A SMALL town?* says a character in one of Picard's plays. "Oil, yes, twice a year, a select company, a game of bouillotte at thirty sous. ... A few very ugly, very dried-up old ladies, a few old squireens seriously discussing the excellence of their tobacco; a few very starched young men, a handful of very silly young women; two candles on the mantelpiece, a couple of tallow dips on each card-table; a little dog under one, a big cat under another; there's nothing so elegant as a party in the provinces.*
If a contemporary is to be believed, this picture was inspired by life as it was lived at Castelnaudary in 1801. In France at that date, sad to say, there were hundreds of Castel-naudarys. Most of the large towns of today were then only small. Except for Paris and Lyons, not one had a population of 100,000. Only our two ports of Marseilles and Nantes came near to that number. 1 But at Lille and Strasbourg, at Amiens and Limoges, Grenoble and Nancy, Nimes and Toulouse, statistics vary between 20,000 and 50,000. Toulon had scarcely 12,000, and many prefectures were hardly as populated as one of our country towns.
If these little centres had at least been able to communicate easily with one another! But the bad state of the roads, abeady mentioned, and the cost and scarcity of means of transport, kept them apart and forced their inhabitants to live as it were inside a retort. Goods, news, fashions., all that contributed to the liveliness of existence, reached them only in slow motion, at the rate of travel of the canal-boats, that took a fortnight to get from Orleans to Indret, or of the carts that took twelve days on the journey from Lyons to Paris.
1 Whereas Paris had 630,000 inhabitants at the end of the Empire, Lyons had 115,000, Marseilles 96,000 and Nantes 77,000.
14 Rural interior
Bourgeois interior
In the departments at a distance from Paris one might have been at the end of the world, the 'public news-sheets' being obtainable only after a delay of one or two weeks, while letters took almost as long as in the century of Mme de Sevigne. If we add that out of 37,000 communes, 36,000 were without a post-office of any sort until the end of the Empire, it will be easy to see why certain victims of the provinces speak of them with bitterness.
The man with the greatest grudge against them was undoubtedly Stendhal. He had a comprehensive horror of all the towns he had passed through. Dijon, for him, was nothing but 'a mess of a town'. Rouen, of which he ignored the cathedral, the Palais de Justice and the Gros-Horloge, was merely 'an execrable hole, inferior even to Grenoble; the opposite of grandiose in every respect.' When he turned towards his native mountains he discovered 'an air of boredom and acrimony' in Gap. At Sisteron 'the smell of the provinces is doubly strong 7 . Tm in for it this time', he sighs. 'Bored expression of the townsfolk settled outside the cafes, stupid expression, on everybody's face. I still find the sight of a small town painful to endure. Transeat a me calix iste!*
Even the port of Toulon could not disarm him. 'Ugly streets, like those of Grenoble* (this native of the Dauphine evidently had his knife in his home country!) 'even uglier, perhaps, paved with little pointed stones. What a come-down after the Rue Saint-Ferreol in Marseilles!'
For Beyle was more indulgent towards Marseilles, where he had lived for some time, carrying on a few love affairs, and going to respectable parties for little girls, which amused him. The only time he was really bored there was at the balls given by a certain Mme Felip, which elicited this note in his Diary. 'A few women of thirty-five who looked ridiculous when they danced. I watched General Cervoni for a time, playing bouillotte: he did nothing but yawn. As a rule it's only about once in a quarter of an hour that you hear anything mentioned not concerned with bouillotte. After an hour of this the General took his departure. A fine evening for a man whose position has become important, who is envied, and who doubtless considers himself fortunate!*
Was better entertainment to be found elsewhere? A letter of Julie Talma's from Moulins in 1805 would suggest the contrary. By way of welcoming the officers of a regiment on its way to Lyons, the authorities of Allier organized a party to wMch Julie was invited. 'Would you believe it?' she says, "I spent two hours at the ball. There was a fearful crowd. The people in these parts would put up with anything for the sake of a ball. They filled their pockets with all the sweets and fruit off the buffets. I don't think you'd find such a senseless rabble anywhere but here/
She does, however, record a sensational turn: a dancing display by some mamelukes, who didn't do at all badly, their only fault being that their faces were 'insufficiently washed'.
The theatre was undoubtedly still the favourite pastime of the provincial towns. According to Salgues, there were 128 regular theatres in the departments in 1813. There were two each in Lyons and Rouen, three in Marseilles and Brussels, and in Bordeaux, where fashionable society was fairly extensive, there were four.
Attracted by good fees, the stars of Paris came to act there fairly often. Mile Contat asked 5000 francs a night. In the last year of the Empire Mile Duchesnois was paid 700 francs in Lyons. During the summer of 1804 Talma acted in several tragedies before the audiences of Bordeaux, who wanted to keep him till the end of the autumn. 'And even then they will only let him go under protest, and on condition that Mile Mezeray is sent to console them. Brunet saw the time coining when they would keep him by force ... and on his return he gave such a good report of their politeness and friendliness that the entire Volange family started off to pay them a visit on their own. It seems that when the Bordelais decide to treat people well they don't do it by halves.'
But many towns had too slender a budget to afford such prodigality. They had to be content with the little local company, or entertain touring troupes, mostly recruited in Paris from the Cafe Touchard, an establishment in the Rue de FArbre-Sec, that went trailing primitive scenery, soiled costumes and very modest talent from one end of France to the other.
In 1803 a woman, half-adventuress, half-artist, given to impulsive action and used to gunfire, who later signed her memoirs Ida de Saint-Elme, met with one of these companies at Aix-en-Provenee. Being rather hard up, and having recognized some old friends among them, she suggested joining them. The impresario engaged her, after telling her in confidence that he was going to give a performance at Digne, but they were not travelling like princes.
'Madame is no doubt aware that the ancients made use of chariots?'he said.
'Well, what of it?'
'Well, we are going to follow their example, in a country full of their monuments/
"Meaning that we're going to Digne in a cart?'
'How quick you are at guessing!'
The young beauty gaily assumed her role in this novel roman comique. Eleven persons settled themselves as best they could in the straw at the bottom of a cart protected by a tattered canvas hood. And this total did not include the ingenue's Persian cat, nor the soubrettes parakeet, nor the leading actor's pug-dog.* We were the most comical party in the world, and the journey was enough to make anybody laugh that had the sense not to take life too seriously. At last, between a tirade from Semiramis and a grand aria from Barbe-Bleue, we arrived safe and sound, having only been upset once.'
It is to be hoped that the performance given to the audience at Digne was not spoilt by any further debacle.
Far more sumptuous were the tours organized by the Consular Government for its own benefit when it visited the departments.
After rescuing from anarchy towns and villages where people had been tearing one another to pieces for the last ten years, Bonaparte not only brought them back towards French unity, but he laboured to enrich them, to give their lives more amplitude and security. From the very first, he endowed them with an administrative framework so strong that those to come after him would hardly dare to alter it, in spite of changes in the Government. With the prefects of the Consulate, who were soon to be those of the Empire, and often carried on as those of Louis XVIII, a new era may be said to have begun for the provinces, a regime of which the working and peasant population and the middle classes soon felt the benefit. So that even more than in Paris, perhaps, everybody was eager to acclaim the Pacifier.