EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INNS
Europe, with "squares, gardens, shops of all kinds, workshops, and a handsome theatre."[1] Entertainment of tourists was, indeed, on a large scale at Calais, though the town was small. Essex counted the Hôtel d'Angleterre one of the best in France. From forty to fifty carriages were always ready for guests.[2]
In large towns good accommodations were usually to be found, and if it were our business to make lists[3] we might enumerate scores of inns that provided everything one could reasonably ask.[4] Some were almost unreasonably good. Such was the inn at Châlons, with rooms "furnished throughout with silk and damask, the very linings of the rooms and bed covers not excepted."[5] Still better was the Hôtel de Henri IV, at Nantes, over which even the sober Young waxes enthusiastic and inclines to think "the finest inn in Europe." "It cost," says he, "400,000 liv. (17,500l) furnished, and is let at 14,000 liv. per ann. (612l. 10s.), with no rent for the first year. It contains 60 beds for masters, and 25 stalls for horses. Some of the apartments of two rooms, very neat, are 6 liv. a day; one good 3 liv., but for merchants 5 liv. per diem for dinner, supper, wine, and chamber, and 35f. for his horse. It is without comparison, the first inn I have seen in France, and very cheap."[6]
Not merely were palatial establishments of this sort to be found here and there, but many neat and comfortable little hostelries, of small pretensions and "of the second rank in appearance," that were nevertheless "much the most comfortable for travellers of the sober sort."[7]
But it would be a serious error to suppose that every inn in France was a model. We must not forget that France before the Revolution suffered much actual misery, particularly in the provinces. No traveler could fail to see some trace of it, and he was fortunate if he had nothing to suffer himself. Many provincial inns simply continued throughout the eighteenth century the state of things existing in the seventeenth century, when travel was difficult and inns were ill-kept because little patronized. Babeau cites
79
- ↑ Fitzgerald, Life of Sterne, ii, 132.
- ↑ Journal of a Tour through Flanders and France, p. 4.
- ↑ Nugent, Grand Tour, iv, 33, 34, says: "There are a great many very good inns at Paris, where you are sure of being extremely well accommodated, according to the figure and expence you wish to make." Then follows a long list.
- ↑ In 1761 the thrifty traveler Willebrandt jotted down the names of the best hotels in Paris, the streets where were found the most desirable furnished rooms, and showed how to get déjeûner and supper cheaply. Babeau, Les Voyageurs en France, p. 258.
- ↑ The Gentleman's Guide, p. 139.
- ↑ Travels in France, p. 133.
- ↑ Smith, Tour on the Continent, iii, 240.
