520 My Uncles Diary at Calais. [MAY, 



the walking of French females ? Is a lame amble elegance ? or is the 

 halting of a cat in walnut-shells called grace ? I execrate the wriggling 

 gait of the French girls ; it gives me the uneasy conviction that they 

 have sore toes and narrow petticoats, or that they tie both stockings with a 

 single garter, too short to admit of the extension of their limbs. In the 

 young it is mincing and unnatural ; and when French gormandizing 

 has clothed the elderly with bilious corpulence, when in motion, they 

 look like forms of jelly in staggering agitation ; tottering, with unwieldy 

 feet in narrow shoes, under an unmanageable impulse. I have seen 

 them take to an ascent to counteract the force of an original momentum. 



4th, 5th, 6th, 7th April. Confined to the house with a sore hand, 

 which I cut severely in opening my door an arduous task sometimes, 

 from the clumsy workmanship of French locks and latches. Here they 

 are centuries behind us in all articles of hardware. Their pokers are 

 skewers, their tongs pincers, and their shovels spoons ; a coal-skuttle is 

 a curiosity, a grate a rarity, and a hearth-brush unknown. The tem- 

 perature of their rooms is a constant battle between the result of one 

 element and the violence of another the warmth of smoke being con- 

 stantly qualified by the rushing of the wind through windows, doors, 

 and key-holes. You may sit by a red-hot stove, and roast your knees, 

 while your extremities are frozen. 



8th April. Visited , a countryman, who felt ashamed at the 



delusion of all his projected comforts. I remember, in England, his 

 favourite theme was the charm of the French climate, the obliging dis- 

 position and quick perception of its people. He couldn't bear the atmos- 

 phere of his native country ; he hated the dulness and incivility of its 

 inhabitants ; so he sought a refuge from these intolerable evils in the 

 superior temperature, manners, and character of France and its popula- 

 tion. He was ashamed to own his disappointment. He was drinking 

 claret as he called it which sank like frozen lead within him. He 

 would fain have mulled a bottle ; but his servant was gone, in spite of a 

 raging storm, to a dance some leagues distant. He appealed, in miserable 

 French, to the female of a fellow-lodger, who answered him with a broad 

 stare, and a perpetual " plait-il ?" He succeeded, at length, by panto- 

 mime and gibberish, in wringing a reluctant promise of some boiling 

 water from this type of national acquiescence this perceptive and 

 obliging handmaid. In an hour it came, lukewarm, highly tinctured 

 with the savour of an unclean tub, in which it had been caught from the 

 house-tops ; tolerably suffused with grease, and in a tea-cup. He 

 could bear this no longer j and sincerity compelled him to say, " Was 



there ever such a d d set of ?" Here he stopped; and I 



responded with a hem ! He had ever been a warm encomiast of French 

 furniture. I saw him wriggling to and fro upon his chair ; being some- 

 what lusty, he found himself uneasy in his seat, over which his Britan- 

 nic person was expanded like a toad-stool on its stem. f{ Let us drink 

 Old England !" He assured me that the wine, at least, was excellent 

 and surely wholesome ; but he swallowed every bumper with the air of 

 one who takes a draught by gulps, to guard against its nausea. He 

 seemed to labour through a bottle for the compensation of his toil, which 

 was, in general, a kind of counterpoise against its healthful predecessor 

 a quart of brandy, with a fiery twang, diluted in a fashion of his own, 

 with economical consideration for his water, which, in Calais, is both bad 

 and scarce. 



