The
Villainous Asthma Baulked Me Of That Satisfaction.
I was pinched
with the cold, and impatient to reach a warmer climate.
Our next
stage was at a paltry village, where we were poorly entertained.
I looked so ill in the morning, that the good woman of the house,
who was big with child, took me by the hand at parting, and even
shed tears, praying fervently that God would restore me to my
health. This was the only instance of sympathy, compassion, or
goodness of heart, that I had met with among the publicans of
France. Indeed at Valencia, our landlady, understanding I was
travelling to Montpellier for my health would have dissuaded me
from going thither; and exhorted me, in particular, to beware of
the physicians, who were all a pack of assassins. She advised me
to eat fricassees of chickens, and white meat, and to take a good
bouillon every morning.
A bouillon is an universal remedy among the good people of
France; insomuch, that they have no idea of any person's dying,
after having swallowed un bon bouillon. One of the English
gentlemen, who were robbed and murdered about thirty years ago
between Calais and Boulogne, being brought to the post-house of
Boulogne with some signs of life, this remedy was immediately
administered. "What surprises me greatly, (said the post-master,
speaking of this melancholy story to a friend of mine, two years
after it happened) I made an excellent bouillon, and poured it
down his throat with my own hands, and yet he did not recover."
Now, in all probability, this bouillon it was that stopped his
breath. When I was a very young man, I remember to have seen a
person suffocated by such impertinent officiousness. A young man
of uncommon parts and erudition, very well esteemed at the
university of G - ow was found early one morning in a subterranean
vault among the ruins of an old archiepiscopal palace, with his
throat cut from ear to ear. Being conveyed to a public-house in
the neighbourhood, he made signs for pen, ink, and paper, and in
all probability would have explained the cause of this terrible
catastrophe, when an old woman, seeing the windpipe, which was
cut, sticking out of the wound, and mistaking it for the gullet,
by way of giving him a cordial to support his spirits, poured
into it, through a small funnel, a glass of burnt brandy, which
strangled
him in the tenth part of a minute. The gash was so hideous, and
formed by so many repeated strokes of a razor, that the surgeons
believed he could not possibly be the perpetrator himself;
nevertheless this was certainly the case.
At Brignolles, where we dined, I was obliged to quarrel with the
landlady, and threaten to leave her house, before she would
indulge us with any sort of flesh-meat. It was meagre day, and
she had made her provision accordingly. She even hinted some
dissatisfaction at having heretics in her house:
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 111 of 276
Words from 57216 to 57718
of 143308
