EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INNS
and who declares that "Through the whole south of France, except in large cities, the inns are cold, damp, dark, dismal, and dirty; the landlords equally disobliging and rapacious; the servants aukward, sluttish and slothful."[1]
Particularly shocking to travelers of our day would appear the entire lack of sanitary conveniences. In fact, until very recently Gallic ideals in matters of personal cleanliness and sanitation have called forth unfavorable comment from English tourists, but the state of things in the eighteenth century one can hardly venture to describe.[2] Smollett has a fragrant passage on the "temple of Cloacina" connected with the inn at Nimes which cannot be quoted, but which is worthy the attention of the inquiring reader.[3]
Englishmen were inclined also to be critical about French beds. Nugent warns the traveler: "After you have passed Boulogne, you will not find the beds like ours in England; for they raise them very high with several thick mattresses: their linen is ill-washed and worse dried, so that you must take particular care to see the sheets aired."[4]
With more particularity another Englishman comments on the beds in inns: "Two of them are always placed in the same room: they consist of a bed of straw at the bottom, then a large mattrass, then a feather-bed, then another large mattrass, upon which are the blankets, etc., with all which, the bed is so high, that a man with great difficulty climbs into it; and, if he were to tumble out of it by mischance, he would be in danger of breaking his bones upon a brick floor."[5]
But every traveler was tempted to magnify his experience and to regard it as typical. If he found in one city that the "beds seemed stuffed with potatoes rather than feathers,"[6] he easily assumed that French beds were usually of the same sort. It is well to remember that Arthur Young distinctly says: "Beds are better in France; in England they are good only at good inns; and we have none of that torment, which is so perplexing in England, to have
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- ↑ Travels, ii, 256.
- ↑ "Provence is a pleasant country, well cultivated; but the inns are not so good here as in Languedoc, and few of them are provided with a certain convenience which an English traveller can very ill dispense with. Those you find are generally on tops of the houses, exceedingly nasty; and so much exposed to the weather, that a valetudinarian cannot use them without hazard of his life." Ibid., i, 197.
- ↑ Ibid., i, 198.
- ↑ Grand Tour, iv, 22.
- ↑ (Jones) Journey to France, i, 90.
- ↑ Smith, Tour on the Continent, i, 143.
