The Anglo-French Entente in the Seventeenth Century. Charles Bastide
href="#u2d224de0-c492-4075-a92c-c84f6118c8fd">[1]
Next to official envoys stood unofficial agents, gentlemen who preferred exile to a more rigorous punishment; lastly, mere adventurers.
Not a few Frenchmen came over to England on business purposes. The Bordeaux wine merchant, the Rouen printer, the Paris glovemaker, could not always trust their English agents when some difficult question arose. Cardinal Mazarin's envoy mentions in his dispatches the "numerous Bordeaux merchants in London, some of whom are Catholics."[2] At the Restoration there existed a kind of French Chamber of Commerce, and, as early as 1663, the ambassadors extol the adroitness of one Dumas, who appears to have played the part of an unofficial consul-general.[3]
But there were travellers by taste as well as by necessity. Long before the word globe-trotter was added to the English language, not a few Frenchmen spent their lives wandering about the world, to satisfy a natural craving for adventure. Men of letters had been known to travel before Voltaire or Regnard. Shall we name Voiture, Boisrobert, Saint-Amant, the author of Moses, an epic ridiculed by Boileau? Saint-Amant celebrated his journey in an amusing poetical skit in which he complains of the climate, the splenetic character of the people, the rudeness of the drama. But most of the travellers preferred to note their impressions in ordinary prose. Some published guides. Those narratives enable us to find out how a Frenchman could journey from Paris to London under the Grand Monarch.
Then, as now, the travellers had the choice between the Calais and Dieppe routes. According to their social status, they would set out in a private coach, on horseback, or in the stage coach. The latter was not yet the diligence, it was a heavy cumbersome vehicle "neither decent nor comfortable," through the canvas cover of which the rain would pour.[4] It took five days to go from Paris to Calais. As travelling by night was out of the question, the traveller would put up at Beaumont-sur-Oise, Poix, Abbeville, Montreuil.
As soon as the traveller had passed the gates of the capital, his adventures began. When the Swiss servant fell off his horse, every one laughed because he received no more consideration than a "stout portmanteau."[5] Then the roads were bad: the coach might upset or stick fast in the mud. Dangers had to be taken into account as well as inconveniences: in November 1662, Ambassador Cominges quaintly congratulated himself upon avoiding "two or three shipwrecks on land," meaning that there were floods between Montreuil and Boulogne.[6] Another danger arose from the highwaymen who infested the country, and, in time of war, no one dreamed of leaving the shelter of a fortress such as Abbeville or Montreuil without getting previous information on the movements of the enemy in Flanders or Artois.[7]
A traveller will always complain of the inns; in the seventeenth century they seem to have been of more than Spartan simplicity: "We were no sooner got into our chambers," writes a distinguished traveller, "but we thought we were come there too soon, as the highway seemed the cleaner and more desirable place. … After supper, we retreated to the place that usually gives relief to all moderate calamities, but our beds were antidotes to sleep: I do not complain of the hardness, but the tangible quality of what was next me, and the savour of all about made me quite forget my supper."[8]
The illustration "On the road to Calais," taken from a contemporary print, gives a good idea of what an inn, the "Tin Pot" at Boulogne or the "Petit Saint-Jean" at Calais, then looked like. The scene is dreary enough, in spite of the picturesque bare-legged turnspit by the roaring wood-fire, the furniture is scanty, there are draughts, and the litter lying about spells slovenliness and discomfort.
In such a place, one must be as wary of one's fellow-travellers as of the rascally innkeepers. "One of the Frenchmen," Locke goes on to say, "who had disbursed for our troop, was, by the natural quickness of his temper, carried beyond the mark, and demanded for our shares more than we thought due, whereupon one of the English desired an account of particulars, not that the whole was so considerable, but to keep a certain custom we had in England not to pay money without knowing for what. Monsieur answered briskly, he would give no account; the other as briskly, that he would have it: this produced a reckoning of the several disbursements, and an abatement of one-fourth of the demand, and a great demonstration of good nature. Monsieur Steward showed afterwards more civility and good nature, after the little contest, than he had done all the journey before."
Those were minor difficulties next to what the traveller had to expect who was bold enough to cross the Channel. In 1609, Beaumont and Fletcher mention not without horror "Dover's dreadful cliffe and the dangers of the merciless Channel 'twixt that and Callis."[9] The passengers crossed on what would appear now a ridiculously small bark, which belonged to the English Post Office. The boat, pompously named "a packet-boat," attempted the passage twice a week, but did not always effect it. Even when the sea was calm the skipper had to wait for the tide before weighing anchor. If the tide turned in the night, the passengers would set up in an inn outside the walls of Calais because the gates closed at sunset, and, as about the same time a huge chain was stretched across the harbour's mouth, they were compelled to reach by means of a small cock-boat the bark anchored in the roads.
At last, the passengers being safely on board, the sails are set. Hardly has the wind carried the packet-boat beyond Cape Grisnez when the swell becomes uncomfortably perceptible. Nowadays we cross the Channel on fast steamers, but progress which has given us speed has not done away with the chief discomfort. Even as we do, so our forefathers dreaded sea-sickness.
Locke, good sailor as he was, rather coarsely jests at his fellow-traveller, the astronomer Römer: "I believe he will sacrifice to Neptune from the depths of his heart or stomach."[10] Those who have experienced the sufferings of a bad passage will sympathise with the Frenchman Gourville. "I went on board the packet-boat," he writes, "to go to Dover; at two or three leagues out at sea, we were beset by a dead calm; as I was very ill, I compelled the sailors to let down a small skiff not ten feet long; and two of them having got into it with their oars, I had trouble enough to find room; hardly had we rowed two leagues, when a gale arose that scared my two sailors. I got to land nevertheless and, no sooner had I drained a glass of canary, than I felt well again."[11] On coming back, Fortune did not favour him. The North Sea that he had thus braved, took her revenge. "I travelled post to Dover where I went on board the packet-boat. The winds being against us, I felt worse than the first time, and it took me three weeks to recover."
The time of crossing varied considerably. "The Strait of Dover," wrote Coulon, "is only seven leagues wide, so that with a fair wind one can cross from one kingdom to the other in three hours."[12] But then the wind was seldom fair. Generally it took twelve or fourteen hours to sail from Calais to Dover. The passengers always had to take the unexpected into account. "At 6 in the evening," Evelyn records in his Diary, "set saile for Calais, the wind not favourable. I was very sea sicke. Coming to an anker about one o'clock; about five in the morning we had a long boate to carry us to land tho' at a good distance; this we willingly enter'd, because two vessells were chasing us, but being now almost at the harbour's mouth, thro' inadvertency there brake in upon us two such heavy seas as had almost sunk the boate, I being neere the middle up in water. Our steeresman, it seems, apprehensive of the danger, was preparing to leape into the sea and trust to swimming, but seeing the vessell emerge, he put her into the pier, and so, God be thanked, we got to Calais, tho' wett."[13] Thus delays were frequent enough; for which fogs, contrary winds, and storms were chiefly responsible. No one