"This Shortness Of Breath, He Says, Has Steadily Increased.
This
group of symptoms makes it certain that he had tuberculosis of
the lungs, in other words, was slowly progressing in consumption.
"His darting pains in his side were due to the pleurisy which
always occurs in such an illness.
"His account shows also the absence of hopelessness which is a
characteristic state of mind in patients with pulmonary
tuberculosis.
"I do not think that the opinion of the Montpellier professor
deserves Smollett's condemnation. It seems to me both careful and
sensible and contains all the knowledge of its time. Smollett,
with an inconsistency not uncommon in patients who feel that they
have a serious disease, would not go in person to the Professor,
for he felt that from his appearance the Professor would be sure
to tell him he had consumption. He half hoped for some other view
of the written case in spite of its explicit statements, and when
Professor F - wrote that the patient had tubercles in his lungs,
this was displeasing to poor Smollett, who had hoped against hope
to receive - some other opinion than the only possible one, viz.,
that he undoubtedly had a consumption certain to prove fatal."
The cruel truth was not to be evaded. Smollett had tuberculosis,
though not probably of the most virulent kind, as he managed to
survive another seven years, and those for the most part years of
unremitting labour. He probably gained much by substituting Nice
for Montpellier as a place to winter in, for although the climate
of Montpellier is clear and bright in the highest degree, the
cold is both piercing and treacherous. Days are frequent during
the winter in which one may stand warmly wrapped in the brilliant
sun and feel the protection of a greatcoat no more than that of a
piece of gauze against the icy and penetrating blast that comes
from "tile roof of France."
Unable to take the direct route by Arles as at present, the
eastward-bound traveller from Montpellier in 1764 had to make a
northerly detour. The first stone bridge up the Rhone was at
Avignon, but there was a bridge of boats connecting Beaucaire
with Tarascon. Thence, in no very placable mood, Smollett set out
in mid-November by way of Orgon [Aix], Brignolles and le Muy,
striking the Mediterranean at Frejus. En route he was inveigled
into a controversy of unwonted bitterness with an innkeeper at le
Muy. The scene is conjured up for us with an almost disconcerting
actuality; no single detail of the author's discomfiture is
omitted. The episode is post-Flaubertian in its impersonal
detachment, or, as Coleridge first said, "aloofness." On crossing
the Var, the sunny climate, the romantic outline of the
Esterelles, the charms of the "neat village" of Cannes, and the
first prospect of Nice began gradually and happily to effect a
slight mitigation in our patient's humour. Smollett was
indubitably one of the pioneers of the Promenade des Anglais.
Long before the days of "Dr. Antonio" or Lord Brougham, he
described for his countrymen the almost incredible dolcezza of
the sunlit coast from Antibes to Lerici. But how much better
than the barren triumph of being the unconscious fugleman of so
glittering a popularity must have been the sense of being one of
the first that ever burst from our rude island upon that secluded
little Piedmontese town, as it then was, of not above twelve
thousand souls, with its wonderful situation, noble perspective
and unparalleled climate. Well might our travel-tost doctor
exclaim, "When I stand on the rampart and look around I can
scarce help thinking myself enchanted." It was truly a garden of
Armida for a native of one of the dampest corners of North
Britain.
"Forty or fifty years ago, before the great transformation took
place on the French Riviera, when Nizza, Villafranca, and Mentone
were antique Italian towns, and when it was one of the
eccentricities of Lord Brougham, to like Cannes, all that sea-board
was a delightful land. Only a hundred years ago Arthur
Young had trouble to get an old woman and a donkey to carry his
portmanteau from Cannes to Antibes. I can myself remember Cannes
in 1853, a small fishing village with a quiet beach, and Mentone,
a walled town with mediaeval gates and a castle, a few humble
villas and the old Posta to give supper to any passing traveller.
It was one of the loveliest bits of Italy, and the road from
Nizza to Genoa was one long procession for four days of glorious
scenery, historic remnants, Italian colour, and picturesque
ports. From the Esterelles to San Remo this has all been ruined
by the horde of northern barbarians who have made a sort of
Trouville, Brighton, or Biarritz, with American hotels and
Parisian boulevards on every headland and bay. First came the
half underground railway, a long tunnel with lucid intervals,
which destroyed the road by blocking up its finest views and
making it practically useless. Then miles of unsightly
caravanserais high walls, pompous villas, and Parisian grandes
rues crushed out every trace of Italy, of history, and pictorial
charm." So writes Mr. Frederic Harrison of this delectable coast,
[In the Daily Chronicle, 15th March 1898.] as it was, at a period
within his own recollection - a period at which it is hardly
fanciful to suppose men living who might just have remembered
Smollett, as he was in his last days, when he returned to die on
the Riviera di Levante in the autumn of 1771. Travel had then
still some of the elements of romance. Rapidity has changed all
that. The trouble is that although we can transport our bodies so
much more rapidly than Smollett could, our understanding travels
at the same old pace as before. And in the meantime railway and
tourist agencies have made of modern travel a kind of mental
postcard album, with grand hotels on one side, hotel menus on the
other, and a faint aroma of continental trains haunting, between
the leaves as it were.
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