e
encountered General Paterson, a friendly Scot in the Sardinian service,
who confirmed what an English physician had told Smollett to the effect
that the climate of Nice was infinitely preferable to that of
Montpellier "with respect to disorders of the breast." Smollett now
hires a berline and four horses for fourteen louis, and sets out with
rather a heavy heart for Paris. It is problematic, he assures his good
friend Dr. Moore, whether he will ever return. "My health is very
precarious."

IV

The rapid journey to Paris by way of Montreuil, Amiens, and Clermont,
about one hundred and fifty-six miles from Boulogne, the last
thirty-six over a paved road, was favourable to superficial observation
and the normal corollary of epigram. Smollett was much impressed by the
mortifying indifference of the French innkeepers to their clients. "It
is a very odd contrast between France and England. In the former all
the people are complaisant but the publicans; in the latter there is
hardly any complaisance but among the publicans." [In regard to two
exceptional instances of politeness on the part of innkeepers, Smollett
attributes one case to dementia, the other, at Lerici, to mental shock,
caused by a recent earthquake.] Idleness and dissipation confront the
traveller, not such a good judge, perhaps, as was Arthur Young
four-and-twenty years later. "Every object seems to have shrunk in its
dimensions since I was last in Paris." Smollett was an older man by
fifteen years since he visited the French capital in the first flush of
his success as an author. The dirt and gloom of French apartments, even
at Versailles, offend his English standard of comfort. "After all, it
is in England only where we must look for cheerful apartments, gay
furniture, neatness, and convenience. There is a strange incongruity in
the French genius. With all their volatility, prattle, and fondness for
bons mots they delight in a species of drawling, melancholy, church
music. Their most favourite dramatic pieces are almost without
incident, and the dialogue of their comedies consists of moral insipid
apophthegms, entirely destitute of wit or repartee." While amusing
himself with the sights of Paris, Smollett drew up that caustic
delineation of the French character which as a study in calculated
depreciation has rarely been surpassed. He conceives the Frenchman
entirely as a petit-maitre, and his view, though far removed from
Chesterfield's, is not incompa