Leading the Blind

by Alan Sillitoe

  After a cursory visit to the cathedral and museum in Narbonne, James seems to like Montpellier rather better as a town. The Hôtel Nevet is ‘the model of a good proverbial inn; a big rambling, creaking establishment, with brown, labyrinthine corridors, a queer old open-air vestibule, into which the diligence used to penetrate, and an hospitality more expressive than that of the new caravanserais’.

  He spent two days there, ‘mostly in the rain, and even under these circumstances I carried away a kindly impression. I think the Hôtel Nevet had something to do with it, and the sentiment of relief with which, in a quiet, even a luxurious room that looked out on a garden, I reflected that I had washed my hands of Narbonne.’ Then, as if to boast of his heartlessness, he goes on: ‘The phylloxera has destroyed the vines in the country that surround Montpellier, and at that moment I was capable of rejoicing in the thought that I should not breakfast with vintners.’ Perhaps he didn’t know, or maybe he would not have cared, but in the nearby villages people were hungry to the extent that they had only snails to eat from their ravaged vineyards.

  Murray’s 1881 version of the Hôtel Nevet is quite different, for it is said to have ‘200 bed-rooms, dirty and bad smells’, whereas in 1848 it was ‘a splendid, new, and large edifice, 200 bed-rooms – one of the best hotels in France’. In the Baedeker of 1895 it is the first on the list, and without deleterious comment, while in the issue of 1914 there is no mention of it at all.

  The business of hotels could fall off alarmingly after a few adverse remarks in guidebooks, and perhaps some landlords could be forgiven for suspecting that a certain solitary traveller might be an emissary of one of the publishing firms who had come to check his establishment. An unassuming British voyageur spotted in the hotel dining-room might cause the waiting maid to spill a tureen of soup at the table, the wine waiter to fall over with his carafe of local wine (‘the most one might say about it is that it could be called the best vinegar in France’). The proprietor in trying to be pleasant would be accused in the next edition of obsequiousness, and the early-morning chambermaid would be so rattled as to spill one of the overful pots she was carrying along the corridor – and thereby utterly spoil the reputation of a perfectly good hostelry for the next twenty years because a stray traveller had remarked that the smells were too odious to be endured.

  It is fair to say that Murray recognized the possible volatility of his readers’ reports when he wrote in Southern Germany, 1858: ‘The number of good rooms in an inn, especially a country inn, is generally limited: if the traveller gets one of these, and the house is not too full to prevent his being well attended to, he gives it a good character, if it is crowded, and he gets an inferior room, he condemns it. I am sure I have been in the same inn, and during the same summer, under such different circumstances, that I could hardly believe it the same.’

  The problem of hotel classification is commented on by Sabine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century novelist who also wrote travel books or, rather, what would be today called ‘companion guides’. In the preface to A Book of the Cévennes he modestly writes that his work is but ‘an introduction to the country, to be supplemented by guide-books. For inns, consult the annual volume of the French Touring Club; Baedeker and Joanne cannot always be relied on, as proprietors change, either for the better or for the worse. I have been landed in unsatisfactory quarters by relying on one or other of these guide-books, owing to the above-mentioned reason.’

  In very plain prose Baring-Gould describes the scenery and gives some account of local history, as well as telling of such bizarre customs as the following about the Cévennes: ‘When the chestnuts have been gathered, then in November they are dried in sechoirs. These are small square structures with a door and window on one side, and on the other three or more long narrow loopholes that are never closed. A fire of coals is lighted and kept burning incessantly in the drying-house, and the smoke passes through shelves on which the chestnuts are laid, in stages, and escapes by loopholes. To any one unaccustomed to the atmosphere, in these sechoirs, it is hard to endure the smoke, and one stands the risk of being asphyxiated. Nevertheless the peasants spend two months in the year in these habitations, amidst cobwebs and soot, swarming with mice and rats, and the smoke at once acrid and moist, for in drying the chestnuts exude a greenish fluid that falls in a rain from the shelves. The natives do not seem to mind the dirt and smell of these horrible holes. Moreover, if there be in a village any one suffering from phthisis, at the end of autumn the patient is taken by the relations in his or her bed, and this is deposited in a corner of the sechoir. The sick person is not allowed to leave the drying-house, and it is a singular phenomenon that not infrequently, under the influence of the heat and the sulphurous smoke, the tuberculosis is arrested, and the sufferer lives on for many long years.’

  Arles, says Murray, is famous for its beautiful women, ‘due to the Greek element which has never been lost. It is odd that not a trace of this should be found in the men.’ Augustus J. C. Hare recommends the Hôtel de Nord which, he says, is the best, being ‘very good and clean, with obliging landlady’. In 1848 Murray tells us that the man who keeps the Hôtel de Forum was once cook to Lord Salisbury; that the Hôtel du Nord was ‘improved, and tolerably comfortable’, and that the Hôtel du Commerce on the Quai was kept by the wife of one of the English engineers on the steamboats.

  Hare also is not slow to comment on the women, who are perhaps ‘the most beautiful of any European city. With dark eyes and raven locks, they are generally majestic in carriage and figure. They are greatly adorned by the becoming costume of Arles – which is still, happily, almost universal – a black dress and shawl, with full white muslin stomacher, and a very small lace cap at the back of the hair, bound round with broad black velvet or ribbon, fastened with gold or jewelled pins.’ By 1930 the costume of the women was only seen on Sundays and holidays.

  Henry James devotes two chapters to Arles. ‘There were two shabby inns, which compete closely for your custom. I mean by this that if you eject to go to the Hôtel du Forum, the Hotel du Nord, which is placed exactly beside it, watches your arrival with ill-concealed disapproval; and if you take the chances of its neighbour, the Hôtel du Forum seems to glare at you invidiously from all its windows and doors. I forget which of these establishments I selected; whichever it was, I wished very much that it had been the other.’

  At a café the next afternoon, James observes that there sat ‘behind the counter a splendid mature Arlesienne, the handsomest person I had ever seen give change for a five-franc piece. She was a large quiet woman, who would never see forty again; of an intensely feminine type, yet wonderfully rich and robust, and full of a certain physical nobleness. Though she was not really old, she was antique; and she was very grave, even a little sad. She had the dignity of a Roman empress, and she handled coppers as if they had been stamped with the head of Caesar.’

  The main reason why so many English went to the Mediterranean coast of France was that of health, and Marseilles was the gate through which they passed in order to get there. Dickens gave a graphic picture of its summer climate in Little Dorrit (1856), and Murray in 1848 was equally explicit: ‘From the margin of the old harbour, lined with quays, the ground rises on all sides, covered with houses, forming a basin or amphitheatre, terminating only with the encircling chain of hills. From this disposition of the ground, the port becomes the sewer of the city – the receptacle of all its filth, stagnating in a tideless sea and under a burning sun, until a S.E. wind produces that circulation in its waters which the tide would do on other seas. The stench emanating from it at times is consequently intolerable, except for natives …’

  As a reminder of times past we are told: ‘The Lazaret owed its foundation to the fearful ravages of the plague at Marseilles in 1720, which carried off between 40,000 and 50,000 persons, half the population. Amidst the general despair, selfishness, and depravity which accompanied this dire calamity, many individuals distinguished themselves by their noble self-
devotion. The streets soon became choked with dead, and of the galley-slaves, supplied at the rate of 80 a-week to conduct the dead-carts, none survived.’

  Nor is one allowed to forget that at the Revolution, ‘which inflamed to madness the fiery spirits of the people of the south, Marseilles furnished, from the dregs of its own population and the outcasts of other countries, the bands of assassins who perpetrated the greater portion of the September massacres in Paris. The well-known hymn of Revolution, the Marseillaise, was so called because it was played by a body of troops from Marseilles marching into Paris in 1792.’

  By 1880 Marseilles had become ‘a grand city in site and extent, and, excepting Paris, no town in France has been more improved since 1853, by the creation of streets, quarters, harbours, and public edifices etc.’ In spite of all that, the town did not merit the accolade of a stay of some time. Its climate was said to be delightful at certain seasons but, nevertheless, ‘in summer and autumn the heat is intense – the streets like an oven, so that it is scarcely possible to move abroad during the daytime, and all rest during the night is liable to be destroyed by mosquitoes.’

  Going east along the coast, Murray found in 1848 that none of the hotels at Cannes were any good, though there was a comfortable one at Grasse, ‘where an invalid from Nice might put up with advantage during the months of March, as the place is well sheltered’. At Antibes, however, the hotels were so bad that travellers were advised to ‘stop outside the gates, and send in for horses; they will thus save time, and their carriage will escape the risk of accidents, in being twice dragged through the most odious streets.’

  Hyères, the first place of importance beyond Toulon, became a desirable place to stay later in the century: ‘Pure water has been laid on to all parts of the town by a company. The authorities have become more careful in securing cleanliness and drainage. The mildness and dryness of its climate causes Hyères to be chosen as a winter residence for invalids, and renders it one of the best in Europe during the season.’ As for Cannes, for those who suffer from the sea-air, ‘producing often nervous irritability and want to sleep’, the villas on the north side of the town are recommended.

  English doctors and bankers were as usual installed in the main towns to care for and cater to the many winter visitors. ‘Pattieson’s is a good shop for groceries and English stores.’ English and Scottish churches mushroomed as on a dank November dawn at home. Today, the condescending wrath towards fish-and-chip shops and Yorkshire-bitter bars set up for those who flock to places like Corfu and Benidorm – who cannot sleep well if the familiar wherewithal is not stowed in their bellies – is a snobbish response to the fact that the hoi-polloi can afford to get off the island at all. If the middle classes (what and whoever they are) can have their comforting appurtenances – which they hardly need to export, these days, because the local equivalents serve perfectly well and may indeed be welcomed as ‘local colour’ – why not the others? The middle classes would of course rather the yobbos stayed at home, playing kickshins and throwing up behind impeccable clapboard cottages lining the village green, instead of acting as evidence for the indigenous foreign population that respectable English tourists with the present-day Baedeker or Blue Guide might well have come out of the same unruly bucket a couple of generations back.

  The English who travelled to or settled on the Riviera in the nineteenth century were, however, certainly responsible for some improvements in sanitation, though the French would undoubtedly have taken these in hand anyway as part of the general trend all over Europe. In this respect Cannes went up many notches in general estimation after 1848. ‘The drainage, formerly bad, is now considerably improved; many works have been already carried out, and others, more important, are about to be undertaken.’

  An extract from HM Consul’s Report, October 1889, at Nice states: ‘The Municipality has introduced improvements which considerably increase the healthiness of this town, and which, I believe, have so far been carried out in no other towns on the French Riviera. In the first place they have secured, entirely irrespective of the natural supply of water, an immense water supply, which is calculated at little less than 1000 litres a day per inhabitant. The drains are fitted with automatic flushers, placed at intervals of some 300 metres apart; which appear to give excellent results. Street gullies of improved construction have been largely provided, which, when kept full of water (which is done by means of the hose in watering the streets), effectually prevent the escape of foul air, while allowing rain and other surplus water to pass into the drain. These are superior to anything of the kind I have seen in England or elsewhere.’

  Dr James Henry Bennet, in Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean, gives another point of view on the matter of sanitation: ‘In the small primitive agricultural towns of the Ligurian coast, and of the south of Europe generally, the want of main drains is not felt. All the inhabitants are usually landed proprietors. Olive and lemon trees, even in the sunny south, will not bear crops of fruit without manure, and where is it to come from in countries where there is little or no pasture unless it be from the homes of the proprietors? Hence, at Mentone and elsewhere, before the advent of strangers, the household drainage was everywhere scrupulously preserved, placed in small casks, hermetically sealed, and taken up to the terraces on the mountain side every few days by the donkey which most possess. There a trench was made around the base of a tree, and the contents of the tub mixed with the soil and the trench closed.’ For another page or so Bennet goes on to talk about drainage and cesspools, manure pumps, and dysentery.

  Equally to the point perhaps is the advice given in the handbooks on hiring furnished apartments, in which ‘the general system is that the agent is paid by the owner. Visitors ought to see that all agreements are made in writing, and to mark particularly that charges for water, gas, porter, be included in the rent; and that a clause be inserted, that if any necessary articles of furniture be wanting, they can procure them at the owner’s cost, and that he pays for the inventory. All crockery, china, glass, linen, etc. should be gone over piece by piece, since, if on giving up possession there be the smallest crack or stain, the lodger will have to pay for the article as if it were new. Tenants are naturally expected to have all linen washed before leaving; but the cleaning of curtains and woollen covers is the affair of the owner.’

  In a more general manner Murray tells us: ‘When Nice first became the resort of British residents, the salubrity and advantages of its climate were perhaps overrated, but at present there is too great a tendency in a contrary direction, in comparing it with other places adopted as a residence for invalids.’ Hare says that the place ‘is much frequented as a sunny winter residence, but is ravaged in spring by the violent mistral, which fills the air with a whirlwind of dust’.

  Eustace Reynolds Ball in Mediterranean Winter Resorts wrote: ‘Considered purely in the light of an invalid station, there are several objections to Nice. Being a large city and the centre of fashion and gaiety during the season, its numerous attractions and amusements, offer too many temptations to the invalid visitor, and may lead him to neglect precautions, which may have a serious result.’ He quotes a Dr Yeo’s remarks that ‘whatever defects the climate of the Riviera possesses, these are specifically concentrated and aggravated at Nice.’

  Let us continue to Mentone, where I spent the year of 1952, recovering from tuberculosis. In 1875 Dr Bennet wrote: ‘Until latterly but few of the tribe of health loungers chose Mentone as a residence. The Mentonians were at first all real invalids, glad to escape from the gaieties of Nice, as well as from its dust and occasionally cold winds. Many, however, are becoming attached to this picturesque Mediterranean nook. It is thus beginning to attract mere sun-worshippers, and a foreign population is gradually growing up, of the same description as that of Nice and Cannes … The inhabitants of Mentone are exceedingly gracious and cordial to strangers, and are doing their utmost to render the place agreeable to them.’

  These ‘health
and invalid guides’ discuss problems of sickness and disease in a way that suggests there were tens of thousands of hypochondriacs (or seriously ill people) in Britain who, having the money, were ready to go to the Riviera in the hope of a cure. People vitiated by a lifetime’s service in India, or those blighted by consumption in the damp climate of England (where the disease was endemic) or those needing to recover after the gruelling task of overseeing their factories in the industrial north, would look on the South of France as the sure place of restoration.

  Reynolds Ball says: ‘In indicating the class of cases which receive benefit from a winter residence on the Riviera, one must first mention the affectations of the respiratory organs. Bronchitis, emphysema, laryngitis, the early stages of phthisis (especially those cases in which no important haemorrhages have taken place), all receive conspicuous benefit; and recognising the therapeutic value of absolutely dry air in all catarrhal affectations, great improvement is speedily manifest in cases of bronchial, nasal, post-nasal, pharyngeal and laryngeal catarrh.’

  Those suffering from rheumatism and gout were said to do extremely well; rheumatism of the joints was almost unknown among the locals, although muscular rheumatism was occasionally met with. ‘The mildness of the climate and persistent sunshine, encouraging the action of the skin, produces an excellent effect upon the disease of the kidneys and liver, and cases of diabetes received marked benefit.’

  In Mentone, according to Black’s 1906 guide, the Villa Helvetia is ‘a convalescent home for ladies not younger than 18 nor older than 40, who are received for 20 shillings a week, which includes everything except laundress and fire in the bedroom.’ In San Remo, just along the coast in Italy, the Villa Emily is also a home for ‘invalid ladies of limited means. They pay 25 shillings a week, which includes doctor’s fees, comfortable board and lodging, and wine or beer.’ The sanatorium at Gorbio did not take tubercular patients, and a full-page advertisement in Reynolds Ball’s guide, paid for by the town council of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, says, in case guests would be upset by the early morning coughing, ‘Consumptives refused in all hotels.’