The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  This inspiring but ultimately futile exploit33 belonged to an age when long-distance travellers took to the water whenever they could and expected the voyage to be an interesting adventure. It was quite usual for a person touring France to make half the tour on rivers and canals: carriage from Paris to Chalon-sur-Saône; passenger boat to Lyon, then down the Rhô ne to Avignon; post road to Montpellier and Béziers; canal boat to Toulouse, river boat to Bordeaux and another boat to Blaye on the Gironde; diligence or private carriage via Saintes and La Rochelle to Nantes; sailboat or steamer up the Loire to Tours, Blois or Orléans. The tourist could then travel back to Paris by road or by a series of canals to the Seine at Montereau: from there, the daily passenger boat from Nogent-sur-Seine reached Paris in a day and a night. This was the service on which the fifteen-year- old Napoleon first arrived in Paris and on which Frédéric Moreau leaves the city at the start of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale. Compared to the jolting road and the clutter of slums and beggars on the edge of Paris, the river was a royal avenue, flowing majestically towards the towers of Notre-Dame.

  Better still, the accommodation was cheaper and more comfortable. Diligences – sometimes optimistically called vélocifères – were lumbering contraptions composed, like giant beetles, of three sections. The coupé in front was protected by thick curtains of foul-smelling, oily leather; the interior was padded and crammed with little pockets and nets for hatboxes and sundry possessions. The impériale above the coupé was exposed to the wind and the rain, but passengers could at least make sure that the postilion, perched on the nearest horse in his gargantuan jackboots of wood and iron, was still awake. (These were the original ‘seven-league boots’ of the fairy tale, because seven leagues was once the common distance between two staging posts.) Suspension was provided by leather thongs nailed to blocks of wood. Even rich travellers who were equipped with inflatable waterproof cushions and lambswool foot-warmers found the diligence an ordeal. The American writer Bayard Taylor described the horrors of the Auxerre–Paris service in his Views A-Foot, or Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff (1846):

  I should not want to travel it again and be paid for doing so. Twelve persons were packed into a box not large enough for a cow, and no cabinetmaker ever dove-tailed the corners of his bureaus tighter than we did our knees and nether extremities. It is my lot to be blessed with abundance of stature, and none but tall persons can appreciate the misery of sitting for hours with their joints in an immovable vice. The closeness of the atmosphere – for the passengers would not permit the windows to be opened for fear of taking cold – combined with loss of sleep, made me so drowsy that my head was continually falling on my next neighbor, who, being a heavy country lady, thrust it indignantly away. . . .

  All that night did we endure squeezing and suffocation, and no morn was ever so welcome than that which revealed to us Paris. With matted hair, wild, glaring eyes, and dusty and dishevelled habiliments, we entered the gay capital, and blessed every stone upon which we placed our feet.

  The same journey, by the green-painted coche d’eau on the river Yonne, offered a large room lined with benches, prettily decorated compartments, better views and more cheerful passengers. Though the Rhône riverboats were more cramped and dirty, people entering Provence by the river usually had nicer things to say about it than those who had entered it by road. The sniffy Countess Gasparin, in her Voyage of an Ignoramus in the South of France (1835), found that the lovely views made up for ‘the incommodious throng’ that blocked the passageways with its luggage and ignored the distinction between first and second class. Boat passengers enjoyed an unfurling tableau of hilltop castles, vineyards, country homes and people waving from the banks. They smelled the warm air of the Mediterranean; they saw the white summit of Mont Ventoux in the east and the towers of the Palais des Papes at Avignon; and when the boat docked beneath the Pont Saint-Bénezet, they invariably sang a chorus of ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’.

  On the return journey, though the boat might be held fast by the current for several hours, they had the consolation of knowing that travellers on the road had to face the terrifying carters of Provence, who never gave way to oncoming traffic, unless, according to an ancient custom, the leading horse had four white hooves, in which case it had right of way. ‘On two or three occasions’, wrote Stendhal, ‘my poor little carriage was almost smashed to smithereens by the enormous six-horse carts coming up from Provence. . . . True, I had my pistols, but those carters are quite capable of being afraid of pistols only after they have been fired.’

  Boatmen, too, were a law unto themselves, but even the most delicate passengers seem to have entered into the spirit of the river. All over France, whenever one boat passed another, a salvo of abuse was fired at the other boat, referring to its derisory speed, the ugliness of its crew and the profession of the captain’s female relatives. The barrage would continue until the boat was out of earshot. The same ritual was performed when the boat passed riverside houses – when masters, wives, children and servants were standing at the windows – if necessary with megaphones.

  These boats were the public spaces of a new France, where class barriers were flimsier than before, where people had news and information to exchange, and where – to judge by many accounts of river journeys – chance encounters often led to romantic adventures. The experience of Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau on the steamer to Nogent was not unusual:

  The deck was littered with nutshells, cigar stubs, pear peelings and the remains of meat pies that had been brought on board wrapped in paper. Three cabinetmakers dressed in overalls were standing in front of the canteen. A harpist in rags was taking a rest, leaning his elbow on his instrument. Now and then, there was the sound of the coal in the furnace, a shout, someone laughing. On the bridge, the captain kept walking from one paddle-wheel to the other. To get back to his seat, Frédéric pushed open the gate that led to First Class, disturbing two hunters with their dogs.

  It was like a vision:

  She was sitting in the middle of the bench, all on her own . . . A long shawl with purple stripes was placed behind her back on the brass rail. . . . But the fringe was pulling it down and it was about to slip away into the water. Frédéric leapt forward and caught it. She said, ‘Thank you, Monsieur.’

  Their eyes met.

  *

  NOT EVERY RIVER JOURNEY, of course, was an undiluted delight. In her bilingual Traveller’s Manual, Mme de Genlis prepared her readers for the worst. (The first set of phrases is a reminder that road journeys, too, often involved a perilous river crossing.)

  Coachman or postilion, stop, I wish to alight before boarding the ferry.

  Oh, there is no danger, the horses are gentle . . .

  I wish to alight, I tell you, and to board the ferry on foot.

  How much must I pay to have the little room to myself ? And how much must one pay when one is in the large room with all the other passengers?

  Are there any women among these passengers?

  How shall we be fed?

  Quite badly. You shall have only smoked and salted meat, potatoes and cheese. I advise you to take with you some private provisions. This is especially necessary for old people, women and children.

  I am suffering greatly. I am going to vomit. Give me the vase.

  The smell of tar makes me sick.

  Is the wind always so contrary / so bad?

  I have toothache.

  Shall we soon be there?

  The serene river-statues of Versailles were deceptive. Divine providence seemed to have designed the rivers of France to be more picturesque than useful. Some of the stretches of river that carried large passenger boats were not as safe as they seemed. As it corkscrewed its way towards Le Havre, the Seine was full of treacherous currents. Before the passenger steamboat service began (Le Havre–Rouen in 1821, Rouen–Paris in 1836), some travellers preferred to cut off all the bends between Rouen and Paris and to make a long, disjointed journey by boat, horse, boat, foot, ov
ernight boat to Poissy and carriage to Paris.

  On France’s eastern frontier, the river Rhine was a model of fluvial efficiency. Raft trains a thousand feet long took construction wood to the Low Countries on three-week voyages. They looked like villages floating down the river with their own anchored landing stages, dining rooms, kitchens, stables and panoramic observation galleries, and enough bread, meat and beer for a crew of five hundred and the owner’s party of friends. They were probably the largest vehicles in existence. Crowds gathered on the riverbank to watch them pass. The Rhône by comparison was a fairground ride. The Cassini map shows four hundred and fifty-one tiny islands between Lyon and Avignon. Most people disembarked and walked or rode along the riverbank while the current carried the boat between and sometimes onto the piers of the bridge at Pont-Saint-Esprit.

  The Loire, which was supposed to be the cradle of French civilization, disappointed many travellers with its mudflats, its wispy poplars and its monotonous, misty banks. The Renaissance châteaux that appeared every league or so were a welcome distraction and there always seemed to be a tireless expert on anecdotal French history to bring the scene to life. Stendhal’s voyage down the Loire was a typical mixture of tedium and adventure. Ten minutes after leaving Tours at 5.30 a.m., his steamboat was sitting on a sandbank, swathed in freezing fog. After several hours, it was pulled off the bank by a boat piloted by a fifteen-year-old boy and into the path of an oncoming ship. The eight horses towing the ship were stopped just in time. For the next few hours, everyone gave their own version of what had happened: ‘The ladies in first class had been much more frightened than the peasant women, and so their tales were much more novelistic.’ At Ancenis, the metal funnel was lowered to allow the boat to pass under the bridge; it scraped the rotting beams and showered the passengers with splinters.

  ‘My secret reason’ for recounting all this, Stendhal explained, was to encourage the reader to take a cheerful view of ‘all the little mishaps that often spoil the jolliest expeditions – passports, quarantine, accidents’, etc. Modern transport created expectations of comfort and convenience, but a traveller who put his mind to it could avoid ill humour as ‘a kind of madness that eclipses the objects of interest that may surround one and amongst which one shall never pass again’.

  *

  THESE RIVER ROUTES were kept alive by steamboats, but not for long. The low-pressure puffers known as inexplosibles, which chugged up and down the Loire until the railway reached Nantes in 1851, moved at the speed of a cart horse. Canals were even slower. The mail boat from Toulouse to Sète took fifteen minutes to pass each lock and the Canal du Midi itself was closed for maintenance for up to two months a year. ‘For those who have long been jolted along high roads in Diligences’ – and who could bear to spend a night with two hundred members of ‘the lower classes’ – the mail boat was ‘not a disagreeable mode of conveyance’, according to Murray’s guide. But for merchants and industrialists, it was intolerably slow. Michel Chevalier was a Saint-Simonian reformer who dreamed of steamboats and railways creating a global industrial cooperative, galvanizing snail-like peasants with ‘the spectacle of prodigious speed’. In 1838, he pointed out the dismal fact that, until recently, in the time it took a coal barge to reach Paris from Mons (two hundred and twenty miles), a medium-sized sailing ship could cross the Atlantic to Guadeloupe, take on a fresh load, return to Bordeaux, then sail again for the Gulf of Mexico and return to France via New Orleans.

  The canal system was already turning into an accessory of the leisure industry in 1876 when Robert Louis Stevenson and a friend canoed along the canals that joined the Sambre to the Oise and Belgium to Paris. At the last lock before Landrecies, they stopped for a smoke:

  A vivacious old man, whom I take to have been the devil, drew near and questioned me about our journey. In the fulness of my heart, I laid bare our plans before him. He said it was the silliest enterprise that ever he heard of. Why, did I not know, he asked me, that it was nothing but locks, locks, locks, the whole way? not to mention that, at this season of the year, we should find the Oise quite dry? ‘Get into a train, my little young man’, said he, ‘. . . and go you away home to your parents.’

  The man at the lock obviously had time to spare for a chat. Pleasure and prosperity did not have to travel at top speed. Trade figures suggest an increasingly busy population, but conviviality was still an essential element of trade. In the early twentieth century, the wines of Burgundy were still making deliciously slow journeys down the Canal de Bourgogne and the Canal du Charolais towards the all-consuming capital.

  Time passed slowly on the barges. People who saw those low, wine-laden boats gliding through a sunny landscape knew that not all the wine would be incarcerated in bottles and sold in cities. Surprising quantities of it would filter out along the way and return to the land that gave it life. In the summer of 1900, disgruntled wine-brokers at a meeting in Dijon identified one of the happier disadvantages of transport by canal:

  The boatmen, who voyage for several weeks without supervision, surrounded by brimming barrels, indulge in wine-tastings, the size of which is directly proportional to the quality of the merchandise. They have no hesitation in inviting the riverside people – lock-keepers and the like – to join them in depleting the stock, and the navigation companies refuse to accept any responsibility in the matter.

  *

  APART FROM THE LEAVES of plane trees drifting on the brown surface, a darting dragonfly, a silent racing cyclist on the tarmacked towpath or a holiday barge with a nervous captain and an idle crew, there is little movement nowadays on the Canal du Midi. Until the first signs of the aerospace industry appear on the outskirts of Toulouse, it is hard to imagine that this was once one of the great trade highways of Western Europe. Or rather, it is hard to imagine the canal as one might suppose it should be imagined. Though commercial traffic is now almost non-existent, the Canal du Midi is busier today than it was before the railways. The fleet of rental barges outnumbers the hundred and seventy boats that plied the canal at its height by more than two to one.

  The common experience of a particular age tends to be measured by the fastest transport available at the time. Eighty-six per cent of French people have never flown in an aeroplane and most have never taken a TGV, though both forms of transport will be standard images of early twenty-first-century France in future histories. This distortion by speed is harder to correct for periods that lie beyond living memory. Turgot’s reform might have brought Paris closer in time to the twelve hundred towns that lay on the post roads in 1775, but very few people ever took a high-speed coach. In the mid-nineteenth century, many villages to the north of Paris were connected to the outside world for half the year by stepping stones. In many parts, the sound of carriage wheels brought people to their windows. A pastor touring Provence in the 1830s found it hard to get his carriage through the main street of Bédoin at the foot of Mont Ventoux because of the crowd that came to see it.

  A journey by diligence was something to be remembered for a lifetime. In 1827, a Lyon newspaper advised heads of families ‘to consider making a will as a precautionary measure’ before embarking on such a momentous expedition. The newspaper naturally assumed that the diligence traveller was a man of means. A high-speed coach was proportionately as expensive as first-class air travel today. The mail coach from Paris to Calais in 1830 cost forty-nine francs, which was a servant’s monthly wage or the cost of dinner in a famous Paris restaurant. The reason why wet-nurses were so often seen in diligences was that their employers paid the fare. The exposed seats on top of the diligence were cheaper, but most of the ‘rough and lowbred companions’ that Murray’s guide warned fresh-air travellers to expect had probably not paid for their seat: postilions were notoriously bribable and often allowed pedestrians to clamber on so they could enter a town after the gates had been closed for the night.

  Once the scale of human locomotion was recalibrated to include steam engines and speedy carriages on macadamized
roads, every other form of transport looked too slow to be significant. From the window of a diligence or a railway carriage, the rest of France appeared to be rooted to the spot. Walking came to be associated with tortoise-like peasants and leisurely tourists like Robert Louis Stevenson. But Stevenson probably held the record for the slowest journey ever made through the Cévennes. Two years after his canoe trip, it took him and his donkey twelve days to travel from Le Monastier to Saint-Jean-du-Gard – a journey, by his meandering route, of about a hundred and thirty miles. At one point, they were overtaken by a tall peasant ‘arrayed in the green tail-coat of the country’. He ‘stopped to consider our pitiful advance’:

  ‘Your donkey’, says he, ‘is very old?’

  I told him, I believed not.

  Then, he supposed, we had come far.

  I told him, we had but newly left Monastier.

  ‘Et vous marchez comme ça!’ cried he; and, throwing back his head, he laughed long and heartily.

  The man in the green tail-coat lived in a world where people thought nothing of walking fifty miles in a day. The simple lesson of the hare and the tortoise was easily forgotten by people who spent their entire travelling life sitting down. By the mid-twentieth century, a whole world of human-powered transport had disappeared from view.