Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth/Volume 1/Letter 35
To MISS SOPHY RUXTON.
BRUSSELS, Oct. 15, 1802.
After admiring on the ramparts of Calais the Poissardes with their picturesque nets, ugly faces, and beautiful legs, we set out for Gravelines, with whips clacking in a manner which you certainly cannot forget. The stillness and desolation of Gravelines was like the city in the Arabian Tales where every one is turned into stone. Fortifications constructed by the famous Vauban, lunes, and demi-lunes, and curtains, all which did not prevent the French from trotting through it.
We left Gravelines with an equipage at which Sobriety herself could not have forborne to laugh: to our London coach were fastened by long rope traces six Flemish horses of different heights, but each large and clumsy enough to draw an English waggon. The nose of the foremost horse was thirty-five feet from the body of the coach, their hoofs all shaggy, their manes all uncombed, and their tails long enough to please Sir Charles Grandison himself. These beasts were totally disencumbered of every sort of harness except one strap which fastened the saddle on their backs; and high, high upon their backs, sat perfectly perpendicular, long-waisted postillions in jack-boots, with pipes in their mouths. The country appeared one vast flat common, without hedges, or ditches, or trees, tiled farmhouses of equal size and similar form at even distances. All that the power of monotony can do to put a traveller to sleep is here tried; but the rattling and jolting on the paved roads set Morpheus and monotony both at defiance. To comfort ourselves we had a most entertaining Voyage dans les Pays Bas par M. Breton to read, and the charming story of Mademoiselle de Clermont in Madame de Genlis's Petits Romans. I never read a more pathetic and finely written tale.
Dunkirk is an ugly, bustling town. Strange-looking charettes, driven by thin men in cocked hats,—the window-shutters turned out to the streets and painted by way of signs with various commodities. A variety of things, among them little shifts, petticoats, and corsets, were fairly spread upon the ground on the bridges and in the streets. The famous basin, about which there have been such disputes, is little worth. Voltaire wonders at the English and French waging war "for a few acres of snow"; he might with equal propriety have laughed at them for fighting about a slop-basin. The pont-tournant is well worth seeing, and for those who have strong legs and who have breakfasted, it is worth while to climb the two hundred and sixty-four steps of the tower. Whilst we were climbing the town clock struck, and the whole tower vibrated, and the vibration communicated itself to our ears and heads in a most sublime and disagreeable manner.
At Dunkirk we entered what was formerly called L'ancien Brabant, and all things and all persons began to look like Dutch prints and Dutch toys, especially the women with their drop earrings, and their necklaces like the labels of decanters, their long-waisted, long-flapped jackets of one colour, and stiff petticoats of another. Even when moving the people all looked like wooden toys set in motion by strings—the strings in Flanders must be of gold: the Flemings seem to be all a money-making, money-loving people: they are fast recovering their activity after the Revolution.
The road to Bruges, fifty feet broad, solidly paved in the middle, seems, like all French and Flemish roads, to have been laid out by some inflexible mathematician: they are always right lines, the shortest possible between two points. The rows of trees on each side of these never-ending avenues are of the ugliest sort and figure possible: tall poplars stripped almost to the top, as you would strip a pen, and pollarded willows: the giant poplar and the dwarf willow placed side by side alternately, knight and squire. The postillions have badges like the badges of charity schools, strapped round their arms; these are numbered and registered, and if they behave ill, a complaint may be lodged against them by merely writing their names on the register, which excludes them from a pension, to which they would be entitled if they behaved well for a certain number of years. The post-houses are often lone, wretched places, one into which I peeped, a grenier, like that described by Smollett, in which the murdered body is concealed. At another post-house we met with a woman calling herself a servante, to whom we took not only an aversion, but a horror; Charlotte said that she should be afraid, not of that woman's cutting her throat, but that she would take a mallet and strike her head flat at one blow. Do you remember the woman in Caleb Williams, when he wakens and sees her standing over him with an uplifted hatchet? Our servante might have stood for this picture.
Bruges is a very old, desolate-looking town, which seems to have felt in common with its fellow-towns the effects of the Revolution. As we were charged very high at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, at Dunkirk, my father determined to go to the Hôtel de Commerce at Bruges, an old strange house which had been a monastery: the man chamber-maid led us through gallery after gallery, up stairs and down stairs, turning all manner of ways, with a bunch of keys in his hand, each key ticketed with a pewter ticket. There were twenty-eight bed-chambers: thank heaven we did not see them all! I never shall forget the feeling I had when the door of the room was thrown open in which we were to sleep. It was so large and so dark, that I could scarcely see the low bed in a recess in the wall, covered with a dark brown quilt. I am sure Mrs. Radcliffe might have kept her heroine wandering about this room for six good pages. When we meet I will tell Margaret of the night Charlotte and I spent in this room, and the footsteps we heard overhead—just a room and just a night to suit her taste.
In the morning we went to see the Central School; it is in what was an old monastery, and the church belonging to it is filled with pictures collected from all the suppressed convents, monasteries, and churches. Buonaparte has lately restored some of their pictures to the churches, but those by Rubens and Raphael are at Paris. In the cabinet of natural history there is the skeleton and the skin of a man who was guillotined, as fine white leather as ever you saw. The preparations for these Écoles Centrales are all too vast and ostentatious: the people are just beginning to send their children to them. Government finds them too expensive, and their number is to be diminished. The librarian of this École Centrale at Bruges is an Englishman, or rather a Jamaica man, of the name of Edwards. Brian Edwards was his great friend, and he was well acquainted with Johnson the bookseller, and Dr. Aikin, and Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld. Mr. Edwards and his son had often met Lovell at Johnson's, and spoke of him quite with affection. The two sons spent the evening with us, and they and their father accompanied us next morning part of our way to Ghent. We went by the canal barque, as elegant as any pleasure-boat I ever was in. My father entertained the Edwards with the history of his physiognomical guesses in a stage-coach. The eldest son piques himself upon telling character from handwriting. He was positive that mine could not be the hand of a woman, and then he came off by saying it was the writing of a manly character! We had an extremely fine day, and the receding prospect of Bruges, with its mingled spires, shipping, and windmills, the tops of their giant vanes moving above the trees, gave a pleasing example of a Flemish landscape, recalling the pictures of Teniers and the prints of Le Bas. We had good and agreeable company on board our barque, the Mayor of Bruges and his lady; her friend, a woman of good family; and an old Baron Triste, of a sixteen-quartering family. At the name of Mayor of Bruges, you probably represent to yourself a fat, heavy, formal, self-sufficient mortal—tout au contraire: our Mayor was a thin gentleman, of easy manners, literature, and amusing conversation: Madame, a beautiful Provinciale. M. Lerret, the Mayor, found us out to be the Edgeworths described by M. Pictet in the Journal Britannique. Since we came to France we have found M. Pictet's account very useful, for at every public library, and in every École Centrale, the Journal Britannique is taken, and we have consequently received many civilities. It was Sunday, and when we arrived at Ghent, all the middling people of the town in their holiday clothes were assembled on the banks of the canal according to custom to see the barque arrive: they made the scene very cheerful. The old Baron de Triste, though he had not dined, and though he had, as he said of himself, "un faim de diable," stayed to battle our coach and trunks through an army of custom-house officers. We stayed two days at Ghent, and saw pictures and churches without number. Here were some fine pictures by that Crayer of whom Rubens said, "Crayer! personne ne te surpassera!" Do not be afraid, my dear Sophy, I am not going to overwhelm you with pictures, nor to talk of what I don't understand; but it is extremely agreeable to me to see paintings with those who have excellent taste and no affectation. At the École Centrale was a smart little librarian, to whom we were obliged for getting the doors of the cathedral opened to us at night: we went in by moonlight, the appearance was sublime; lights burning on the altar veiled from sight, and our own monstrous shadows cast on the pillars, added to the effect. The verger took one of the tall candles to light us to some monuments in white marble of exquisite sculpture. There were no pictures, but the walls were painted in the manner of the Speaker's room at the Temple, and by the master who taught De Gray. This kind of painting seems to suit churches, and to harmonise well with sculpture and statues.
My dear friend, I have not room to say half I intended, but let me make what resolutions I please, I never can get all I want to say to you into a letter.