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