3. LETTER III.
Havre.—This is one of those places which scribbling
travellers hurry through with a crisp mention of
their arrival and departure, but as I have passed a day
here upon customhouse compulsion, and passed it
pleasantly too, and as I have an evening entirely to
myself, and a good fire, why I will order another pound
of wood (they sell it like a drug here), and Monsieur
and Mademoiselle Somebodies, “violin players right
from the hands of Paganini, only fifteen years of age,
and miracles of music” (so says the placard), may delight
other lovers of precocious talent than I. Pen,
ink, and paper, for number two!
If I had not been warned against being astonished
short of Paris, I should have thought Havre quite an
affair. I certainly have seen more that is novel and
amusing since morning than I ever saw before in any
seven days of my life. Not a face, not a building, not
a dress, not a child even, not a stone in the street, nor
shop, nor woman, nor beast of burden, looks in any
comparable degree like its namesake the other side of
the water.
It was very provoking to eat a salt supper and go to
bed in that tiresome berth again last night, with a
French hotel in full view, and no permission to send
for a fresh biscuit even, or a cup of milk. It was nine
o'clock when we reached the pier, and at that late
hour there was, of course, no officer to be had for permission
to land; and there paced the patrole, with his
high black cap and red pompon, up and down the
quay, within six feet of our tafferel, and a shot from his
arquebuss would have been the consequence of any
unlicensed communication with the shore. It was
something, however, to sleep without rocking; and
after a fit of musing anticipation, which kept me conscious,
of the sentinel's measured tread till midnight,
the “gentle goddess” sealed up my cares effectually,
and I awoke at sunrise—in France!
It is a common thing enough to go abroad, and it
may seem idle and common-place to be enthusiastic
about it; but nothing is common, or a trifle, to me,
that can send the blood so warm to my heart, and the
color to my temples as generously, as did my first
conscious thought when I awoke this morning. In
France! I would not have had it a dream for the
price of an empire!
Early in the morning a woman came clattering into
the cabin with wooden shoes, and a patois of mingled
French and English—a blanchisseuse—spattered to the
knees with mud, but with a cap and 'kerchief that
would have made the fortune of a New-York milliner.
Ciel! what politeness! and what white teeth! and
what a knowing row of papillotes, laid in precise parallel
on her clear brunette temples.
“Quelle nouvelle?” said the captain.
“Poland est a bas!” was the answer, with a look
of heroic sorrow, that would have become a tragedy
queen, mourning for the loss of a throne. The French
manner, for once, did not appear exaggerated. It was
news to sadden us all. Pity! pity! that the broad
Christian world could look on and see this glorious
people trampled to the dust in one of the most noble
and desperate struggles for liberty that the earth ever
saw! What an opportunity was here lost to France
for setting a seal of double truth and splendor on her
own newly-achieved triumph over despotism. The
washerwoman broke the silence with “Any clothes to
wash, monsieur?” and in the instant return of my
thoughts to my own comparatively-pitiful interests, I
found the philosophy for all I had condemned in kings
—the humiliating and selfish individuality of human
nature. And yet I believe with Dr. Channing on that
dogma!
At ten o'clock I had performed the traveller's routine—had
submitted my trunk and my passport to the
three authorities, and had got into (and out of) as
many mounting passions at what seemed to me the
intolerable impertinences of searching my linen, and
inspecting my person for scars. I had paid the porter
three times his due rather than endure his cataract of
French expostulation; and with a bunch of keys, and
a landlady attached to it, had ascended by a cold, wet,
marble staircase, to a parlor and bedroom on the fifth
floor; as pretty a place, when you get there, and as
difficult to get to as if it were a palace in thin air. It
is perfectly French! Fine, old, last-century chairs,
covered with splendid yellow damask, two sofas of the
same, the legs or arms of every one imperfect; a coarse
wood dressing-table, covered with fringed drapery and
a sort of throne pincushion, with an immense glass
leaning over it, gilded probably in the time of Henri
Quatre; artificial flowers all round the room, and
prints of Atala and Napoleon mourant over the walls;
windows opening to the floor on hinges, damask and
muslin curtains inside, and boxes for flower-pots without;
a bell-wire that pulls no bell, a bellows too asthmatic
even to wheeze, tongs that refuse to meet, and
a carpet as large as a table-cloth in the centre of
the floor, may answer for an inventory of the “parlor.”
The bedchamber, about half as large as the
boxes in Rattle-row at Saratoga, opens by folding-doors,
and discloses a bed, that for tricksy ornament
as well as size might look the bridal couch for a faery
queen in a panorama; the same golden-sprig damask
looped over it, tent-fashion, with splendid crimson
cord, tassels, fringes, etc., and a pillow beneath that I
shall be afraid to sleep on, it is so dainty a piece of
needlework. There is a delusion about it, positively.
One can not help imagining that all this splendor
means something, and it would require a worse evil
than any of these little deficiencies of comfort to disturb
the self-complacent, Captain-Jackson sort of
feeling, with which one throws his cloak on one sofa
and his hat on the other, and spreads himself out
for a lounge before this mere apology of a French
fire.
But for eating and drinking! if they cook better in
Paris, I shall have my passport altered. The next
prefet that signs it shall substitute gourmand for proprietaire.
I will profess a palate, and live to eat.
Making every allowance for an appetite newly from
sea, my experience hitherto in this department of
science is transcended in the degree of a rushlight to
Arcturns.
I strolled about Havre from breakfast till dinner,
seven or eight hours, following curiosity at random,
up one street and down another, with a prying avidity
which I fear travel will wear fast away. I must compress
my observations into a sentence or two, for my
fire is out, and this old castle of a hotel lets in the
wind “shrewdly cold,” and, besides, the diligence calls
for me in a few hours, and one must sleep.
Among my impressions the most vivid are—that of
the twenty thousand inhabitants of Havre, by far the
greater portion are women and soldiers—that the buildings
all look toppling, and insecurely antique and unsightly—that
the privates of the regular army are the
most stupid, and those of the national guard the most
intelligent-looking troops I ever saw—that the streets
are filthy beyond endurance, and the shops clean beyond
all praise—that the women do all the buying and
selling, and cart-driving, and sweeping, and even shoemaking,
and other sedentary craftswork, and at the
same time have (the meanest of them) an air of ambitious
elegance and neatness, that sends your hand to
your hat involuntarily when you speak to them—that
the children speak French, and look like little old
men and women, and the horses (the famed Norman
breed) are the best of draught animals, and the worst
for speed in the world—and that for extremes ridiculously
near, dirt and neatness, politeness and knavery,
chivalry and petitesse, of learning and language, the
people I have seen to-day must be pre-eminently remarkable,
or France, for a laughing philosopher, is a
paradise indeed! And now for my pillow, till the diligence
calls. Good night.
