Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

sudden peopling of the solitude!

‘It is well,’ said I, scattering among them what small coin I had;

‘here comes Louis, and I am quite roused from my nap.’

We journeyed on again, and I welcomed every new assurance that

France stood where I had left it. There were the posting-houses,

with their archways, dirty stable-yards, and clean post-masters’

wives, bright women of business, looking on at the putting-to of

the horses; there were the postilions counting what money they got,

into their hats, and never making enough of it; there were the

standard population of grey horses of Flanders descent, invariably

biting one another when they got a chance; there were the fleecy

sheepskins, looped on over their uniforms by the postilions, like

bibbed aprons when it blew and rained; there were their Jack-boots,

and their cracking whips; there were the cathedrals that I got out

to see, as under some cruel bondage, in no wise desiring to see

them; there were the little towns that appeared to have no reason

for being towns, since most of their houses were to let and nobody

could be induced to look at them, except the people who couldn’t

let them and had nothing else to do but look at them all day. I

lay a night upon the road and enjoyed delectable cookery of

potatoes, and some other sensible things, adoption of which at home

would inevitably be shown to be fraught with ruin, somehow or

other, to that rickety national blessing, the British farmer; and

at last I was rattled, like a single pill in a box, over leagues of

stones, until – madly cracking, plunging, and flourishing two grey

tails about – I made my triumphal entry into Paris.

At Paris, I took an upper apartment for a few days in one of the

hotels of the Rue de Rivoli; my front windows looking into the

garden of the Tuileries (where the principal difference between the

nursemaids and the flowers seemed to be that the former were

locomotive and the latter not): my back windows looking at all the

other back windows in the hotel, and deep down into a paved yard,

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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

where my German chariot had retired under a tight-fitting archway,

to all appearance for life, and where bells rang all day without

anybody’s minding them but certain chamberlains with feather brooms

and green baize caps, who here and there leaned out of some high

window placidly looking down, and where neat waiters with trays on

their left shoulders passed and repassed from morning to night.

Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible force into the

Morgue. I never want to go there, but am always pulled there. One

Christmas Day, when I would rather have been anywhere else, I was

attracted in, to see an old grey man lying all alone on his cold

bed, with a tap of water turned on over his grey hair, and running,

drip, drip, drip, down his wretched face until it got to the corner

of his mouth, where it took a turn, and made him look sly. One New

Year’s Morning (by the same token, the sun was shining outside, and

there was a mountebank balancing a feather on his nose, within a

yard of the gate), I was pulled in again to look at a flaxen-haired

boy of eighteen, with a heart hanging on his breast – ‘from his

mother,’ was engraven on it – who had come into the net across the

river, with a bullet wound in his fair forehead and his hands cut

with a knife, but whence or how was a blank mystery. This time, I

was forced into the same dread place, to see a large dark man whose

disfigurement by water was in a frightful manner comic, and whose

expression was that of a prize-fighter who had closed his eyelids

under a heavy blow, but was going immediately to open them, shake

his head, and ‘come up smiling.’ Oh what this large dark man cost

me in that bright city!

It was very hot weather, and he was none the better for that, and I