"Gaunt
emblems of famine." In Burgundy the Doctor says, "I saw a peasant
ploughing the ground with a jackass, a lean cow, and a he-goat
yoked together." His vignette of the fantastic petit-maitre at
Sens, and his own abominable rudeness, is worthy of the master
hand that drew the poor debtor Jackson in the Marshalsea in
Roderick Random.
His frank avowal of ill temper at the time deprives our
entertainment of the unamiable tinge of which it would otherwise
have partaken. "The truth is, I was that day more than usually
peevish, from the bad weather as well as from the dread of a fit
of asthma, with which I was threatened. And I daresay my
appearance seemed as uncouth to him as his travelling dress
appeared to me. I had a grey, mourning frock under a wide
greatcoat, a bob-wig without powder, a very large laced hat, and
a meagre, wrinkled, discontented countenance."
From Lyons the traveller secured a return berline going back to
Avignon with three mules and a voiturier named Joseph. Joseph,
though he turned out to be an ex-criminal, proved himself the one
Frenchman upon whose fidelity and good service Smollett could
look back with unfeigned satisfaction. The sight of a skeleton
dangling from a gibbet near Valence surprised from this droll
knave an ejaculation and a story, from which it appeared only too
evident that he had been first the comrade and then the
executioner of one of the most notorious brigands of the century.
