EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CARRIAGES
[Cassel], so that if the dulcis et alta quies had not been now and then interrupted by coughing, sneezing, belching, and the like, I should not have known that I had company with me."[1]
The Englishman Russell traveling in Germany in 1828 found the post-wagdn to be still of the eighteenth-century type. In going through the Rhine region he remarks: "What the Germans call a Diligence or Postwagen, dragging its slow length through this delicious scene, is a bad feature in the picture. Much as we laugh at the meagre cattle, the knotted rope-harness, and lumbering paces of the machines which bear the same name in France, the French have outstripped their less alert neighbours in everything that regards neatness, and comfort, and expedition. The German carriage resembles the French one, but is still more clumsy and unwieldy."[2]
The luggage, towering on high like a "castle" as large as the wagon itself, was secured by chains. Inside the wagon sat six passengers, and with the guard sat two more. Four horses slowly dragged the great load, while from all the openings of the vehicle poured out in dense clouds the smoke of vile tobacco. Naturally enough, the Englishman traveling for pleasure and not as a penance was warned in advance not to use the public post-wagons. "The only way of travelling with comfort through Germany," says the author of the "Tour in Germany,"[3] "is in a chaise of your own and with post-horses." This merely repeats the advice of Nugent, who points out that "then a person is at liberty to stop at what station he pleases, and as long as he pleases."[4] He remarks, too, that by having a chaise to one's self one saves "the trouble of tying and untying the baggage; because when a person hires a chaise of the post-office, he must change it at every stage, which is vastly inconvenient."[5]
Sometimes one arranged to travel in a post-chaise, but bargained to have all expenses on the road covered for a fixed sum. With an arrangement of this sort Mariana Starke, in April of 1798, left Florence for Dresden, "with
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