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Updated: June 18, 2025
Gross Laufingen has seen more stirring times than at present: it was a thriving post town once, a halting-place for all the diligences.
Here there used to be plenty of movement, when the Lafitte diligences went clattering by, starting for Paris, before the voracious railway marched victoriously in and swallowed diligence, horses, postilions bells, boots and all! The gay crowd passing across the place was making for the huge iron-gray cathedral, quite ponderous and fortress-like in its character.
Any thing that absolutely awakened us was accounted a blessing; and I remember few things in life with so keen a pleasure as the summons that came to us to descend from our places and cross a river in one boat, while the two diligences of our train followed in another.
The population indeed depends, not upon agriculture, but upon industries for support, and many of the wares fabricated in these isolated Jura villages find their way all over the world. From St. Laurent, where we stopped to change horses, the traveller who is indifferent to cramps, bruises and contortions, may exchange diligences, and instead of taking the shorter and straighter road to St.
The upper town is silent, clean, solemn, surmounted by the imposing ruins of the old chateau. The lower is a town of mills, watered by the Voulzie and the Durtain, two rivers of Brie, narrow, sluggish, and deep; a town of inns, shops, retired merchants; filled with diligences, travelling-carriages, and waggons.
There is no amusement except in the lumbering diligences of France, that gabbling and indiscreet country, where every one is in a hurry to laugh and show his wit, and where jest and epigram enliven all things, even the poverty of the lower classes and the weightier cares of the solid bourgeois.
In all the diligences throughout France the places are numbered, and he who comes first has the first choice, in which case most persons choose No. 1, but others who prefer sitting with their backs to the horses select No. 3; this excellent regulation prevents any kind of dispute about seats. The mails are dearer than the diligence, and some go eleven miles an hour.
The affair on which the First Consul was engaged, and which seemed to absorb him a great deal, had also its interest for Roland. It concerned the recent stoppages of diligences by the Companions of Jehu. On the table lay three proces-verbaux relating the stoppage of one diligence and two mail-coaches. Tribier, the paymaster of the Army of Italy, was in one of the latter.
Fell's grand project of carrying a line of rails over the top of the mountain was only in preparation, and the journey from St. Michael to Susa was still made by the diligences, those dear old continental coaches which are now nearly as extinct as our own, but which did not deserve death so fully as did our abominable vehicles.
It was the hour for the departure of the mail-coaches and diligences. Nearly all the stage-coaches for the south and west passed through the Champs-Elysees. The majority followed the quay and went through the Passy Barrier.
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