Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
The post-house is a tolerably good inn: the douaniers, the most troublesome we had yet met with, refusing to compound for the customary donation, and asking for money when their search was ended. We had, therefore, the sweet revenge of first watching them as pick-pockets, and next refusing them as beggars.
The usual prying douaniers were quickly at work, and after some coffee at the Restaurant Baqué, which is so well known to travellers to Southern Spain, we re-entered the train for Narbonne, where in the morning we changed and travelled to Montauban, by way of Carcassonne and Toulouse.
Such a tariff called for a highly drilled army of those sufficiently rare individuals, honest douaniers, endowed also with Napoleonic activity and omniscience. But, as Chaptal remarked, the Emperor had never thought much about the needs of commerce, and he despised merchants as persons who had "neither a faith nor a country, whose sole object was gain."
Augereau's corps was driven from Berlin by a force of Cossacks led by Tettenborn; and this daring free lance, a native of Hamburg, thereupon made a dash for the liberation of his city. For the time he was completely successful: the fury of the citizens against the French douaniers gave the Cossacks and patriots an easy triumph there and throughout Hanover. This news caused Napoleon grave concern.
Meanwhile Louis, nettled by the inquisitions of the French douaniers, and by the order of his brother to seize all American ships in Dutch ports, was drawing on himself further reproaches and threats: "Louis, you are incorrigible ... you do not want to reign for any length of time. States are governed by reason and policy, and not by acrimony and weakness."
Without including the hosts of douaniers, who were under the orders of the collectors of taxes, the gens d'armerie, who were at the disposal of the police, and had no other duties to perform, amounted to above 10,000 men, cavalry and infantry, all completely armed and equipped. As soon, therefore, as any individual excited suspicion, there was no difficulty as to his apprehension.
Not the Douvres-Calais that day! only that horrible little narrow boat that always upsets me and I such an heroic being, bearing the mighty mediaeval sword, an object of wonder and questioning to sailors, douaniers, passengers alike. As it happened, I was the sole individual on board whose inner organs had not their sea-legs on this occasion.
This also was sacred ground, it appears, but the douaniers let the blood-horse pass, not even making the feint to prod his inside for contraband. He went a burster over the bridge by a short turn down a street and to the door of his stable, and there he positively stopped, and I swear I felt his sides shaking with laughter.
At Calais, Boulogne, or Ventimiglia there are always agents of police, who eye the traveller entering France, but up at that rural Alpine village are only idling douaniers, who never suspected the affluent owner of a big automobile. What, I wondered, had occurred to cause the Count to travel around viâ Ostend, Brussels, and Milan, as I rightly suspected he had done?
Rayne had probably sent messengers with stolen property to France by that route before, knowing that, contrary to the shrewd examination at Calais, the officers of certain trading ships and the douaniers were on friendly terms. When again I raised my eyes furtively to the Frenchman in the white spats I was relieved to find that he had disappeared.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking