Wintering in the Riviera. William James Miller

      I.

       Table of Contents

      CONTINENTAL TRAVELLING.

      I have sometimes thought that if it were possible for a person of mature years now living to return to the world, with memory unimpaired, after a period of five hundred or even of one hundred years hence, how strangely new to him everything would appear! Events succeed each other in these times with such startling rapidity, that he would be a bold man who would venture to predict what even a generation will bring forth. We may speculate on the effects likely to result from agencies now in operation—as to what, for example, may be the future of Great Britain, looking to the gigantic scale on which hazardous enterprise is carried on; to the contests of labour with capital in which natural laws are set at defiance; to the growth of Ritualism in the English Church; to the penchant which our rulers seem to have for annexing or conquering remote provinces, stern and wild or insalubrious; to a thousand other things which are with more or less force influencing or disquieting our country commercially, socially, or politically—but none of us can possibly foresee the actual consequences and the condition of things to which they will lead. In the future there is so much dependent on occurrences which appear to us to be fortuitous (though truly under the guidance of Supreme Wisdom), that we can only feel that over all there hangs an impenetrable veil of mysterious darkness. A single unexpected event may turn aside the policy of an age, or even alter the divisions of the world. A single man by a foolish blunder may plunge nations into protracted war. A single happy discovery, a single clever invention, may affect the fortunes or alter the habits of a whole people. A single convulsion of nature may change the aspect of a state. But when we turn from the future to the past, the case is different, and we can pretty well realize what the feelings of one who has lived, say, sixty years ago would be if he could now return to earth. It would, indeed, be some time ere he would begin to grasp the extent of the wonderful changes which, since he formerly lived, have been effected. But of all the changes flowing from the inventions and discoveries which the long peace succeeding Waterloo was instrumental in producing, he would probably be most struck by the revolution accomplished in the matter of travelling.

      We have only to go back half a century to the time when a tour upon the Continent of Europe was attended by great expense, inconvenience, and even danger. It consumed much time, and no Englishman upon whom business did not lay a necessity to travel, could undertake any very extensive pilgrimage in these foreign countries unless possessed of ample means united to ample leisure. It was thus generally reserved for young noblemen and gentlemen of wealth, as the completion of their education, to take, with a tutor, a courier, and a sufficient retinue, the grand tour of Europe, the limit of which was usually, though not always, Constantinople. I suppose this circumstance has given rise to the Continental idea, which at least formerly prevailed, that every Englishman was a milord Anglais, and to its practical consequence, from which present travellers continue to suffer—the custom, gradually disappearing, of charging English persons upon a different scale from that applied to natives. No doubt many of those men of former days scattered money profusely, and to a certain extent their successors continue to do so, and are even exceeded by some of the American travellers who, accustomed to pay in dollars where shillings with us often suffice, contrive by their extravagance to spoil for others the places they frequent.

      Times are now changed since the days of our grandfathers. The treacherous sailing vessel (the smack, which would take at one time three days, and at another, because of adverse winds, three weeks to go from Leith to London) is supplanted by the steady, expeditious, and almost faultlessly punctual steamboat; while the lumbering diligence or almost equally lumbering post-chaise has been driven out of the field by, wherever it exists, the rapid railway train. Nevertheless, as regards Continental railway rapidity, M. Arago’s expectations that Parisians might ‘on the same day examine the preparations of our squadron at Toulon; may breakfast on juicy rougets at Marseilles; may bathe at mid-day their relaxed limbs in the mineral waters of Bagnères, and return in the evening by way of Bordeaux to attend a ball or the Opera House,’[1] have hardly as yet, at least, been realized; for the railway train abroad bears about the same proportion in point of speed to the English train as the clumsy diligence did of old to our high-flyers and our ten-mile-an-hour stage-coaches.[2] Sometimes, indeed, people in former times, who were able to do so, travelled on the Continent in pursuit of health; and a very interesting account of a tour of this description, made to a large extent over the same ground as that which forms the subject of description in the following pages, is contained in The Diary of an Invalid, by Henry Matthew, A.M., made during a journey, performed in the years 1817–18-19, through Italy, Switzerland, and France, from which an idea of the difference of travelling in those days—sixty years ago—from what it is now, may to some extent be gathered. Since the introduction of railways, which now form a complete network all over the Continent of Europe, reaching some of its wildest parts, and not hesitating even to penetrate some of its loftiest mountains, and often by means of costly tunnels connecting long stretches of country, travelling has been made so easy, and the facilities for availing themselves of the means of locomotion have been rendered so great, that there are comparatively few persons of the better classes who have not at some time or other, and in a greater or lesser measure, visited Continental lands. Our very mechanics have, especially by means of excursion trains, sometimes in connection with such great occasions as foreign Exhibitions, been enabled to see a little of other lands; and even the seeing a little of another land is calculated to remove prejudices, to enlarge the ideas, and to extend the amount of one’s information.[3]

      People in the present day travel sometimes for pleasure and to obtain acquaintance with what cannot be seen at home, and sometimes for the sake of health; and it is astonishing to what an extent this latter reason has operated on the people of Great Britain, who rush from the rigours of their northern climate—its clouds, its fogs, and its rains—to enjoy the sunshine of warmer places, avoiding and exchanging wet, foggy, and chilly winter quarters at home for pleasant sunny places abroad. So much is this the case, that whole colonies of English people, many of them owning houses, built or bought for their residence, are found scattered over the Continent, particularly on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. They go to winter there, and the places they frequent become