1828.] Dunkerque. 155 



craft that bring merchandize to Dunkerque. The long coal barges as 

 long as a street ribbed like some strange animal, and shining with 

 varnish almost like a piece of French household furniture offer an 

 agreeable contrast to our vehicles for the same purpose. Here also the 

 stranger is amused by the perpetual pokings of the custom-house officers, 

 with their long shining iron spikes, into every vehicle that passes, to 

 detect any of those objects of traffic that are not allowed to enter the 

 French towns, without paying the octroi, or town-duty. On passing the 

 abovenamed gate and drawbridge, you are, in fact, within the town of 

 Dunkerque ; but you are riot so in appearance and effect, till you have 

 passed a second gate and drawbridge, over another canal leading to the 

 opposite side of the town, and the view of which is more pleasing than 

 that of any other canal in this neighbourhood, on account of the extreme 

 neatness of its banks of smooth turf, and the perfection of its various 

 locks and drawbridges. On passing this second gate, the road turns 

 abruptly to the left, and you are immediately within the city. Hitherto 

 the road, though of a noble width, and flanked with handsome houses, is 

 paved in the middle only. But on entering the second gate, the pavement 

 covers every part, up to the walls of the houses, and gives that effect 

 which is peculiar to continental cities. I will venture to state it as a 

 fact (I would announce it as a discovery of my own, but that I know 

 you are apt to smile at the supposed merit of such discoveries, even when 

 you allow them to be such) that the irreconcilably foreign look which 

 belongs to all provincial cities on the continent, in the eyes of most 

 English travellers, arises chiefly from this circumstance of the road pave- 

 ment covering the whole open space of the streets, up to the very doors 

 and walls of the houses, so that not a foot of natural earth is to be seen, 

 if you look for it ever so carefully : not a vestige of any thing appears, 

 that is not obviously, and almost obtrusively, the work of man's hands. 

 And this arrangement acts on the eye in two ways it not only gives that 

 unfinished, and yet altogether artificial look, neither quality of which is 

 agreeable to an English eye, but it is the immediate cause of that other 

 appearance, which at first seems so odd to us of every body, even to the 

 most gaily attired of the female foot passengers, walking in the middle of 

 the carriage road that being, in fact, not only the dryest and best paved 

 part of the street, but there being no other part where you can walk with 

 equal convenience that portion of the street w T hich is next to the houses 

 on either side being intersected and cut up by the entrances to the caves 

 which are beneath every house, and which entrances are almost always 

 open, for the purposes of those by whom they are inhabited : it being 

 the custom for every house even the finest in the city to let their 

 cellars to the poorer inhabitants for distinct dwellings, and purposes of 

 trade, manufactures, &c. Having announced to you one of my disco- 

 veries in the above sort, I may as well follow it by another, that you may 

 punish my sins in that particular both under one. You may be assured, 

 then, that the custom of dispensing with a trottoir, or foot pavement, in 

 the French streets, has arisen, not from the want of perceiving or appre- 

 ciating the extreme convenience and comfort of such an arrangement, 

 but from the impossibility of making it coincide with another custom, 

 which they cannot afford to part with, of turning to the utmost possible 

 account all the ground within the walls of the cities. In many of the 

 French fortified cities, perhaps a fourth, or at least a sixth part of the 

 inhabitants, live under ground, in the cellars of the better sort of houses $ 



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