EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INNS
Abraham Goelnitz, who in 1631 went through France on foot and on horseback, often going out of the beaten track. He notes : "In certain villages, in certain towns even in the center of France, the inns lack everything. One can hardly find bread and a fire. Beds are wanting."[1]
Particularly defective were "the post-houses," which, as one traveler in 1776 remarks, "are not always places of reception as with us: many of them are ordinary farmhouses; and when they are inns, they are frequently very indifferent."[2] In this matter, as in others, Young may be trusted to tell the truth as it was. At Moulins, in the Loire region, "I went," says he, "to the Belle Image, but found it so bad that I left it and went to the Lyon d'Or, which is worse. This capital of the Bourbonnois, and on the great post road to Italy, has not an inn equal to the little village of Chavanne."[3] What one might encounter off the main routes may be judged from Young's experience at Saint-Girons[4] in the Basses Pyrénées, a town of four or five thousand inhabitants, where he was forced to put up at a public house undeserving the name of inn. "A wretched hag, the demon of beastliness, presides there. I laid [!] not rested, in a chamber over a stable, whose effluviae [!] through the broken floor were the least offensive of the perfumes afforded by this hideous place. It could give me but two stale eggs, for which I paid exclusive of all other charges, 20ƒ. … But the inns all the way from Nismes are wretched, except at Lodeve, Gange, Carcasonne, and Mirepoix."[5]
Of the road near Mayres in Ardèche he says: "It conducts, according to custom, to a miserable inn, but with a large stable."[6] After dining one day at Viviers and passing the Rhone, he remarks: "After the wretched inns of the Vivarais, dirt, filth, bugs, and starving, to arrive at the Hotel de Monsieur, at Montilimart, a great and excellent inn, was something like the arrival in France from Spain."[7]
With Young's comments before us we may be the more inclined to give credence to the peppery Smollett, whose journey antedates Young's by about a quarter of a century,
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