and drives his team, something like the Courier of Saint
Petersburgh in the circle at Astley’s or Franconi’s: only he sits
his own horse instead of standing on him. The immense jack-boots
worn by these postilions, are sometimes a century or two old; and
are so ludicrously disproportionate to the wearer’s foot, that the
spur, which is put where his own heel comes, is generally halfway
up the leg of the boots. The man often comes out of the stableyard,
with his whip in his hand and his shoes on, and brings out,
in both hands, one boot at a time, which he plants on the ground by
the side of his horse, with great gravity, until everything is
ready. When it is – and oh Heaven! the noise they make about it! –
he gets into the boots, shoes and all, or is hoisted into them by a
couple of friends; adjusts the rope harness, embossed by the
labours of innumerable pigeons in the stables; makes all the horses
kick and plunge; cracks his whip like a madman; shouts ‘En route –
Hi!’ and away we go. He is sure to have a contest with his horse
before we have gone very far; and then he calls him a Thief, and a
Brigand, and a Pig, and what not; and beats him about the head as
if he were made of wood.
There is little more than one variety in the appearance of the
country, for the first two days. From a dreary plain, to an
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Dickens, Charles – Pictures From Italy
interminable avenue, and from an interminable avenue to a dreary
plain again. Plenty of vines there are in the open fields, but of
a short low kind, and not trained in festoons, but about straight
sticks. Beggars innumerable there are, everywhere; but an
extraordinarily scanty population, and fewer children than I ever
encountered. I don’t believe we saw a hundred children between
Paris and Chalons. Queer old towns, draw-bridged and walled: with
odd little towers at the angles, like grotesque faces, as if the
wall had put a mask on, and were staring down into the moat; other
strange little towers, in gardens and fields, and down lanes, and
in farm-yards: all alone, and always round, with a peaked roof,
and never used for any purpose at all; ruinous buildings of all
sorts; sometimes an hotel de ville, sometimes a guard-house,
sometimes a dwelling-house, sometimes a chateau with a rank garden,
prolific in dandelion, and watched over by extinguisher-topped
turrets, and blink-eyed little casements; are the standard objects,
repeated over and over again. Sometimes we pass a village inn,
with a crumbling wall belonging to it, and a perfect town of outhouses;
and painted over the gateway, ‘Stabling for Sixty Horses;’
as indeed there might be stabling for sixty score, were there any
horses to be stabled there, or anybody resting there, or anything
stirring about the place but a dangling bush, indicative of the
wine inside: which flutters idly in the wind, in lazy keeping with
everything else, and certainly is never in a green old age, though
always so old as to be dropping to pieces. And all day long,
strange little narrow waggons, in strings of six or eight, bringing
cheese from Switzerland, and frequently in charge, the whole line,
of one man, or even boy – and he very often asleep in the foremost
cart – come jingling past: the horses drowsily ringing the bells
upon their harness, and looking as if they thought (no doubt they
do) their great blue woolly furniture, of immense weight and
thickness, with a pair of grotesque horns growing out of the
collar, very much too warm for the Midsummer weather.
Then, there is the Diligence, twice or thrice a-day; with the dusty
outsides in blue frocks, like butchers; and the insides in white
nightcaps; and its cabriolet head on the roof, nodding and shaking,
like an idiot’s head; and its Young-France passengers staring out
of window, with beards down to their waists, and blue spectacles
awfully shading their warlike eyes, and very big sticks clenched in
their National grasp. Also the Malle Poste, with only a couple of