EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INNS
needy assassins. …" Nervous travelers, we learn, may put the table with chairs on it against the door if bolts are lacking. "Such precautions, are, however, less necessary in England, but on the Continent they are much more so."
"It will not be amiss in such lonesome places, where accidents may oblige a traveller to remain the whole night, to show his fire-arms to the landlord in a familiar discourse, without acquainting him of his well-grounded suspicion of insecurity; and to tell him, with a courageous look, that you are not afraid of a far superior number of enemies."[1]
In view of the foregoing warnings we see that not all inns were models of comfort and that they forced travelers to provide somewhat minutely for personal needs. There is, in fact, no more striking commentary on the general lack on the Continent of ordinary articles of comfort, not to say luxury, than the list of necessaries suggested for the use of travelers. As late as 1798 Mariana Starke recommends all sorts of things for every family to be provided with on leaving England; among them sheets, pillows, blankets, towels, pistols, a pocket-knife to eat with, soup, tea, salt, spoons, a tea-and-sugar chest, loaf-sugar, mustard, Cayenne-pepper, ginger, nutmegs, oatmeal, sago, plenty of medicines, etc., etc.[2]
II
French Inns
In cleanliness[3] and comfort English inns were on the whole regarded as superior to the French, though the latter were commonly praised by travelers.[4] Comfort, as elsewhere pointed out, was far less generally diffused throughout Europe in the eighteenth century than now, abounding greatly in one district while strangely lacking in another. But the English were the wealthiest people in Europe, except perhaps the Dutch, and everywhere insisted upon the best that was to be had. No mere chance was it, therefore, that Dessein's Inn at Calais, where swarms of English tourists landed, was one of the most extensive in
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