s agreed that with more horses and great
caution and stock of patience the road to Mons should be attempted, and
we were directed to "Le Grand Monarque," a good name for these times,
applicable to Buonaparte or Louis XVIII.

It was worth while to lose our way and encounter these unexpected
difficulties for the amusement the landlady afforded us. We seemed
almost at the end of the world. I am sure we felt so, for the people
were so odd. Dinner she promised, and in half an hour proved by a
procession of half a dozen capital dishes how wonderfully these people
understand the art of cookery, in a place which in England would be
considered upon a par with the "Eagle and Child."[115] We asked her
about the road in hopes of hearing a more satisfactory account. With a
nod and a shrug, and an enlargement of the mouth and projection of lip,
she replied, "Messieurs, je ne voudrais pas etre un oiseau de mauvais
augure, mais, pour les chemins il faut avouer qu'ils sont effroyables."

I will venture to say such a "oiseau" as our speaker has never before
been seen or heard of by any naturalist or ornithologist. Her figure and
cloak were both inimitable. She gave such a tragi-comic account of her
sufferings last year, during the time of the retreat, and in 1814 when
the Russians were there, that while she laughed with one eye and cried
with the other, we were almost inclined to do the same. She had been
pillaged by a French officer in a manner which surpassed any idea we
could have formed of French oppression and barbarity. At one time the
Cossacks caught her, and on some dispute about a horse, 4 of them took
her each by an arm and leg and laying her upon her "Ventre" flat as a
pancake, a fifth cracked his knout (whip) most fearfully over her head,
and prepared himself to apply the said whip upon our poor landlady. By
good fortune an officer rescued her from their clutches, but she
shivered like a jelly when she described her feelings in her awkward
position, like a boat upon the shore bottom upwards. Then she told us
how her husband died of fright, or something very near it. Her account
of him was capital, "Il etoit," said she, "un bon papa du temps passe,"
by which perhaps you may imagine she was young and handsome. She was
very old and as ugly as Hecate.

Well, my sheet is at an end, and my hand quite knocked up. We did get to
Mons, but the roads were "effroyable." At one moment (luckily we were
not in it) the carriage stuck in th