In five minutes we have passed the iron cross, with
a little ragged kneeling-place of turf before it,
in the outskirts of the town; and are again upon the
road.
Chalons is a fair resting-place, in right of its good
inn on the bank of the river, and the little steamboats,
gay with green and red paint, that come and go upon
it: which make up a pleasant and refreshing
scene, after the dusty roads. But, unless you
would like to dwell on an enormous plain, with jagged
rows of irregular poplars on it, that look in the
distance like so many combs with broken teeth:
and unless you would like to pass your life without
the possibility of going up-hill, or going up anything
but stairs: you would hardly approve of Chalons
as a place of residence.
You would probably like it better, however, than Lyons:
which you may reach, if you will, in one of the before-mentioned
steamboats, in eight hours.
What a city Lyons is! Talk about people feeling,
at certain unlucky times, as if they had tumbled from
the clouds! Here is a whole town that is tumbled,
anyhow, out of the sky; having been first caught up,
like other stones that tumble down from that region,
out of fens and barren places, dismal to behold!
The two great streets through which the two great
rivers dash, and all the little streets whose name
is Legion, were scorching, blistering, and sweltering.
The houses, high and vast, dirty to excess, rotten
as old cheeses, and as thickly peopled. All up
the hills that hem the city in, these houses swarm;
and the mites inside were lolling out of the windows,
and drying their ragged clothes on poles, and crawling
in and out at the doors, and coming out to pant and
gasp upon the pavement, and creeping in and out among
huge piles and bales of fusty, musty, stifling goods;
and living, or rather not dying till their time should
come, in an exhausted receiver. Every manufacturing
town, melted into one, would hardly convey an impression
of Lyons as it presented itself to me: for all
the undrained, unscavengered qualities of a foreign
town, seemed grafted, there, upon the native miseries
of a manufacturing one; and it bears such fruit as
I would go some miles out of my way to avoid encountering
again.
In the cool of the evening: or rather in the
faded heat of the day: we went to see the Cathedral,
where divers old women, and a few dogs, were engaged
in contemplation. There was no difference, in
point of cleanliness, between its stone pavement and
that of the streets; and there was a wax saint, in
a little box like a berth aboard ship, with a glass
front to it, whom Madame Tussaud would have nothing
to say to, on any terms, and which even Westminster
Abbey might be ashamed of. If you would know
all about the architecture of this church, or any
other, its dates, dimensions, endowments, and history,
is it not written in Mr. Murray’s Guide-Book,
and may you not read it there, with thanks to him,
as I did!
