Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/619

606 must make the best of my position. How near those Dover lights seem! but what a way they are still off, if the lapse of time is to be computed by painful sensation! It is bad enough even in my own case; but I imagine that an Englishman’s worst miseries at sea are merely as the disagreeables consequent upon under-done muffins or crumpled rose-leaves when compared with the horrible sufferings of our continental friends from the like cause. What test, what gauge have we of the appalling agonies of a sea-sick Frenchman?

Even when we glide into Elysium within the protecting arms of that gentlest masonry and stone work, is there any term to the sufferings of our friends in the cabin? Here we are at Dover, I say, and are they all right? Not a bit of it. Still they are lying prostrate in grim and awful woe—one sufferer with the toe of his boot in his neighbour’s mouth; a second desiderating yet another cuvette, although the Eagle has folded her strong pinions, and is at rest; a third continues his moaning song of “Ah! mon Dieu! Ayiai!” Every now and then a patient sits up in a feeble way, and does exactly what he would have done had we been in mid-channel. The swinging lamp, which has ceased to swing, still lights up the human misery, while the steward, not without a certain scorn in his accent, which would I doubt not crop out more strongly but for his anxiety upon the subject of fees, endeavours to convince his passengers that they are divided but by a few steps from solid land. A clearance is effected at last, and slowly those forlorn Frenchmen stagger out of the cabin, and are passed up the ladder to the Custom House I know not how. The nearest approach I can imagine to their performances would be that of two or three dozen blue-bottle flies in a state of intoxication endeavouring to make their way up the slippery surface of a window-pane. However, at the Custom House they arrive at last, and when a Frenchman is once within the friendly shelter of the walls of a douane he is comparatively comfortable.

It is possible that the greater miseries endured by our French neighbours at sea must be referred to the manner and quality of their diet. The notion that all Englishmen are amphibious animals is quite a delusion. We have no doubt a much larger sea-faring class than the French, but an average Londoner and an average Parisian are pretty much upon an equality as far as matters nautical are concerned. The experience of each is probably confined to a dozen trips in the course of his life across the Straits of Dover. A good deal of stress has been laid upon our yachting propensities, and English yacht clubs. At one time I saw a good deal of yachting men, and my own testimony must decidedly be to the effect that when the sea was rough we were all invariably poorly; when it was very rough we were very poorly. Our authors of marine songs and marine ballads and marine novels are a good deal answerable for blinding our eyes upon this point. My position then is, that as far as nautical habits are concerned, the great bulk of Englishmen are much in the same position as their continental friends, but that their sufferings at sea are less intense. I refer this result to the difference in diet.

I want, to-day, to offer a few remarks upon the varieties of foreign ladies and gentlemen whom one sees about the streets of London, and therefore will not take advantage of the tempting opportunity for describing at length the manner of their landing upon our shores after a tempestuous passage. Enough is said. The humours of the southern ports are well-nigh at an end in consequence of the extension of our railroad system. He must be an unfortunate Frenchman indeed who cannot contrive to get a bouillon and a petit verre at the railway station, and to complete the clearance of that huge box which contains his “effects,” and to be snugly seated in a carriage on the Dover line within two or three hours, at most, of his disembarcation. They are off at last, and how they converse with each other upon the magnanimity with which they endured the trials of the passage, and how courteously they interchange confidences upon the details of their misery! Still they can scarcely have been pleased with the manner in which they were wafted to our shores. It was not a triumph. They cannot think so themselves. Here they are at London Bridge at last, and there is a general call for cabs, and general directions for Lester Squar.

A Frenchman’s first impressions of London can scarcely be favourable. He has but small appreciation of the comforts and conveniences which the town really contains; and he has an intense longing for various luxuries which it does not contain. Our foreign visitors would scarcely care a button about the well-paved and well-lighted streets on either side of Regent Street—but in Regent Street itself they would miss the splendour of the cafés, and the glare of lights at night, and the rattle of the dominoes, and the little marble tables under the canopies, and the moving gesticulating crowds. This is the sort of thing they have been accustomed to look for ever since they were little French boys with concave stomachs—they are now middle-aged Frenchmen with convex stomachs—how can you expect them to change their views in an hour, and adopt our habits and methods of thought?

If it were possible to name the time and occasion when you would preferably introduce a French friend to London, you would, I think, choose the latter spring or early summer, when the leaves were yet of tender green, their freshness uncontaminated by the London smoke; you would then lead him judiciously through the squares into Piccadilly—by the Green Park into Hyde Park—and so into Kensington Gardens. He would, no doubt, indulge you with a little rhapsody about the arbres séculaires in the locality last named—pining all the while to be back in Rotten Row, to see the young ladies on horseback. That spectacle is what the French gentleman would really enjoy—his vegetable enthusiasm being a pure delusion or fetch. I cannot blame him. A graceful young English girl upon her horse is a much prettier thing to look at than an elm or an oak. Be sure that your French friend, after some few courtesies of speech, will drop a hint to the effect that what he sees before him is very well in its way, but there is Madame de Something-or-other in the