
three hours before day-break in the depth of winter, and stop two
hours about noon, in order to arrive early in the evening. With all the
disadvantages of preposterous hours and of intense cold pouring into
the cabriolet like water the two first mornings, I cannot say I
repented of my bargain. We had come a thousand miles to see the
Alps for one thing, and we did see them in perfection, which we
could not have done inside. The ascent for some way was striking
and full of novelty; but on turning a corner of the road we entered
upon a narrow defile or rocky ledge, overlooking a steep valley under
our feet, with a headlong turbid stream dashing down it, and
spreading itself out into a more tranquil river below, a dark wood of
innumerable pine-trees covering the side of the valley opposite, with
broken crags, morasses, and green plots of cultivated ground,
orchards, and quiet homesteads, on which the sun glanced its
farewell rays through the openings of the mountains. On our left, a
precipice of dark brown rocks of various shapes rose abruptly at our
side, or hung threatening over the road, into which some of their
huge fragments, loosened by the winter’s flaw, had fallen, and which
men and mules were employed in removing—(the thundering crash
had hardly yet subsided, as you looked up and saw the fleecy clouds
sailing among the shattered cliffs, while another giant-mass seemed
ready to quit its station in the sky)—and as the road wound along to
the other extremity of this noble pass, between the beetling rocks and
dark sloping pine-forests, frowning defiance at each other, you
caught the azure sky, the snowy ridges of the mountains, and the
peaked tops of the Grand Chartreuse, waving to the right in solitary
state and air-clad brightness.—It was a scene dazzling, enchanting,
and that stamped the long-cherished dreams of the imagination
upon the senses. Between those four crystal peaks stood the ancient
monastery of that name, hid from the sight, revealed to thought,
half-way between earth and heaven, enshrined in its cerulean
atmosphere, lifting the soul to its native home, and purifying it from
mortal grossness. I cannot wonder at the pilgrimages that are made
to it, its calm repose, its vows monastic. Life must there seem a
noiseless dream;—Death a near translation to the skies! Winter was
even an advantage to this scene. The black forests, the dark sides of
the rocks gave additional and inconceivable brightness to the
glittering summits of the lofty mountains, and received a deeper tone
and a more solemn gloom from them; while in the open spaces the
unvaried sheets of snow fatigue the eye, which requires the contrast
of the green tints or luxuriant foliage of summer or of spring. This
was more particularly perceptible as the day closed, when the golden
sunset streamed in vain over frozen valleys that imbibed no richness
from it, and repelled its smile from their polished marble surface.
But in the more gloomy and desert regions, the difference is less
remarkable between summer and winter, except in the beginning of
spring, when the summits of the hoary rocks are covered with snow,
and the cleft[s] in their sides are filled with fragrant shrubs and
flowers. I hope to see this miracle when I return.
We came to Echelles, where we changed horses with great formality
and preparation, as if setting out on some formidable expedition. Six
large strong-boned horses with high haunches (used to ascend and
descend mountains) were put to, the rope-tackle was examined and
repaired, and our two postilions mounted and dismounted more
than once, before they seemed willing to set off, which they did at
last at a hand-gallop, that was continued for some miles. It is nothing
to see English blood-horses get over the ground with such prodigious
fleetness and spirit, but it is really curious to see the huge cart-
horses, that they use for Diligences abroad, lumbering along and
making the miles disappear behind them with their ponderous
strength and persevering activity. The road for some way rattled
under their heavy hoofs, and the heavy wheels that they dragged or
whirled along at a thundering pace; the postilions cracked their
whips, and the one in front (a dark, swarthy, short-set fellow)
flourished his, shouted and hallooed, and turned back to vociferate
his instructions to his companion with the robust energy and
wildness of expression of a smuggler or a leader of banditti, carrying
off a rich booty from a troop of soldiers. There was something in the
scenery to favour this idea. Night was falling as we entered the
superb tunnel cut through the mountain at La Grotte (a work
attributed to Victor-Emanuel, with the same truth that Falstaff took
to himself the merit of the death of Hotspur), and its iron floor rang,
the whips cracked, and the roof echoed to the clear voice of our
intrepid postilion as we dashed through it. Our path then wound
among romantic defiles, where huge masses of snow and the
gathering gloom threatened continually to bar our way; but it seemed
cleared by the lively shout of our guide, and the carriage-wheels,
clogged with ice, rolled after the heavy tramp of the horses. In this
manner we rode on through a country full of wild grandeur and
shadowy fears, till we had nearly reached the end of our day’s
journey, when we dismissed our two fore-horses and their rider, to
whom I presented a trifling douceur ‘for the sake of his good voice
and cheerful countenance.’ The descent into Chambery was the most
dangerous part of the road, and our horses were nearly thrown on
their haunches several times. The road was narrow and slippery;
there were a number of market-carts returning from the town, and
there was a declivity on one side, which, though not a precipice, was
quite sufficient to have dashed us to pieces in a common-place way.
We arrived at Chambery in the dusk of the evening; and there is
surely a charm in the name, and in that of the Charmettes near it
(where he who relished all more sharply than his fellows, and made
them feel for him as for themselves, alone felt peace or hope), which
even the Magdalen Muse of Mr. Moore has not been able to unsing!
We alighted at the inn fatigued enough, and were delighted on being
shewn to a room to find the floor of wood, and English teacups and
saucers. We were in Savoy.
We set out early the next morning, and it was the most trying part of
our whole journey. The wind cut like a scythe through the valleys,
and a cold, icy feeling struck from the sides of the snowy precipices
that surrounded us, so that we seemed enclosed in a huge well of
mountains. We got to St. Jean de Maurienne to breakfast about
noon, where the only point agreed upon appeared to be to have
nothing ready to receive us. This was the most tedious day of all; nor
did we meet with any thing to repay us for our uncomfortable setting
out. We travelled through a scene of desolation, were chilled in
sunless valleys or dazzled by sunny mountain-tops, passed frozen
streams or gloomy cavities, that might be transformed into the scene
of some Gothic wizard’s spell, or reminded one of some German
novel. Let no one imagine that the crossing the Alps is the work of a
moment, or done by a single heroic effort—that they are a huge but
detached chain of hills, or like the dotted line we find in the map.
They are a sea or an entire kingdom of mountains. It took us three
days to traverse them in this, which is the most practicable direction,
and travelling at a good round pace. We passed on as far as eye could
see, and still we appeared to have made little way. Still we were in the
shadow of the same enormous mass of rock and snow, by the side of
the same creeping stream. Lofty mountains reared themselves in
front of us—horrid abysses were scooped out under our feet.
Sometimes the road wound along the side of a steep hill, overlooking
some village-spire or hamlet, and as we ascended it, it only gave us a
view of remoter scenes, ‘where Alps o’er Alps arise,’ tossing about
their billowy tops, and tumbling their unwieldy shapes in all
directions—a world of wonders!—Any one, who is much of an egotist,
ought not to travel through these districts; his vanity will not find its
account in them; it will be chilled, mortified, shrunk up: but they are
a noble treat to those who feel themselves raised in their own
thoughts and in the scale of being by the immensity of other things,
and who can aggrandise and piece out their personal insignificance
by the grandeur and eternal forms of nature! It gives one a vast idea
of Buonaparte to think of him in these situations. He alone (the Rob
Roy of the scene) seemed a match for the elements, and able to
master ‘this fortress, built by nature for herself.’ Neither impeded
nor turned aside by immoveable barriers, he smote the mountains
with his iron glaive, and made them malleable; cut roads through
them; transported armies over their ridgy steeps; and the rocks
‘nodded to him, and did him courtesies!’
We arrived at St. Michelle at night-fall (after passing through beds of
ice and the infernal regions of cold), where we met with a truly
hospitable reception, with wood-floors in the English fashion, and
where they told us the King of England had stopped. This made no
sort of difference to me.
We breakfasted the next day (being Sunday) at Lans-le-Bourg, where
I observed my friend the Spaniard busy with his tables, taking down
the name of the place. The landlady was a little, round, fat, good-
humoured black-eyed Italian or Savoyard, saying a number of good
things to all her guests, but sparing of them otherwise. We were now
at the foot of Mount Cenis, and after breakfast we set out on foot
before the Diligence, which was to follow us in half an hour. We
passed a melancholy-looking inn at the end of the town, professing to
be kept by an Englishwoman; but there appeared to be nobody about
the house, English, French, or Italian. The mistress of it (a young
woman who had married an Italian) had, in fact, died a short time
before of pure chagrin and disappointment in this solitary place,
after having told her tale of distress to every one, till it fairly wore her
out. We had leisure to look back to the town as we proceeded, and
which, with its church, stone-cottages, and slated roofs, shrunk into
a miniature-model of itself as we continued to advance farther and
higher above it. Some straggling cottages, some vineyards planted at
a great height, and another compact and well-built village, that
seemed to defy the extremity of the seasons, were seen in the
direction of the valley that we were pursuing. Else all around were
shapeless, sightless piles of hills covered with snow, with crags or
pine-trees or a foot-path peeping out, and in the appearance of which
no alteration whatever was made by our advancing or receding. We
gained on the mountain by a broad, winding road that continually
doubles, and looks down upon the point from whence you started
half an hour before. Some snow had fallen in the morning, but it was
now fine, though cloudy. We found two of our fellow-travellers
following our example, and they soon after overtook us. They were
both French. We noticed some of the features of the scenery; and a
lofty hill opposite to us being scooped out into a bed of snow, with
two ridges or promontories projecting (something like an arm-chair)
on each side. ‘Voilà!’ said the younger and more volatile of our
companions, ‘c’est un trône, et le nuage est la gloire!‘—A white cloud
indeed encircled its misty top. I complimented him on the happiness
of his allusion, and said that Madame was pleased with the exactness
of the resemblance. He then turned to the valley, and said, ‘C’est un
berceau.’ This is the height to which the imagination of a Frenchman
always soars, and it can soar no higher. Any thing that is not cast in
this obvious, common-place mould, that had been used a thousand
times before with applause, they think barbarous, and as they phrase
it, originaire. No farther notice was taken of the scenery, any more
than if we had been walking on the Boulevards at Paris, and my
young Frenchman talked of other things, laughed, sung, and smoked
a cigar with a gaiety and lightness of heart that I envied. ‘What has
become,’ said the elder of the Frenchmen, ‘of Monsieur l’Espagnol?
He does not easily quit his seat; he sits in one corner, never looks
out, or if you point to any object, takes no notice of it; and when you
come to the end of the stage, says—“What is the name of that place
we passed by last?” takes out his pocket-book, and makes a note of it.
“That is droll.”’ And what made it more so, it turned out that our
Spanish friend was a painter, travelling to Rome to study the Fine
Arts! All the way as we ascended, there were red posts placed at the
edge of the road, ten or twelve feet in height, to point out the
direction of the road in case of a heavy fall of snow, and with notches
cut to shew the depth of the drifts. There were also scattered stone-
hovels, erected as stations for the Gens d’armes, who were
sometimes left here for several days together after a severe snow-
storm, without being approached by a single human being. One of
these stood near the top of the mountain, and as we were tired of the
walk (which had occupied two hours) and of the uniformity of the
view, we agreed to wait here for the Diligence to overtake us. We
were cordially welcomed in by a young peasant (a soldier’s wife) with
a complexion as fresh as the winds, and an expression as pure as the
mountain-snows. The floor of this rude tenement consisted of the
solid rock; and a three-legged table stood on it, on which were placed
three earthen bowls filled with sparkling wine, heated on a stove with
sugar. The woman stood by, and did the honours of this cheerful
repast with a rustic simplicity and a pastoral grace that might have
called forth the powers of Hemskirk and Raphael. I shall not soon
forget the rich ruby colour of the wine, as the sun shone upon it
through a low glazed window that looked out on the boundless
wastes around, nor its grateful spicy smell as we sat round it. I was
complaining of the trick that had been played by the waiter at Lyons
in the taking of our places, when I was told by the young Frenchman,
that, in case I returned to Lyons, I ought to go to the Hotel de
l’Europe, or to the Hotel du Nord, ‘in which latter case he should
have the honour of serving me.’ I thanked him for his information,
and we set out to finish the ascent of Mount Cenis, which we did in
another half-hour’s march. The traiteur of the Hotel du Nord and I
had got into a brisk theatrical discussion on the comparative merits
of Kean and Talma, he asserting that there was something in French
acting which an English understanding could not appreciate; and I
insisting loudly on bursts of passion as the forte of Talma, which was
a language common to human nature; that in his Œdipus, for
instance, it was not a Frenchman or an Englishman he had to
represent—‘Mais c’est un homme, c’est Œdipe‘—when our cautious
Spaniard brushed by us, determined to shew he could descend the
mountain, if he would not ascend it on foot. His figure was
characteristic enough, his motions smart and lively, and his dress
composed of all the colours of the rainbow. He strutted on before us
in the snow, like a flamingo or some tropical bird of variegated
plumage; his dark purple cloak fluttered in the air, his Montero cap,
set a little on one side, was of fawn colour; his waistcoat a bright
scarlet, his coat a reddish brown, his trowsers a pea-green, and his
boots a perfect yellow. He saluted us with a national politeness as he
passed, and seemed bent on redeeming the sedentary sluggishness of
his character by one bold and desperate effort of locomotion.
The coach shortly after overtook us. We descended a long and steep
declivity, with the highest point of Mount Cenis on our left, and a
lake to the right, like a landing-place for geese. Between the two was
a low, white monastery, and the barrier where we had our passports
inspected, and then went forward with only two stout horses and one
rider. The snow on this side of the mountain was nearly gone. I
supposed myself for some time nearly on level ground, till we came
in view of several black chasms or steep ravines in the side of the
mountain facing us, with water oozing from it, and saw through
some galleries, that is, massy stone-pillars knit together by thick
rails of strong timber, guarding the road-side, a perpendicular
precipice below, and other galleries beyond, diminished in a fairy
perspective, and descending ‘with cautious haste and giddy cunning,’
and with innumerable windings and re-duplications to an
interminable depth and distance from the height where we were. The
men and horses with carts, that were labouring up the path in the
hollow below, shewed like crows or flies. The road we had to pass
was often immediately under that we were passing, and cut from the
side of what was all but a precipice out of the solid rock by the broad,
firm master-hand that traced and executed this mighty work. The
share that art has in the scene is as appalling as the scene itself—the
strong security against danger as sublime as the danger itself. Near
the turning of one of the first galleries is a beautiful waterfall, which
at this time was frozen into a sheet of green pendant ice—a magical
transformation. Long after we continued to descend, now faster and
now slower, and came at length to a small village at the bottom of a
sweeping line of road, where the houses seemed like dove-cotes with
the mountain’s back reared like a wall behind them, and which I
thought the termination of our journey. But here the wonder and the
greatness began: for, advancing through a grove of slender trees to
another point of the road, we caught a new view of the lofty
mountain to our left. It stood in front of us, with its head in the skies,
covered with snow, and its bare sides stretching far away into a valley
that yawned at its feet, and over which we seemed suspended in mid
air. The height, the magnitude, the immovableness of the objects, the
wild contrast, the deep tones, the dance and play of the landscape
from the change of our direction and the interposition of other
striking objects, the continued recurrence of the same huge masses,
like giants following us with unseen strides, stunned the sense like a
blow, and yet gave the imagination strength to contend with a force
that mocked it. Here immeasurable columns of reddish granite
shelved from the mountain’s sides; here they were covered and
stained with furze and other shrubs; here a chalky cliff shewed a fir-
grove climbing its tall sides, and that itself looked at a distance like a
huge, branching pine-tree; beyond was a dark, projecting knoll, or
hilly promontory, that threatened to bound the perspective—but, on
drawing nearer to it, the cloudy vapour that shrouded it (as it were)
retired, and opened another vista beyond, that, in its own
unfathomed depth, and in the gradual obscurity of twilight,
resembled the uncertain gloom of the back-ground of some fine
picture. At the bottom of this valley crept a sluggish stream, and a
monastery or low castle stood upon its banks. The effect was
altogether grander than I had any conception of. It was not the idea
of height or elevation that was obtruded upon the mind and
staggered it, but we seemed to be descending into the bowels of the
earth—its foundations seemed to be laid bare to the centre; and
abyss after abyss, a vast, shadowy, interminable space, opened to
receive us. We saw the building up and frame-work of the world—its
limbs, its ponderous masses, and mighty proportions, raised stage
upon stage, and we might be said to have passed into an unknown
sphere, and beyond mortal limits. As we rode down our winding,
circuitous path, our baggage, (which had been taken off) moved on
before us; a grey horse that had got loose from the stable followed it,
and as we whirled round the different turnings in this rapid,
mechanical flight, at the same rate and the same distance from each
other, there seemed something like witchcraft in the scene and in our
progress through it. The moon had risen, and threw its gleams across
the fading twilight; the snowy tops of the mountains were blended
with the clouds and stars; their sides were shrouded in mysterious
gloom, and it was not till we entered Susa, with its fine old
drawbridge and castellated walls, that we found ourselves on terra
firma, or breathed common air again. At the inn at Susa, we first
perceived the difference of Italian manners; and the next day arrived
at Turin, after passing over thirty miles of the straightest, flattest,
and dullest road in the world. Here we stopped two days to recruit
our strength and look about us.
 CHAPTER XV

My arrival at Turin was the first and only moment of intoxication I

have found in Italy. It is a city of palaces. After a change of dress
(which, at the end of a long journey, is a great luxury) I walked out,
and traversing several clean, spacious streets, came to a promenade
outside the town, from which I saw the chain of Alps we had left
behind us, rising like a range of marble pillars in the evening sky.
Monte Viso and Mount Cenis resembled two pointed cones of ice,
shooting up above all the rest. I could distinguish the broad and
rapid Po, winding along at the other extremity of the walk, through
vineyards and meadow grounds. The trees had on that deep sad
foliage, which takes a mellower tinge from being prolonged into the
midst of winter, and which I had only seen in pictures. A Monk was
walking in a solitary grove at a little distance from the common path.
The air was soft and balmy, and I felt transported to another climate
—another earth—another sky. The winter was suddenly changed to
spring. It was as if I had to begin my life anew. Several young Italian
women were walking on the terrace, in English dresses, and with
graceful downcast looks, in which you might fancy that you read the
soul of the Decameron. It was a fine, serious grace, equally remote
from French levity and English sullenness, but it was the last I saw of
it. I have run the gauntlet of vulgar shapes and horrid faces ever
since. The women in Italy (so far as I have seen hitherto) are
detestably ugly. They are not even dark and swarthy, but a mixture of
brown and red, coarse, marked with the small pox, with pug-
features, awkward, ill-made, fierce, dirty, lazy, neither attempting
nor hoping to please. Italian beauty (if there is, as I am credibly
informed, such a thing) is retired, conventual, denied to the common
gaze. It was and it remains a dream to me, a vision of the brain! I
returned to the inn (the Pension Suisse) in high spirits, and made a
most luxuriant dinner. We had a wild duck equal to what we had in
Paris, and the grapes were the finest I ever tasted. Afterwards we
went to the Opera, and saw a ballet of action (out-heroding Herod)
with all the extravagance of incessant dumb-show and noise, the
glittering of armour, the burning of castles, the clattering of horses
on and off the stage, and heroines like furies in hysterics. Nothing at
Bartholomew Fair was ever in worse taste, noisier, or finer. It was as
if a whole people had buried their understandings, their
imaginations, and their hearts in their senses; and as if the latter
were so jaded and worn out, that they required to be inflamed,
dazzled, and urged almost to a kind of frenzy-fever, to feel any thing.
The house was crowded to excess, and dark, all but the stage, which
shed a dim, ghastly light on the gilt boxes and the audience. Milton
might easily have taken his idea of Pandemonium from the inside of
an Italian Theatre, its heat, its gorgeousness, and its gloom. We were
at the back of the pit, in which there was only standing room, and
leaned against the first row of boxes, full of the Piedmontese
Nobility, who talked fast and loud in their harsh guttural dialect, in
spite of the repeated admonitions of ‘a gentle usher, Authority by
name,’ who every five seconds hissed some lady of quality and high
breeding whose voice was heard with an éclat above all the rest. No
notice whatever was taken of the acting or the singing (which was
any thing but Italian, unless Italian at present means a bad imitation
of the French) till a comic dance attracted all eyes, and drew forth
bursts of enthusiastic approbation. I do not know the performers’
names, but a short, squat fellow (a kind of pollard of the green-
room) dressed in a brown linsey-woolsey doublet and hose, with
round head, round shoulders, short arms and short legs, made love
to a fine die-away lady, dressed up in the hoops, lappets and
furbelows of the last age, and stumped, nodded, pulled and tugged at
his mistress with laudable perseverance, and in determined
opposition to the awkward, mawkish graces of an Adonis of a rival,
with flowing locks, pink ribbons, yellow kerseymere breeches, and an
insipid expression of the utmost distress. It was an admirable
grotesque and fantastic piece of pantomime humour. The little fellow
who played the Clown, certainly entered into the part with infinite
adroitness and spirit. He merited the teres et rotundus of the poet.
He bounded over the stage like a foot-ball, rolled himself up like a
hedge-hog, stuck his arms in his sides like fins, rolled his eyes in his
head like bullets—and the involuntary plaudits of the audience
witnessed the success of his efforts at once to electrify and stultify
them! The only annoyance I found at Turin was the number of
beggars who are stuck against the walls like fixtures, and expose their
diseased, distorted limbs, with no more remorse or feeling than if
they did not belong to them, deafening you with one wearisome cry
the whole day long.
We were fortunate enough to find a voiture going from Geneva to
Florence, with an English lady and her niece—I bargained for the two
remaining places for ten guineas, and the journey turned out
pleasantly, I believe, to all parties; I am sure it did so to us. We were
to be eight days on the road, and to stop two days to rest, once at
Parma, and once at Bologna, to see the pictures. Having made this
arrangement, I was proceeding over the bridge towards the
Observatory that commands a view of the town and the whole
surrounding country, and had quite forgotten that I had such a thing
as a passport to take with me. I found, however, I had no fewer than
four signatures to procure, besides the six that were already tacked to
my passport, before I could proceed, and which I had some difficulty
in obtaining in time to set out on the following morning. The hurry I
was thrown into by this circumstance prevented me from seeing
some fine Rembrandts, Spagnolettos and Caraccis, which I was told
are to be found in the Palace of Prince Carignani and elsewhere. I
received this piece of information from my friend the Spaniard, who
called on me to inquire my proposed route, and to ‘testify,’ as he said,
‘his respect for the English character.’ Shall I own it? I who flout, rail
at, and contemn the English, was more pleased with this compliment
paid to me in my national character, than with any I ever received on
the score of personal civility. My fellow-traveller was for Genoa and
Milan; I for Florence: but we were to meet at Rome.
The next morning was clear and frosty, and the sun shone bright into
the windows of the voiture, as we left Turin, and proceeded for some
miles at a gentle pace along the banks of the Po. The road was level
and excellent, and we met a number of market people with mules
and yokes of oxen. There were some hills crowned with villas; some
bits of traditional Italian scenery now and then; but in general you
would not know but that you were in England, except from the
greater clearness and lightness of the air. We breakfasted at the first
town we came to, in two separate English groups, and I could not
help being struck with the manner of our reception at an Italian inn,
which had an air of indifference, insolence, and hollow swaggering
about it, as much as to say, ‘Well, what do you think of us Italians?
Whatever you think, we care very little about the matter!’ The French
are a politer people than the Italians—the English are honester; but I
may as well postpone these comparisons till my return. The room
smoked, and the waiter insisted on having the windows and the door
open, in spite of my remonstrances to the contrary. He flung in and
out of the room as if he had a great opinion of himself, and wished to
express it by a braggadocio air. The partridges, coffee, cheese and
grapes, on which we breakfasted à la fourchette, were, however,
excellent. I said so, but the acknowledgment seemed to be
considered as superfluous by our attendant, who received five francs
for his master, and one for himself, with an air of condescending
patronage. In consequence of something being said about our
passports, he relaxed in the solemnity of his deportment, and
observed that ‘he had been once near being engaged as valet to an
English gentleman, at Ostend; that he had but three hours to procure
his passport, but while he was getting it, the ship sailed, and he lost
his situation.’ Such was my first impression of Italian inns and
waiters, and I have seen nothing since materially to alter it. They
receive you with a mixture of familiarity and fierceness, and instead
of expecting any great civility from them, they excite that sort of
uncomfortable sensation as to the footing you are upon, that you are
glad to get away without meeting with some affront. There is either a
fawning sleekness, which looks like design, or an insolence, which
looks as if they had you in their power. In Switzerland and Savoy you
are waited on by women; in Italy by men. I cannot say I like the
exchange. From Turin to Florence, only one girl entered the room,
and she (not to mend the matter) was a very pretty one.—I was told
at the office of Messrs. Bonnafoux at Turin, that travelling to Rome
by a vetturino was highly dangerous, and that their Diligence was
guarded by four carabineers, to defend it from the banditti. I saw
none, nor the appearance of any thing that looked like a robber,
except a bare-foot friar, who suddenly sprang out of a hedge by the
road-side, with a somewhat wild and haggard appearance, which a
little startled me. Instead of finding a thief concealed behind each
bush, or a Salvator Rosa face scowling from a ruined hovel, or
peeping from a jutting crag at every turn, there is an excellent
turnpike-road all the way, three-fourths perfectly level, skirted with
hedges, corn-fields, orchards and vineyards, populous with hamlets
and villages, with labourers at work in the fields, and with crowds of
peasants in gay, picturesque attire, and with healthy, cheerful, open,
but manly countenances, passing along, either to or from the
different market-towns. It was Carnival time; and as we travelled on,
we were struck with the variety of rich dresses, red, yellow, and
green, the high-plaited head-dresses of the women, some in the
shape of helmets, with pins stuck in them like skewers, with gold
crosses at their bosoms, and large muffs on their hands, who poured
from the principal towns along the high-road, or turned off towards
some village-spire in the distance, chequering the landscape with
their gaily-tinted groups. They often turned back and laughed as we
drove by them, or passed thoughtfully on without noticing us, but
assuredly showed no signs of an intention to rob or murder us. Even
in the Apennines, though the road is rugged and desolate, it is lined
with farm-houses and towns at small distances; and there is but one
house all the way that is stained by the recollection of a tragic
catastrophe. How it may be farther south, I cannot say; but so far,
the reports to alarm strangers are (to the best of my observation and
conjecture) totally unfounded.
We had left the Alps behind us, the white tops of which we still saw
scarcely distinguishable from ridges of rolling clouds, and that
seemed to follow us like a formidable enemy, and almost enclose us
in a semicircle; and we had the Apennines in front, that, gradually
emerging from the horizon, opposed their undulating barrier to our
future progress, with shadowy shapes of danger and Covigliaijo
lurking in the midst of them. All the space between these two, for at
least 150 miles (I should suppose) is one level cultivated plain, one
continuous garden. This became more remarkably the case, as we
entered the territories of Maria-Louisa (the little States of Parma and
Placentia) when, for two whole days, we literally travelled through an
uninterrupted succession of corn-fields, vineyards and orchards, all
in the highest state of cultivation, with the hedges neatly clipped into
a kind of trellis-work, and the vines hanging in festoons from tree to
tree, or clinging ‘with marriageable arms’ round the branches of each
regularly planted and friendly support. It was more like passing
through a number of orchard-plots or garden-grounds in the
neighbourhood of some great city (such as London) than making a
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