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.
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