1 Ledoux was only a major, actually, but a band more or less was all the same to the Emperor.
Little by little the Parisians were to have fresh facilities provided for them., but up to the end of the Empire the number of carriages remained very restricted. To begin with, as we have said, there was no sort of public transport service in common. The only vehicle available for getting about was the old fiacre, which people had complained about as far back as the reign of Louis XV, and which had gained nothing from the Revolution except rather rustier springs, a rather more worm-eaten body, a rather dirtier seat. The chroniclers of the time describe it in detaiclass="underline"
An old coffer all to pieces, Badly hung on its four wheels, Drawn by two raw-boned horses Through the dust and the mud; The cabby, mostly tipsy, Flogging, cursing, swearing, Here you have the very picture Of the carriage called the fiacre.
After a time, however, it had a rival, the cabriolet. More up-to-date, lighter, faster, it was the vehicle for people in a hurry. They had to be nimble enough to climb into it without too much difficulty, and undeterred by the cold in winter, or the proximity of the driver in all weathers; but one can put up with many discomforts for the pleasure of travelling at speed, a pleasure of which the cabbies never deprived themselves. The accidents they caused even made the prefecture show its teeth at times. It ended by subjecting hired carriages to regulations in which the smallest details were laid down, from the colour of the number painted on the rear of the body to the size of the little bell dangling from the horse's collar.
Regular fares were fixed as well - twenty sous a journey for cabriolets and one franc fifty for fiacres. Hired by the hour, the former charged one franc twenty-five and the latter two francs. Theirs was an institution destined to a hard life, for these fares remained stationary until the advent of the motorcar,
There was little to be said, however, for the cab-ranks, of which there were only three under the Empire — one each in the Rue Le Peletier, the Rue Taitbout and the Champs-Elysees. How did the inhabitants of the other quarters manage, especially those of the Rive Gauche, when they needed a cab?
In a city so large, but so poor in means of transport, happy were those Parisians possessing a carriage of their own, or able to hire one by the month. The latter luxury cost Yorke ten louis a week in 1804. At about the same time, Stendhal hired his livery carriage from Quesnay, in the Rue de Baby-lone, at the rate of fifteen francs for the half day. He found it more economical to buy the latest thing in cabriolets for 2,200 francs, as soon as his salary as a Councillor of State allowed him to play the dandy.
Certain privileged persons travelled more cheaply-the high dignitaries of the Empire whose office provided them with a coach for nothing. But some of these, like Decres, the Minister of Marine, displayed decidedly too much arrogance in their official equipage. One day when a hailstorm was drenching pedestrians to the skin, his friend the Chevalier de Panat, who was sitting beside the Admiral, saw him suddenly burst out laughing, and asked him the reason.
Tm laughing because here we are in a comfortable carriage, properly closed, while all these men and women go wading through the mud/
'Upon my soul,' exclaimed de Panat, 'if there are other people who think like you, you can boast of being the only one that dares to say such a thing!*
'Tm only saying it to you, you idiot!'
'Yes, but I shall tell everybody!'
And the fact that we know the story proves that he kept his word. Nothing gets about so fast as a piece of gossip in a provincial town, and the capital of the Empire was really nothing more.
CHAPTER VIII. ON THE HIGHWAYS OF FRANCE
An epidemic of broken wheels - The misadventures of a Prefect — The ladies of Malmaison go travelling - line tyrannies of the road — The hell of the diligence and the purgatory of the inn - Highway robbers — The Grassini and the brigands
TRAVELLING is a fine tiling/ wrote Diderot, 'but one must have lost father, mother, children and friends, or never have had any, to make a profession of wandering over the surface of the globe/
Thirty or forty years later, the French do not appear to have thought otherwise. But they had a good excuse for travelling so little - the execrable state of the roads.
Left unrepaired throughout the Revolution, as we have seen, they presented a pitiable appearance at the beginning of the new century. A few old royal highways still held together here and there, such as the road from Paris to Calais, along which English tourists were soon to drive their hooded coaches. But for one more or less carriageable road there were many others on which accidents occurred day after day.
The newspapers of the year IX tell us that on the road from Bordeaux to Bayonne nothing was to be seen but smashed carriages. A little later, police reports drew attention to certain, stretches between Valenciennes and Cambrai, so bad that even the drivers of the mail-coaches were obliged to get down and walk to avoid breaking their necks.
Travellers coming from Strasbourg or Brussels were exposed to the same risks; none of them was ever sure, at the start of his journey, of finding himself whole on arrival.
The new Government would have liked to recondition all these lamentable roads, but the task proved such an enormous one that it was hardly even roughed out by the end of the Consulate.
When Prefect Beugnot took possession of his department of the Seine-Inferieure, he found only two high roads really worthy of the name, and he was not long in discovering what it cost to venture on any of the others. Having left Dieppe one morning with Lemasson, the chief engineer, to go to Neufchatel, he had to drive along a so-called road that was no more than a beaten track. As a result, one of the shafts of his carriage was broken, and then, the body having become completely dislocated, the two men were obliged to continue their journey on foot. Policemen coming from the opposite direction asked them if they had seen the Prefect. 'We have been expecting him for the last two hours/ they said. 'That's me!' said Beugnot, pointing to the embroidered lapel of his coat. The mounted constabulary at once took the functionaries up behind and trotted off with them. A little too dashingly, no doubt, for the Prefect, who was no Franconi, soon lost his stirrups and found himself on the ground, swearing roundly, £ Oh, accursed dignity! Miserable glory!'
As no bones had been broken they started off again as best they could, but on reaching the neighbouring market-town, where the sub-Prefect, escorted by fifty troopers, was awaiting his chief, whom he had not met before, the state of the latter's uniform may well be imagined. "Have you come across the Government carriages?' asked somebody. And one of the gendarmes replied, 'Here is the Government! Believe it or not!' Beugnot may have dreamed of a more sensational arrival, but at least he could flatter himself that he now knew what the roads of Normandy were like.
The Seine-Inferieure had no reason to envy the other departments. In the Nord, between Lille and Arras, we are told of a certain road with ruts three feet deep. On the Lyons road there were continual accidents. One day Bonaparte's carriage, coming down off the bridge at Montereau, upset in a ditch. Although two footmen were badly bruised, and Ber-thier's face was cut by glass from the broken windows, the First Consul was unhurt; but to get him out they had to heave him through one of the doors like a piece of luggage.