EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CARRIAGES
velocity,"[1] and in making from "seventy to a hundred miles a day."[2] "But," objects Smollett, "the inconveniences attending this way of travelling are these. You are crowded into the carriage to the number of eight persons so as to sit very uneasy, and sometimes run the risk of being stifled among very indifferent company. You are hurried out of bed at four, three, nay often at two in the morning.[3] You are obliged to eat in the French way, which is very disagreeable to an English palate."[4] Arthur Young, too, notes in his "Travels in France":[5] "This is the first French diligence I have been in, and shall be the last ; they are detestable."
Well on in the nineteenth century Bayard Taylor, though not particularly fastidious, agrees perfectly with Young. "After waiting an hour in a hotel beside the rushing Yonne, a lumbering diligence was got ready, and we were offered places to Paris for seven francs. As the distance is one hundred and ten miles, this would be considered cheap fare, but I should not want to travel it again and be paid for doing so. Twelve persons were packed into a box not large enough for a cow."[6] For many travelers, however, the advantages of a system of transportation that was inexpensive and relieved them of all responsibility outweighed the discomfort.
More than one tourist has left us a striking picture of this mountainous and unwieldy vehicle, — "a huge, rickety, shabby, yellow argosy, all over dried, dirty mud splashes."[7] Edward Wright, who traveled in France toward the end of the first quarter of the century, says of it: "The diligence, a great coach that holds eight persons, is a machine that has not its name for nothing; what it wants in quickness it makes up in assiduity; though by the help of eight mules which drew it, we sometimes went at a brisk pace too; having pass'd from Lyons to Marseilles, which they call a hundred leagues, in three days and a half."[8]
"The stage-coach or diligence used in this country," says Nugent, "is much more convenient than those in England. It has eight chairs, neither of which touch one another, for
54
- ↑ Nugent, Grand Tour, iv, 19.
- ↑ One traveled in the diligence from Paris to Lyons in five days
- ↑ In making the trip to Lyons, James Edward Smith complains of having to rise at four or five in the morning. Tour on the Continent, i, 142, 153.
- ↑ Travels, i, 126.
- ↑ Page 151.
- ↑ Views Afoot, p. 461.
- ↑ Fitzgerald, Life of Sterne, i, 331.
- ↑ Wright, Some Observations made in Travelling through France and Italy, i, 13, 14.
