Then, As Now, It Is Curious
To Find The Rumour Current That The Climate Of Nice Was Sadly
Deteriorating.
"Nothing to what it was before the war!" as the
grumbler from the South was once betrayed into saying of the
August moon.
Smollett's esprit chagrin was nonplussed at first to
find material for complaint against a climate in which he admits
that there was less rain and less wind than in any other part of
the world that he knew. In these unwonted circumstances he is
constrained to fall back on the hard water and the plague of
cousins or gnats as affording him the legitimate grievance, in
whose absence the warrior soul of the author of the Ode to
Independence could never be content.
VII
For his autumn holiday in 1764 Smollett decided on a jaunt to
Florence and Rome, returning to Nice for the winter; and he
decided to travel as far as Leghorn by sea. There was choice
between several kinds of small craft which plied along the coast,
and their names recur with cheerful frequency in the pages of
Marryat and other depictors of the Mediterranean. There was the
felucca, an open boat with a tilt over the stern large enough to
freight a post-chaise, and propelled by ten to twelve stout
mariners. To commission such a boat to Genoa, a distance of a
hundred miles, cost four louis. As alternative, there was the
tartane, a sailing vessel with a lateen sail. Addison sailed from
Marseilles to Genoa in a tartane in December 1699: a storm arose,
and the patron alarmed the passengers by confessing his sins (and
such sins!) loudly to a Capuchin friar who happened to be aboard.
Smollett finally decided on a gondola, with four rowers and a
steersman, for which he had to pay nine sequins (4 1/2 louis).
After adventures off Monaco, San Remo, Noli, and elsewhere, the
party are glad to make the famous phones on the Torre della
Lanterna, of which banker Rogers sings in his mediocre verse:
Thy pharos Genoa first displayed itself
Burning in stillness on its rocky seat;
That guiding star so oft the only one,
When those now glowing in the azure vault
Are dark and silent
Smollett's description of Genoa is decidedly more interesting. He
arrived at a moment specially propitious to so sardonic an
observer, for the Republic had fallen on evil times, having
escaped from the clutches of Austria in 1746 by means of a
popular riot, during which the aristocracy considerately looked
the other way, only to fall into an even more embarrassed and
unheroic position vis-a-vis of so diminutive an opponent as
Corsica. The whole story is a curious prototype of the nineteenth
century imbroglio between Spain and Cuba. Of commonplaces about
the palaces fruitful of verbiage in Addison and Gray, who says
with perfect truth, "I should make you sick of marble were I to
tell you how it is lavished here," Smollett is sparing enough,
though he evidently regards the inherited inclination of Genoese
noblemen to build beyond their means as an amiable weakness.
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