But the question of accommodation was even thornier than that of food. People usually had to be satisfied with a miserable room, badly furnished, and a bed with coarse sheets. As for the sheets themselves, it was better not to look too closely. When young Barante, son of the Prefect of Carcassonne, went one morning to call on Elisa Bacciochi, who was travelling through the district, he found her at the hotel, lying on a mattress that she had been obliged to throw on the floor, to avoid the bugs infesting the bedstead.
Few people complained, however, for they were inured to the dirtiness of the inns and the bad state of the roads, and these rooms, however indifferent, often found more patrons
than they could accommodate. On a very busy night it was fairly usual for two complete strangers to agree to share a bed. If they were of the same sex the arrangement might appear admissible, but we may imagine the feelings of a certain Mme de Nouaille mentioned in a chronicle by Lenotre. On arival at Niort she found, in the room she had engaged at the inn, a young man of the name of Patrot who had just had his luggage brought up there.
7 ? m going to sleep in that bed/ he declared.
Tin not saying you won't sleep in it/ retorted Mme de Nouaille, 'but Tm going to sleep there too/
And to avoid a quarrel, they both spent the night in it.
A far more serious drawback to travel than these little discomforts was the lack of safety on the roads. Armed attacks had become less frequent than at the beginning of the Consulate, but they were far from having ceased. Several were reported in the very year of the Coronation: in September 1804 Marshal Lefebvre, on his way to his country house after a session of the Senate, was twice shot at, almost point-blank, coming out of the woods of Saint-Martin; his horses bolted, and he was only saved by the presence of mind and strength of wrist of his coachman.
In the following year Talleyrand had a similar adventure in the neighbourhood of Strasbourg. Three months later the Rouen diligence was attacked near Saint-Clair by five robbers wearing smocks 'under which uniforms could be detected'. They searched the carriage, and robbed one of its occupants of four thousand francs,
Tm sorry to see that some diligences are being held up/ wrote Napoleon from Berlin. 'You must stir up the police and send out some of the force. This will reassure the good citizens/
They certainly needed reassurance, for even in the heyday of the Empire the highway pirates were still in the news. One of their most celebrated victims was the fair Grassini, robbed in her berline on the road to Avallon on October 19,1807.
The artist was on her way from Milan to Paris, to sing before the Emperor. She was accompanied by Charles, her carissimo fratello, and by her servant, Filippo. All had gone well up to then, and towards eleven at night the travellers were asleep when, after the relay at Rouvray, the carriage suddenly stopped, the doors were opened and two men climbed in, pointing enormous pistols at the occupants, while two others, armed to the teeth, kept the postillions covered. "Quick, out you come! Quick, your money! Otherwise .. /
Grassini held out fifteen louis she had about her person; Charles let them take his watch and Filippo gave them his. All the baggage in the carriage was thrown higgledy-piggledy on the road. In the singer's 'ridicule' the robbers discovered another thirty-five louis, and in her jewel-case they found two miniatures, one of which, set in gold, represented Napoleon.
A personal present from the Emperor! This was too much. Grassini burst into tears. *I beg you 7 my good bandits/ she pleaded, 'take everything I poossess, but leave me oon thing that I love more than you can: the poortmit of our dear Goovernment. I don't want the diamonds, but leave me the poortraitl *
Of course the rascals did not let themselves be affected by these politico-sentimental considerations. 'Hurry up, hurry up, Bianchi, let's be off!' cried one of them, and the gang gathered up their booty and disappeared in the darkness, while the travellers, more dead than alive, re-entered the carriage and drove on to Avallon, where they roused the police.
The story had its epilogue, to be read at length in the admirable study devoted to Grassini by M. Andre Gavoty. Here we learn that the bandits were four Italian deserters who had got their hands in earlier by pillaging the Bourges diligence. But their second exploit did not bring them luck.
On the following day, on the Dijon road, a certain M. Durandeau, in command of the national guard at Vitteaux, was struck by the suspicious appearance of four exhausted pedestrians. He lured them into an inn, warned the mounted police and fetched his own gun. A terrible struggle ensued, in which a policeman was killed, but it was put an end to by the Commandant, who laid two of the bandits low. A third had already been bound hand and foot. The fourth, who had taken to his heels, was caught the following week.
The law thus retained the upper hand. Though Grassini had lost the portrait of her 'dear Government', she had at least the pleasure of reading in the Moniteur of October 29, 1807 that the Veterans' Cross had been awarded by Imperial Decree to Jacques Durandeau, her avenger.
CHAPTER IX. Houses and Furniture
Numbering of houses - The hierarchy of floors – More luxury than comfort - Empire furniture - Mme Récamier ' s sanctuary and Julie Talma' s mousehole – Lighting and heating - Great men in in nightcaps
Having an address would seem a simple matter, but the most elementary problems have not always been solved at the first attempt . Who would think that the Consulate authorities had so much difficulty in numbering the houses systematically? A few years earlier the Revolution had gone the wrong way about it . Instead of proceeding by streets , it had proceeded by sections, including all the properties in the same quarter in a common enumeration. If a street ran through several sections, this enumeration came to an end every time it went from one to another, to begin again a few yards farther on with that of the neighbouring Quarter. The same gateway was sufficiently well known to need no distinctive sign. But habits had changed since then: most houses had been let out in floors, and some egalitarian method was called for, since, owing to this division, very different social classes were housed in the same building.
From this point of view the Paris of the future - the one we know today-in which the rich and poor quarters have definite frontiers, differs essentially from the Paris of the Empire, In the latter there were fewer watertight compartments; tenants of every degree lived close to one another, though the hierarchy of the floors was strictly observed. £ The tradesmen occupy the shops; rich people the first floor; well-to-do people the second; salaried people the third; workpeople the fourth, and the poor the upper stories.'
Later on, much later on, this local geography had to be revised. A day would come when the top stories would be the very ones most in demand. But the Napoleonic era knew nothing of the use of lifts or the fashion for roof-gardens.
Without climbing so high, therefore, we may content ourselves with taking a look at some handsome apartment in one of the new houses going up on the fringe of the Tuileries or near the boulevards. It may be more or less luxurious, but we can be sure, alas, of finding the same defect everywhere: an inconvenient lay-out, with rooms opening into one another and an almost complete lack of comfort. Even if the emulators of Percier and Fontaine have provided drawing-rooms of pleasant proportions, with a multiplicity of mirrors, large marble fireplaces, neo-Greek cornices round the ceilings, they have obviously sacrificed everything to show. Abodes of this kind might be suitable for giving grand receptions, but as regards the amenities of ordinary life, little progress appears to have been made since the century of Louis XIV.