Captured Eventually, Owing To The Treachery Of A Comrade, He Was
Put To Death On The Wheel At Valence On 26th May 1755.
Five
comrades were thrown into jail with him; and one of these
obtained his pardon on condition of acting as Mandrin's
executioner.
Alas, poor Joseph!
Three experiences Smollett had at this season which may well fall
to the lot of road-farers in France right down to the present
day. He was poisoned with garlic, surfeited with demi-roasted
small birds, and astonished at the solid fare of the poorest
looking travellers. The summer weather, romantic scenery, and
occasional picnics, which Smollett would have liked to repeat
every summer under the arches of the Pont du Gard - the monument
of antiquity which of all, excepting only the Maison Carree at
Nimes, most excited his enthusiastic admiration, all contributed
to put him into an abnormally cheerful and convalescent
humour. . . .
Smollett now bent his steps southwards to Montpellier. His
baggage had gone in advance. He was uncertain as yet whether to
make Montpellier or Nice his headquarters in the South. Like
Toulouse and Tours, and Turin, Montpellier was for a period a
Mecca to English health and pleasure seekers abroad. A city of no
great antiquity, but celebrated from the twelfth century for its
schools of Law and Physic, it had been incorporated definitely
with France since 1382, and its name recurs in French history
both as the home of famous men in great number and as, before and
after the brief pre-eminence of La Rochelle, the rival of Nimes
as capital of Protestantism in the South. Evelyn, Burnet, the two
Youngs, Edward and Arthur, and Sterne have all left us an
impression of the city. Prevented by snow from crossing the Mont
Cenis, John Locke spent two winters there in the days of Charles
II. (1675-77), and may have pondered a good many of the problems
of Toleration on a soil under which the heated lava of religious
strife was still unmistakeable. And Smollett must almost have
jostled en route against the celebrated author of The Wealth of
Nations, who set out with his pupil for Toulouse in February
1764. A letter to Hume speaks of the number of English in the
neighbourhood just a month later. Lomenie de Brienne was then in
residence as archbishop. In the following November, Adam Smith
and his charge paid a visit to Montpellier to witness a pageant
and memorial, as it was supposed, of a freedom that was gone for
ever, the opening of the States of Languedoc. Antiquaries and
philosophers went to moralise on the spectacle in the spirit in
which Freeman went to Andorra, Byron to the site of Troy, or De
Tocqueville to America. It was there that the great economist met
Horne Tooke.
Smollett's more practical and immediate object in making this
pilgrimage was to interview the great lung specialist, known
locally to his admiring compatriots as the Boerhaave of
Montpellier, Dr. Fizes. The medical school of Montpellier was
much in evidence during the third quarter of the eighteenth
century, and for the history of its various branches there are
extant numerous Memoires pour Servir, by Prunelle, Astruc, and
others.
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