Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/62

32 The only advantage was that the vessels were manned by English crews, and in those days the British sailor was not a tailor, and he showed his value when danger was greatest.

We steamed northwards in a good old way, puffing and panting, pitching and rolling, and in due time made Marseille.

However agreeable Provence was, the change from Italians to French was not pleasant. The subjects of Louis Philippe, the Citizen-King, were rancorous against Englishmen, and whenever a fellow wanted to get up a row he had only to cry out, "These are the misérables who poisoned Napoleon at St. Helena." This pleasant little scene occurred on board a coasting steamer, between Marseille and Cette, when remonstrance was made with the cheating steward, backed by the rascally captain. Cette was beginning to be famous for the imitation wines composed by the ingenuity of Monsieur Guizot, brother of the austère intrigant. He could turn out any wine, from the cheapest Marsala to the choicest Madeiran Bual.

But he did his counterfeiting honestly, as a little "G" was always branded on the bottom of the cork, and Cette gave a good lesson about ordering wines at hotels. The sensible traveller, when in a strange place, always calls for the carte, and chooses the cheapest; he knows by sad experience, by cramp and acidity of stomach, that the dearest wines are often worse than the cheapest, and at best that they are the same with different labels. The proprietor of the hotel at Cette, had charged his dâme de comptoir with robbing the till. She could not deny it, but she replied with a tu quoqu: "If I robbed you I only returned tit for tat. You have been robbing the public for the last quarter of a century, and only the other day you brought a bottle or ordinaire and escamoté'd it into sixteen kinds of vins fin." The landlord thought it better to drop the proceedings. From Cette we travelled in hired carriages (as Dobbin and the carriages had been sold at Naples) to Toulouse. We stayed at Toulouse for a week, and I was so delighted with student life there, that I asked my father's leave to join them. But he was always determined on the Fellowship at Oxford. Our parents periodically fell ill with asthma, and we young ones availed ourselves of the occasion, by wandering far and wide over the country. We delighted in these journeys, for though the tutor was there, the books were in the boxes. My chief remembrances of Toulouse were, finding the mistress of the hotel correcting her teeth with table d'hôte forks, and being placed opposite the model Englishman of Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue. The man's face never faded from my