CONTINENTAL REPOSE; OR, A MONTH’S RELAXATION.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “CHARLIE THORNHILL.”
I am one of that vast multitude which works hard for its daily existence. I may say from morning till night, and not unfrequently from night till early morning, I am busily employed. I gain my bread by the sweat of my brow, no less than the daily labourer, though the work of perspiration goes on inside instead of out. The consequence of this eternal routine ought to be a corresponding requirement of relaxation. Would you believe it, I remain in the rudest health, and in the highest condition of moral and physical enjoyment. It might be supposed that I therefore fail in creating that sympathy which is so flattering to us all. On the contrary: no sooner does the 12th or 15th of August come round than wife, children, friends, and acquaintance suddenly discover that I am the victim of too much labour: that I look worn, pale, overworked. Like thousands of my fellows, I must rest—I must have thorough repose. If I expect to resume my labours at a future period, I must go up Mont Blanc, or walk over Tête Noire or the Col de Balme, or pull down the Rhine from Basle to Rotterdam in an University eight, after having been made sick in an Ostend steamer, or amidst the villanous smells of Cologne. Now this is the sort of attention that a man receives very readily. Nothing is so flattering as the assurance that our personal appearance is an object of solicitude to our friends; and the plainer a man happens to be the more eagerly he swallows the incense. I confess that my own notions of rest are wholly at variance with this display of muscular Christianity, and that the dolce far niente of Italian life would be more to my taste than the summit of Mont Blanc if I had really reduced myself to the state of lassitude which is supposed to belong pre-eminently to briefless barristers and government clerks at the fall of the year. If I could be persuaded that the brain wants rest like the body, I should prefer taking it on my back in the sunshine, or with the tails of my coat over my arms in front of a fire; though the modern fashion of morning dressing seems to have rendered the latter precaution almost impossible. The brain wants refreshment and recreation, but not rest: it gets the former by a continental ramble, and a balance of fatigue is afforded to the material part of man, at the same time, after its unhealthy repose.
This theory readily accounts for the numbers who flock to the Continent, and answers satisfactorily various questions which the traveller puts to himself, as to the reasonableness of his choice. After the trouble of settling the route to be taken, the most becoming coloured suit for the Swiss lakes (the amount of taste displayed is remarkable), and the various advantages of this or that hotel, we have still to ask ourselves why we have deserted our own language, our beloved coinage, our well-furnished library, our excellent beefsteak, and good wine; the comforts of a home, in fact, for an incomprehensible jargon of foreign tongues, half-a-dozen moneys, manifestly invented for the plunder of the traveller, carpetless rooms at the back of the house, familiar waiters, six-franc dinners, beginning with pike and oil, and ending with potato-salad and unripe fruit, thin potations of bad hock, and the delusive snares of supposed economy? Why do we submit to the imposition of guides who are useless, slip and slide up one hill and down another, carry a bundle on our backs, which only contains sufficient to remind us what a comfortable thing a really clean shirt is, go without shaving, pack and unpack every twenty-four hours, carry our own soap from house to house, and put up with every conceivable want and necessity? Is it to escape the Penny Post?
Having done all this and a great deal more, and being, strange to say, still a little tired, like the man who after three dozen of oysters before dinner did not feel more hungry than before, I was induced to turn towards the Black Forest, in search of complete retirement. I knew Baden-Baden years ago as a quiet little place, with much beauty of scenery within a reasonable distance, where the gambling tables were the chief inducement to a few German, Russian, and English gentlemen to pass a month or two of the autumn. I remembered with great satisfaction that I could there get tolerable comfort, a theatre, a concert, good music, and sufficient society not to die of utter extinction. I could dine al fresco, in which I delight, either alone or with a friend. I could breakfast in the same way, and smoke my cigar, and lounge in and out of the town in a shooting-jacket, as the humour seized me; or, as I never gambled myself, I could watch the very extraordinary development of that singular passion in others, without being elbowed out of society by my virtuous neighbours. In a word, I had no doubt that I should find Baden-Baden what my grandmamma had told me it was years ago—a beautiful, quiet, but cheerful little retreat in the Black Forest.
The reader may imagine, or rather he cannot imagine, my surprise when I reached this sanctum of virtuous repose, supposed to be slumbering in its virgin beauty in the lap of surrounding hills and forests, on the 1st September, 1863. Hyde Park, the Bois de Boulogne, the Prado at Vienna, and the Congress at Frankfort, were all come together in front of the Conversazion’s Haus in Baden-Baden. From twenty different hotels were carriages of every sort being ruthlessly turned—imperials, valets, lady’s-maids, and all, to seek a more hospitable shelter elsewhere. Chairs and tables were at a premium, and beds were an impossibility. It occurred to one gentleman to hire a fiacre for the night; but his rest was a little disturbed by the necessity of turning out for a concert, Molière’s “Misanthrope,” and two balls. They called me fortunate in having previously secured a room. Whether that is the right term to apply to me under the circumstances, the reader shall have an opportunity of judging. On reaching the rooms, or the allée, where I expected to have at least three chairs to myself, I found, with difficulty, standing-room in an immense crowd of kings, princes, dukes, counts, barons, pickpockets, and ladies of all ranks and degrees of virtue and vice, listening to the strains of Mozart