EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CARRIAGES
and-twenty guineas, and travel so slow that I should be ten days upon the road. These carriages are let by the same persons who farm the diligence; and for this they have an exclusive privilege, which makes them very saucy and insolent. When I mentioned my servant, they gave me to understand that I must pay two loui'dores more for his seat upon the coach box."[1]
So ponderous were the French coaches that one ran the risk of being set on fire several times a day by the friction of the wheels.[2] Besides this, there was often friction of another sort, as we see from the following delicious passage: "Through the whole south of France, except in large cities," Smollett found "the postilions lazy, lounging, greedy, and impertinent. If you chide them for lingering, they will continue to delay you the longer: if you chastise them with sword, cane, cudgel, or horse-whip, they will either disappear entirely, and leave you without resources; or they will find means to take vengeance by overturning your carriage. The best method I know of travelling with any degree of comfort, is to allow yourself to become the dupe of imposition, and stimulate their endeavors by extraordinary gratifications. I laid down a resolution (and kept it) to give no more than four and twenty sols per post between the two postilions; but I am now persuaded that for three-pence a post more, I should have been much better served, and should have performed the journey with greater pleasure."[3]
However one might travel from place to place, a tourist of any pretensions was expected in any of the larger cities of the Continent to keep a carriage as a visible token of his respectability. For example, on going to Paris after having submitted to the "absolutely requisite" French tailor and barber, "the next thing is to get a conveniency to carry you abroad, that you may with elegance and ease go and see every thing that is curious in and about Paris. Your best way is to have a recommendation to some of those people who let coaches out to hire; and if you are only two in company, a chariot is most advisable. You may have a
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