Next Day We Put Up At A
Wretched Place Called Orgon, Where, However, We Were Regaled With
An Excellent Supper; And Among Other Delicacies, With A Dish Of
Green Pease.
Provence is a pleasant country, well cultivated; but
the inns are not so good here as in Languedoc, and few of them
are provided with a certain convenience which an English
traveller can very ill dispense with.
Those you find are
generally on the tops of houses, exceedingly nasty; and so much
exposed to the weather, that a valetudinarian cannot use them
without hazard of his life. At Nismes in Languedoc, where we
found the Temple of Cloacina in a most shocking condition, the
servant-maid told me her mistress had caused it to be made on
purpose for the English travellers; but now she was very sorry
for what she had done, as all the French who frequented her
house, instead of using the seat, left their offerings on the
floor, which she was obliged to have cleaned three or four times
a day. This is a degree of beastliness, which would appear
detestable even in the capital of North-Britain. On the fourth
day of our pilgrimage, we lay in the suburbs of Aix, but did not
enter the city, which I had a great curiosity to see. The
villainous asthma baulked me of that satisfaction. I was pinched
with the cold, and impatient to reach a warmer climate. Our next
stage was at a paltry village, where we were poorly entertained.
I looked so ill in the morning, that the good woman of the house,
who was big with child, took me by the hand at parting, and even
shed tears, praying fervently that God would restore me to my
health. This was the only instance of sympathy, compassion, or
goodness of heart, that I had met with among the publicans of
France. Indeed at Valencia, our landlady, understanding I was
travelling to Montpellier for my health would have dissuaded me
from going thither; and exhorted me, in particular, to beware of
the physicians, who were all a pack of assassins. She advised me
to eat fricassees of chickens, and white meat, and to take a good
bouillon every morning.
A bouillon is an universal remedy among the good people of
France; insomuch, that they have no idea of any person's dying,
after having swallowed un bon bouillon. One of the English
gentlemen, who were robbed and murdered about thirty years ago
between Calais and Boulogne, being brought to the post-house of
Boulogne with some signs of life, this remedy was immediately
administered. "What surprises me greatly, (said the post-master,
speaking of this melancholy story to a friend of mine, two years
after it happened) I made an excellent bouillon, and poured it
down his throat with my own hands, and yet he did not recover."
Now, in all probability, this bouillon it was that stopped his
breath. When I was a very young man, I remember to have seen a
person suffocated by such impertinent officiousness. A young man
of uncommon parts and erudition, very well esteemed at the
university of G - ow was found early one morning in a subterranean
vault among the ruins of an old archiepiscopal palace, with his
throat cut from ear to ear. Being conveyed to a public-house in
the neighbourhood, he made signs for pen, ink, and paper, and in
all probability would have explained the cause of this terrible
catastrophe, when an old woman, seeing the windpipe, which was
cut, sticking out of the wound, and mistaking it for the gullet,
by way of giving him a cordial to support his spirits, poured
into it, through a small funnel, a glass of burnt brandy, which
strangled
him in the tenth part of a minute. The gash was so hideous, and
formed by so many repeated strokes of a razor, that the surgeons
believed he could not possibly be the perpetrator himself;
nevertheless this was certainly the case.
At Brignolles, where we dined, I was obliged to quarrel with the
landlady, and threaten to leave her house, before she would
indulge us with any sort of flesh-meat. It was meagre day, and
she had made her provision accordingly. She even hinted some
dissatisfaction at having heretics in her house: but, as I was
not disposed to eat stinking fish, with ragouts of eggs and
onions, I insisted upon a leg of mutton, and a brace of fine
partridges, which I found in the larder. Next day, when we set
out in the morning from Luc, it blew a north-westerly wind so
extremely cold and biting, that even a flannel wrapper could not
keep me tolerably warm in the coach. Whether the cold had put our
coachman in a bad humour, or he had some other cause of
resentment against himself, I know not; but we had not gone above
a quarter of a mile, when he drove the carriage full against the
corner of a garden wall, and broke the axle-tree, so that we were
obliged to return to the inn on foot, and wait a whole day, until
a new piece could be made and adjusted. The wind that blew, is
called Maestral, in the Provencial dialect, and indeed is the
severest that ever I felt. At this inn, we met with a young
French officer who had been a prisoner in England, and spoke our
language pretty well. He told me, that such a wind did not blow
above twice or three times in a winter, and was never of long
continuance, that in general, the weather was very mild and
agreeable during the winter months; that living was very cheap in
this part of Provence, which afforded great plenty of game. Here,
too, I found a young Irish recollet, in his way from Rome to his
own country. He complained, that he was almost starved by the
inhospitable disposition of the French people; and that the
regular clergy, in particular, had treated him with the most
cruel disdain.
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