by Wendy Moore
Naturally Day did not mention the single most interesting aspect of his travels: the two young companions who shared his journey, nor their thoughts on Parisian street life or French cuisine. Not surprisingly, he had divulged nothing of his experiment to his mother or stepfather. So whether the two girls were enjoying chicken wings every day, or even spreading their own wings in the Paris air, was left unsaid. But Day had obviously not lost sight of the main motive for his trip since he was paying close attention to the women he saw with his usual eye for detail. His scorn for the female sex was plainly undiminished. The women of Paris exhibited “the most fantastic Mixture of Slovenliness and Finery,” he spluttered. On the one hand they wore their hair “drest to the highest Ex-travigance of the Mode”—following the contemporary fashion for lavishly piled up hairstyles—and yet their clothes were “dirty, splash’d and sluttish beyond Conception.”
Day, of course, was not alone in denigrating his French neighbors. As soon as the Seven Years War with England’s oldest enemy had ended in 1764, English travelers had flocked to France chiefly to reassure themselves of their national superiority. Samuel Johnson’s friend Hester Thrale was shocked by the contradictions of French fashions when she noticed a countess who sported diamond earrings yet wore a “dirty black handkerchief” around her neck. Another seasoned traveler, Robert Wharton, turned his nose up at the French habit, among both men and women, of urinating in public—even though this was not uncommon in London streets. Others pined for clean beds, decent roads and plain cooking yet their complaints did nothing to deter most English visitors from merrily extending their French leave. Day, likewise, pronounced Paris “altogether very disagreeable” and immediately resolved to explore France further.
Just as disagreeable to Day as the city of Paris itself was no doubt the sizable community of British living in or visiting the capital. With large numbers of well-to-do families passing through on their holidays and young men fresh out of university making their first stop on their grand tours, along with assorted businessmen, diplomats, tutors, servants and hangers-on, the French capital positively bustled with English visitors—and buzzed with English gossip almost as much as London did. There was even an English coffeehouse where customers could read the English papers and circulate the latest rumors. If he stayed in the city for long, Day could be sure to run into somebody he knew, or worse, who knew his mother. And so after just one week of sightseeing, he decided to press on south toward Lyon. On November 19 he paid his hotel bills, gathered his two girls and set off in search of more convenient surroundings and warmer climes.
It is possible, in making for Lyon, that Day was hoping to track down his hero Rousseau and seek advice on training his orphans just as other disciples pestered the writer for guidance on educating their children. After fleeing England in 1767, the philosopher had laid low in various refuges in northern France under a false name, Jean-Joseph Renou—he was no master of disguise—with Thérèse masquerading as his sister, until friends persuaded him it was unsafe to remain. With his books still banned and the arrest warrant still in force throughout most of France, there was a real risk that Rousseau might end up in the Bastille, where his publisher, Pierre Guy, had already been incarcerated. Just because he was paranoid does not mean that Rousseau was free of danger.
By 1769, when Day arrived in France, Rousseau had settled in a village less than thirty miles from Lyon but in a district outside the jurisdiction of the Parisian Parlement. Feeling as tormented as ever, he devoted his days to writing his saucy and candid Confessions. Since Day had made sure to pack his trusty copy of the banned Émile as child-care guidance when leaving England, he too risked prosecution if he stayed within the environs of Paris. And so he followed in his idol’s footsteps on the road south.
The route from Paris to Lyon was a major thoroughfare for continental travelers meandering through France toward Italy. Most took the diligence or alternatively hired a chaise as far as Chalon-sur-Saône from where they could continue to Lyon by boat—the diligence par eau—on a picturesque two-day voyage down the Saône. Most made the trip in spring or summer. To undertake the journey at the onset of winter, when heavy rains transformed the rivers into swollen torrents that washed away the bridges and flooded the roads or made them impassable with mud, was courageous if not downright foolish. For a man with little knowledge of the language and no experience of the terrain to take two young girls on such a journey might be regarded as reckless.
One British traveler who had braved the same route in November 1742, twenty-seven years before Day, complained that in places the road was so flooded that his coach was forced to make a detour through fields and vineyards. At other points the rushing floodwaters coursed down the ruts in the roadway so fast that they threatened to overturn his carriage meaning that the only safe course was to walk.
Taking the two-day boat trip was plainly far too dangerous with the Saône in full spate. So Day and his wards traveled by the diligence where possible and hired post chaises and drivers where not. By day they negotiated flooded roads and crossed surging torrents on flimsy wooden bridges at risk of being swept away, stopping every twelve miles or so to change their exhausted horses. At each posting stage Day had to cajole the postmasters to supply fresh horses and attempt the next stage of the journey. French postilions, whose job was to ride one of the leading horses, had a reputation for obstinacy among British visitors. One exasperated traveler exclaimed: “I might just as effectually argue with a horse as with a French postilion.” By night, Day found refuge for himself and his two girls in cold country inns with lumpy beds and lumpier suppers. At Lyon, where most travelers veered east toward the classical ruins of Italy, Day continued due south for a further 140 miles. Finally they arrived at the towering medieval walls of Avignon.
It was here, in the Church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon, at mass on Good Friday, April 6, 1327, that the Italian poet Petrarch had first seen the mysterious and unattainable Laura who would unleash his lifelong infatuation and inspire more than 300 sonnets. She may have been Laure de Noves, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a local nobleman, who had already been married for two years to a French count—an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade. Exiled in Avignon with his parents, Petrarch, in his early twenties, followed her obsessively. By all accounts she spurned Petrarch’s devotion, for she gave her husband eleven children before she died, aged thirty-eight. She was buried in the city’s Franciscan Church. Day was not the first Englishman to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of Petrarch’s elusive perfect woman; in Avignon he hoped to succeed where Petrarch had famously failed.
Day, at least, survived the rigors of the journey unscathed, as he informed Edgeworth in an uncharacteristically exuberant letter written soon after arrival at the end of November. “Behold me at Avignon, full six hundred and fifty miles, three quarters, and one furlong, from Barehill,” he announced jubilantly, “and yet, by heavens! I am alive! And what is more, tolerably well.” Travel—or at least the attentions of two spellbound girls hanging on his every word—plainly agreed with him. Edgeworth would later say that Day’s letters from Avignon were “almost the only instances of gaiety of manner, which ever appeared in his correspondence.”
With boyish exhilaration, Day continued: “Were I to relate the stagecoaches I have travelled in, the post-boys I have talked big to, (nay, I have gone so far as to say sacre Dieu!) the inns I have lain at, the rivers I have passed with no more than a three-quarters of an inch plank between me and destruction, I should make you shudder!” Visualizing Edgeworth working on his latest invention “in a warm comfortable room” back in Berkshire, Day extolled “the toils, the dangers, of us who travel to see the wonders of the world.” But whether the two orphans who were the chief object of the entire journey were likewise alive and well was left entirely to Edgeworth’s imagination. Day made no direct reference to the girls beyond an enigmatic “Everything belonging to me goes on well.”
Perched on a rocky outcrop above the Rhône, the anc
ient city of Avignon provided an ideal winter refuge. Having served as the seat of seven popes for nearly seventy years during the fourteenth century—when it was the center of the medieval Western world—Avignon still fell under papal control as capital of the enclave, the Comtat Venaissin. The heavily fortified citadel was therefore conveniently beyond the reach not only of English but of French laws, making the city a favorite destination for political, religious and tax exiles of all nationalities as well as a natural hideout for smugglers and other criminals.
Several British aristocrats who had supported the failed Jacobite uprisings in 1715 and 1745 fled to Avignon to lick their wounds. They were followed in later years by fellow Britons seeking sun and scenery for a year or two in Provence so that, according to one source, more than a hundred English people made Avignon their home. Sterne poked fun at the city’s profusion of titled British and French residents in his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: “for they are all Dukes, Marquisses, and Counts, there.” Lively, cultured and prosperous, the city owed its economic well-being as much to its vigorous black market in contraband goods, like tobacco, gunpowder and playing cards, which it sold to its surrounding French neighbors at competitive prices, as to its vibrant silk and calico industry.
Far enough off the tourist trail to provide a degree of anonymity for a young man traveling with two young girls, Avignon was still a sufficiently popular residence with French and British upper-class society to assure Day of intellectual adult company. With its shady squares and cool courtyards encircled by three miles of solid ramparts, Avignon provided a pleasant haven where he could pursue his educational experiment without fear of disturbance. Day ushered Sabrina and Lucretia through one of the city’s seven gates and rented a house in Avignon’s most desirable district, the Quartier des Fusteries.
Close to the great papal fortress, the Popes’ Palace, the fusteries district owed its name to the wood sellers, the fustiers, who once lived there alongside other poor artisans, but now it was dominated by grand town houses, called hôtels, belonging to the idle rich. Having rented his house from a certain Monsieur Fréderic, Day employed native-speaking servants so that he could continue to exclude any outside influences on the two girls. Here Thomas Day began the difficult task of choosing which of his two pupils should become his perfect wife. But first he planned to go out and ingratiate himself with Avignon society.
Discarding his usual drab garb, he sailed out into the Avignon streets in a new laced coat, which he had probably bought in one of the fashionable shops of Paris, or in Lyon, which was famous for its silk and embroidered cloth. When in Avignon, Day presumably reasoned, he should dress like the locals. The novelist Tobias Smollett scorned extravagant French fashions at least as much as Day, but he explained that in France English travelers either had to adopt flamboyant French clothes or make themselves look even more foolish by comparison: “When an Englishman comes to Paris, he cannot appear until he has undergone a total metamorphosis.”
For men this metamorphosis meant a shopping spree for new clothes, a new wig, a new hat, new shoes and even new buckles and ruffles. The costume varied according to the season. French fashion decreed that in spring or autumn men should wear a suit made of “camblet,” a blend of goat or camel hair with silk. In summer, they should wear a suit of silk, and in winter a suit made of “cloth laced with gold, or velvet.” Decked out in his laced coat, perfectly in vogue for the winter season, Day was ready to enter the best Avignon society. Even if he had only just begun the process of transforming his two girls, he had easily mastered his own metamorphosis.
Looking the very picture of the perfect fop, Day spent a dizzying first week visiting Avignon’s abundant coffeehouses, concert halls and soirées. Adopting French couture, French manners and even testing his schoolboy’s French conversation, he was warmly welcomed into French society and impressed his hosts as “the traveller, the polite scholar and the fine gentleman,” he told Edgeworth in this new spirit of effervescence. “I have been introduced into all the polite assemblies. I know something of their manner of life, at least the outward and visible signs.” Although he was shocked by the capacity of the local bourgeoisie for squandering their days in idle leisure—gambling, drinking and gossiping—Day was delighted at the ease with which he had infiltrated French society:
There is indubitably among the French a greater spirit of dissipation than among the English: they are accustomed to no kind of employment, to no kind of attention; their mornings are spent in dress and in sauntering about, and their afternoons in visits. . . . In their visiting rooms, you see a number of beings lolling, walking, standing, yawning, talking of the same trifling subjects, which you would hear discussed in England with the same indifference, till the happy moment arrives, which sets them down to the gaming table. . . . If you go into their coffee-houses you find a number of idle people playing at dice, sitting round a stove doing nothing, gaping, yawning, getting up, and sitting down again.
Yet it was “so much easier for a stranger to get into society here” than in England, he continued, while there was also a “more generous spirit of politeness among the French.” In France, “a man runs less hazard of being affronted, or meeting with any kind of incivility or positive rudeness,” and with good reason, he noted, since the rules of etiquette laid down that a genuine insult or argument could only be settled on the dueling ground—and usually in death.
As to how his young companions were spending their time, Day maintained an infuriating silence. With a careful eye on his future reputation, he was obviously concerned that his letters might fall into the wrong hands. So just as with his letter to his mother from Paris, Day’s first letter to Edgeworth from Avignon covered everything except the most interesting aspect of his trip. He seemed delirious with the excitement of his first continental travel or perhaps drunk on the thrill of his daring experiment. Yet his role as teacher was evidently on his mind. He ended his letter by asking for news about Dick and his ongoing program of education—“let me hear of nothing but your boy, your wooden horse, and other domestic occurrences”—and signed off with a battery of questions: “Have you got a house yet?—have you got a patent?—a title?—a fortune?—a child?—a medal?—a new chaise?”
At home in wintry Berkshire, a frustrated Edgeworth wrote back to press his friend for news of the girls. Although he was busy enough juggling all of the issues that Day had listed—another child was on the way, his father was seriously ailing in Ireland and he was hunting for a new house—Edgeworth knew that, in England, at least, he was legally responsible for his young apprentices’ welfare. Furthermore, as he struggled to apply the Rousseau regime to the truculent Dick, Edgeworth was feeling increasingly doubtful as to the practicalities of the educational theory. Now that he was five, Dick showed no inclination for either reading or writing. While Rousseau’s Émile insisted this was perfectly acceptable even until the age of twelve, Edgeworth naturally worried that his son would not acquire his own love of books.
By the time Day replied a few weeks later, toward the end of 1769, he was already tiring of France and French society—or perhaps the denizens of Avignon’s salons were tiring of him. The jaunty, jovial Day who had bounded through the gates of Avignon in November had returned to form as the gloomy and embittered young man who harbored a grudge against everyone and everything. “That gaiety, my friend, which you remark in my letter, is neither an effect of French, nor of the recovery of my health,” he explained. “It is an effect of either a constitutional philosophy, or of habit to make a jest, at least to others, of what is most disagreeable to me.” It was irony, he now insisted. And in a complete change of mood from his previous enthusiasm, he continued: “For be assured no one circumstance of life was ever half so [disagreeable], as my residence in France.”
Now he lamented that the French had no interest in discussing politics, agriculture or science and no reason to discuss the weather since it was “constantly serene.” Bored and snubbed,
he spent much of his time reading and thinking. But even though he missed the “fogs and showers of Old England,” he was determined to last out the winter and continued to grace the concert parties and assemblies he despised decked out in the comical finery he detested. “Oh, my dear friend, you’d be quite surprised to see me now,” he told Edgeworth. “Oh Lord! I am quite another thing to what I was—I talks French like any thing; I wears a velvet coat, and a fine waistcoat, all over gold, and dresses quite comme il faut: and trips about with my hat under my arm, and ‘Serviteur Monsieur!’ and ‘J’ai l’honneur Madame,’ &c. O dear, it’s charming upon my soul!”
When he was not attempting French small talk, Day skulked moodily in a corner and fumed over his hosts’lifestyles and, in particular, their attitudes toward women. “Nothing can be more ignorant than those of the French Nobility whom I have seen,” he told Edgeworth. “Attached entirely to exteriors,” they were “enslaved by their king” and—a far more serious charge in Day’s book—by “their women.” French girls were generally educated in convents or brought up at home by governesses, Day told Edgeworth. When they were old enough to enter society, they “bring prejudice, extravagance and coquetry to their husbands: no laws, nor the force of the religion they are bigoted to, can restrain them; the feeble ties of modesty, decorum, or shame, are unknown.”
Appalled at the tolerance within the French upper classes for what he termed “universal infidelity,” he stormed, “the men can feel nothing but indifference for their nominal wives; hence all the ties of nature are broken through, all the sweet connexions of domestic life unknown.” Naturally, it did not occur to him that his own behavior toward the opposite sex might be deemed immoral. And rising to his climax Day spluttered, “But the most disgusting sight of all is to see that sex, whose weakness of body, and imbecility of mind, can only entitle them to our compassion and indulgence, assuming an unnatural dominance, and regulating the customs, the manners, the lives and the opinions of the other sex, by their own caprices, weakness, and ignorance.” This nightmare vision, a topsy-turvy world in which women dominated men, completely reinforced Day’s faith in his educational project. It must have been a relief to return from these wild parties where women ruled the roost to his peaceful house where his two young girls waited meekly for their master.