Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
If there was a noise before of screaming postilions and cracked horns, it was nothing to the Babel-like clatter which greets us now. We are in a great court, which Hajji Baba would call the father of Diligences.
From Breda to Amsterdam they varied the Diligences according to the number of travellers; sometimes we had a coach and four, and then a machine and three, and as our number diminished we were forwarded the last stage or two in a vehicle perfectly nondescript with two horses; it was a sort of cart painted white, hung upon springs, with an awning, but it was reserved for this morning to see us in a carriage far beyond anything before seen or heard of.
He did like a man; for suddenly the doors of an old stable flew open, and out rattled a comfortable carriage with a pair of stout little horses jingling their bells, and a brisk driver, whose voice was pleasant, as he touched his hat and invited the ladies to enter, assuring them that they would soon overtake and pass the heavy diligences before them.
Multi-coloured diligences were packed with people and luggage the people often more miscellaneously packed than the luggage, clinging on behind, squashed in the middle, sprawling on the top. The drivers looked superb though dressed in thousand-times-mended black coats, the post-boys tootled on their horns, and the passengers sang or shouted to the music of accordions.
In the Rue Notre-Dame des Victoires is the immense establishment of the Messageries Royales, from whence start diligences to all parts of France; we will pass through the yard into the Rue Montmartre, at No. 44, is the Marché St. Joseph, at 166, the Fontaine de la Rue Montmartre, and at No. 176, the Hôtel d'Uzès erected by Le Doux, considered one of the finest hôtels in Paris.
Falstaff drove one of the St. Gothard diligences for many years, and only retired when the railway was opened. Titian once made me a pair of boots at Vicenza, and not very good ones. At Modena I had my hair cut by a young man whom I perceived to be Raffaelle. The model who sat to him for his celebrated Madonnas is first lady in a confectionery establishment at Montreal.
During the season when people resort to the Pyrenean-waters, the passage of the visitors to Cauterets and Bagneres also brought some animation; diligences passed through the town twice a day, but they came from Pau by a wretched road, and had to ford the Lapaca, which often overflowed its banks.
Here, Carthage, Hamilcar, Hannibal, Narr' Havas, the Numidian hero, and Spendius, the Greek slave, the lions in bondage, the pomegranate trees which they sprinkled with silphium, the whole a strange and barbaric world; then Charles Bovary, the chemist Homais, his son Napoléon and his daughter Athalie, provincial life in the time of the Second Empire; bourgeois adultery, diligences and notaries' clerks.
The Hôtel de Genève is probably the least objectionable of the hotels of Annecy; but the Poste-bureau is at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, and it was much too hot for me to fight with the waiters there, and carry off my knapsack to another house. It is generally a mistake a great mistake to sleep at a house which is the starting-place and the goal of many diligences. All the night through, whips are cracking, bells jingling, and men are shouting hoarsely or blowing hoarser horns. Moreover, the Hôtel d'Angleterre had apparently needed a fresh coat of paint and universal papering for many years, and the latter need had at this crisis been so far grappled with that the old paper had been torn down from the walls and now lay on the various floors, while large pies of malodorous sizing had been planted at the angles of the stairs. The natural salle-
In the north transept and in one of the chapels there still stand great stone reredoses once much gilt, but now all broken and dusty and almost hidden behind the diligences and cabs with which the church is filled.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking