EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ROADS
commonest of incidents.[1] In wet weather there was in London a veritable slough between Kensington Palace and St. James's Palace.
II
France
The roads of France are generally praised by eighteenth-century travelers.[2] It is, moreover, unquestionably true that on the whole no part of Europe in the last quarter of the century, except some portions of the Low Countries, had roads so good as France,[3] but in the seventeenth century even the French roads left much to be desired, and in some cases they could hardly have failed to improve if they had remained passable at all. When Lippomano was in France in the sixteenth century he found the roads frightfully miry. Only the highway from Paris to Orléans was paved. In Poitou he could make but four leagues a day.[4] As late as the middle of the seventeenth century the roads were often ill-defined and passed through fords so deep as to let the water into the carriage through the sides.[5] Before 1700, and in many regions after that date, travel at night was deemed inadvisable.[6] Not until the reign of Louis XVI had the corvées so improved the highways that diligences ventured on the roads after dark.[7] More than one of the roads remained bad to a late date. The keen-eyed Abbé Barthélemy went to Italy in 1755, and he remarks:[8] "Some of our journeys have been very tiresome. The one from Auxerre to Dijon, which is two and thirty leagues, was most intolerable. The road passes through a very fine country, but in itself it is the worst I have ever seen."
The well-known traveler Breval had trouble in reaching Auxerre from the other side: "Auxerre made us some Amends for three Days very dismally spent in getting thither from Gien, thro' a barren ill-peopled Country, and impassable almost for Wheel-Carriages."[9] The distance in our time by railway is only fifty-seven miles.
44
- ↑ See Crabb Robinson's Diary, i, 411.
- ↑ Babeau, Les Voyageurs en France, pp. 261, 278.
- ↑ Cf. Thierry, Almanach du Voyageur, p. 385.
- ↑ Babeau, Les Voyageurs en France, p. 52.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 127.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 60.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 12.
- ↑ Travels in Italy, p. 6.
- ↑ Breval, Remarks on Several Parts of Europe, ii, 41.
