Contents
Introduction: Rough Crossings
The Doll in the Diligence
The Devil in the Channel
A Boulevard in Marylebone
The Invention of the Immeuble
Slums in the Sky
Piping Hot!
Mansions in the Sky
Mean Streets
Window-Shoppers
Signs and Wonders
The Sandwich-Man
The Palais Royal
The Restaurantâs Rivals
Dining Alone
The Celebrity Chef
The Chahut
A Champagne Swell
Finette
Skirt Dancing
Gay Paree
The Spectator-Owl
Making the Night Visible
Vidocq, the French Police Spy
Cuvierâs Anatomy of Crime
âMonsieur Lecoq!â
Elegies and Elysiums.
Père Lachaise
A Railway to the Other World
Resurrection Men
The First Garden Suburbs
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Note on the Author
List of Illustrations
Index
INTRODUCTION
Rough Crossings
The Doll in the Diligence
Somewhere north of Abbeville, spring 1778
âHold it in your lap, please, donât let it drop.â
âDonât worry, Iâm holding her tight.â
That was it, then. The two women were sitting to his right. He could tell he had a gentleman to his left by his snores, which even the hardest jolts had not interrupted. But until now he hadnât been able to work out who was sitting next to him on the other side. Given the way everyone was squeezed together, he presumed there were another three passengers on the seat opposite him, and another by the opposite door on the right. But they remained silent, so he had only the pressure of clothing and knees to go on. What with the ladiesâ long dresses and the travelling cloaks, it was almost impossible to determine where one person stopped and another began. He felt like a mouse trapped inside a ladyâs workbox that was being shaken violently.
It was still dark when he had entered this London-bound coach at Abbeville. He had been the last of the eight passengers to board, and the window curtains were drawn. As was usual, the coach had left the Bureau de la Diligence de Londres in the Rue Notre Dame des Victoires the day before, one of three noon departures a week. Leaving Paris via the Porte Saint-Denis, it had passed through Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, stopping for dinner at Amiens. It had then continued to Abbeville, where he had snatched a few hoursâ sleep before this early morning departure. He had his trusty copy of The Spectator in his pocket, but, like sleep, reading on the journey was clearly impossible. But then, he had read it so many times that he almost had it committed to memory.
And anyway, he was determined to be an attentive traveller. Hadnât he agreed to send reports back to a friend in Paris who edited a weekly newspaper? Once in England, he would observe the customs of the country with the eye of reason, taking time to study them closely and consider their advantages and disadvantages, rather than jumping to conclusions or simply parroting the prejudices of his fellow Frenchmen. He knew he had a lot to learn. He wasnât going to be like those aristocrats who visited London simply because it was fashionable, whose insights went little beyond noting that London, like Paris, has courtesans, gardens and theatres, and that you can get drunk on champagne there just as you can at home.
But how much longer was this journey going to take? Today they would dine at Montreuil-sur-Mer (which wasnât on the sea), spending the second night at Boulogne, where he had to decide whether to board ship for Dover or press on by road to Calais, where the Channel crossing was shorter. He cursed whomever had invented this moving building, the diligence [Fig. 1]. Compared to the carriages in which he had travelled around Paris, this infernal machine was archaic. None of those leaf-springs that made a ride in a berline so smooth. No fine carriage work here. Instead the massive cabin of wood and wicker swung on chains from the huge chassis, rocking violently every time the enormous wooden wheels hit a rock or a hole in the poorly surfaced road. And now, to make things worse, these two ladies were nervously fussing over â well, what?
A lapdog? Some equally spoiled brat of a child? Either way, they were in for some yapping or mewling, he knew it. He wondered idly whether it would rouse the man on his left, deaf to the world. Not that he could blame the child. Terrible, how fashionable ladies wrapped up their children in rich garments that restricted their movements and even stunted their growth. They werenât so foolish in England, he knew; there children of even the highest rank wore plain cotton clothes, which allowed them to move and play freely. Yes, those English certainly had a lot to teach us, he mused, pleased at the thought that he was already making useful observations on national customs, even though he had barely got under way.
The creaking, jolting and snoring continued for several hours. Gradually the sky lightened somewhat. Somewhere over there in the gloaming one of his fellow passengers awoke. Entirely forgetting that he was in the London diligence rather than tucked up at home, he made to rub the sleep out of his eyes. Lifting his arms, his elbows poked both of his neighbours in the face, setting off a wave of expletives and apologies in a babble of French and English, both good and bad:
Ouch!
Sir . . .
Ah!
Monsieur, je vous demande excuse!
Mind what youâre about!
Madam, I beg your pardon.
Several of his fellow passengers were clutching or holding personal items in their laps â things too precious to leave in their trunks â which were piled in the luggage compartment over the front axle, where they were open to the prying gaze of every tiresome customs official. In the excitement these things slid to the floor, from where they were almost irretrievable.
It was now light enough for him to make out from his plain dress that the gentleman opposite and to the right was a Huguenot. He had been clinging on to a heavy breviary, probably because it would have pushed his trunk over the weight limit (there was a one-bag limit on the diligence, and you had to pay for every extra pound). On its journey to the floor it collided with the heavily swaddled creature on the ladyâs lap, striking it roughly where the head would have been. The woman shrieked. It must be a child, after all. Keeping his head, he reached across his neighbour, pulled up the curtains, lowered the windows and shouted to the coachman to stop. As the diligence juddered to a halt, everyoneâs eyes were drawn to the bundle. It had even captured the attention of the snoring man. The ladies began carefully removing some of the bundleâs outer garments. Not a peep from the child. Had it been knocked unconscious?
He leaned over to take a look. Why, it wasnât a child at all! It was one of those fashion dolls that they sent each month from Paris to London! A large doll dressed in scaled-down versions of the latest fashions, sent to London to be studied by the cityâs dressmakers. This precious mannequin had been destined to become the idol of all those foolish followers of fashion who convened in London. Much was at stake, therefore, as the ladies inspected every aspect of the dollâs attire to determine what damage it had sustained. He chuckled to himself as he imagined all the fine ladies of London going into fits on hearing the news that this accident in the London diligence had condemned them to wearing the same gowns two months running. Perhaps the English werenât so enlightened after all, he mused, as the doll was rewrapped, apparently none the worse for its adventure, and the diligence lurched on towards Calais.1
This account is based on a description taken from a 1778 issue of Le Babillard, a French periodical edited by James Rutlidge. The grandson of an Irish Catholic who had emigrated to Dunkirk in 1715, Rutlidge was determined to foster improved communication between London and Paris, England and France. As Rutlidge himself noted, his was the latest in a spate of French periodicals modelled on English ones, above all The Spectator and The Tatler (Le Babillard is French for a âtatlerâ, or talkative person).2 Such periodicals reflected a new curiosity among the French about their neighbours, perhaps a willingness to improve relations, to question familiar national stereotypes. âWe feel that there may be something to be gained, for all of us, by acting thus,â Rutlidge wrote, âand bit by bit we are learning to see the whole world as one vast school, where the only true masters acknowledged as such by reason are experience and propriety.â3
Our traveller was taking part in an experiment Rutlidge had announced in the twenty-fifth issue of Le Babillard. He had sent one young Parisian to report on what he observed in London, and a second young man, a Londoner, to do the same in Paris. Each was to write to him with their impressions and adventures. The study would, he promised, ensure that any prejudices that lurked on one side or the other would cancel each other out, allowing the voice of reason to come through loud and clear. Though travel was certainly involved, these letters were not to be tra...