How to Create the Perfect Wife (14 page)

L
ife with Thomas Day was certainly an education. For most of their short lives, Sabrina and Lucretia—as they were now known—had been accustomed to the repetition and routine that marked out their dreary hours at the Foundling Hospital. Now each day brought something new. Having barely had time to marvel at the crush and chaos of London, by early November the two girls were immersed in the sights and sounds of Paris.

Like fugitives evaporating into the London fog, Day had smuggled his orphans across the Channel during the first week of November, most probably in the sturdy little packet ship that plied its way between Dover and Calais carrying the mail. A popular route with British travelers embarking on continental tours through France and Italy, the twenty-two-mile voyage could take as little as three hours in favorable conditions or as many as fifteen if contrary winds blew the ship off course or, worse, dropped and left it helplessly marooned mid-Channel. Passengers unerringly complained of feeling seasick as the tiny vessel pitched and rolled. And by the time they had been conveyed to and from the ship in open boats in both Dover and Calais harbors, many were drenched as well as
nauseous. While nearly all around them retched and groaned, Sabrina and Lucretia proved robust travelers, Day would later boast, and they made not a murmur of complaint.

From Calais the little party headed for Paris, rattling along the well-paved, straight roads of northern France, most probably in a regular stagecoach, or
diligence.
The 188-mile journey commonly took three days including overnight stops at inns. But the steady stream of carriages and hired post chaises trundling along the main route between coast and capital could sometimes prove so dense that travelers were obliged to share rooms with complete strangers at the wayside inns. In his comic novel
A
Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy,
published a year before Day’s trip, Laurence Sterne told the true story of a friend who had to surrender one of the two beds in his room to a Frenchwoman who had arrived late at night. The roommates negotiated their sleeping arrangements, which stipulated that the curtains around the woman’s bed must be pinned firmly shut and the Englishman must wear his breeches all night. Given the high demand for beds on the busy tourist trail, chances are that Day and his two wards were likewise obliged to share a room, although Day would always, figuratively, draw a curtain over their particular sleeping arrangements.

When they entered through the gates of Paris after days on the open road, the girls would have been assailed by the uproar of carriages and pedestrians jostling for space in the narrow streets. The city’s population was half a million by the second half of the eighteenth century—about half that of London—but its streets were at least as congested and rowdy. The lack of pavements made them hazardous for pedestrians while the traffic din was increased by the echoes reverberating around the apartment buildings that towered up to seven stories high. As they took in the foreign shops, the foreign clothes and—not least—the foreign language, there was much for the girls to see and hear.

The trio arrived in the city during the second week of November. Jubilant at his first taste of continental travel, now that he was twenty-one and free from his stepfather’s purse strings at last, Day was looking forward to touring the city sights. But his encounter with French food and hospitality in Paris largely confirmed his bias for the English way of life.
No doubt the sight of the greasy-haired and scruffily dressed Englishman with two wide-eyed girls in tow reinforced a few French stereotypes about English eccentricity along the way.

The idea of taking his pupils to France, and particularly to Paris—Europe’s capital of culture and center of fashion—seems an odd choice for Day given his avowed horror of urban polite society. He could easily have found a suitably remote country retreat in England or Ireland. And being as much a Francophobe as his hero Rousseau was an Anglophobe, Day would automatically have wanted to protect the two girls from everything he knew, or thought he knew, about France. Like many Englishmen, Day associated the French lifestyle with a slavishness to fashion and foppish effeminacy, which he naturally abhorred. Certainly the move surprised his friends. “Mr. Day had as large a portion of the national prejudice in favor of the people of England, and against the French, as any man of sense could have,” observed Richard Lovell Edgeworth, adding that it was “therefore something strange, that he should take two young girls to that country, one of whom he destined to be his wife.”

Day would later attribute his move to France to a recommendation from his new friend, Dr. William Small, to seek a change of climate to improve his health. But the major benefit of the move was to safeguard his wife-training project rather than his own well-being. In France, the girls were not only beyond the legal dominion of the Foundling Hospital’s governors, they were out of sight and earshot of chattering London society. The two foundlings, the girls named Ann and Dorcas, had vanished into thin air. And there was a further reason—which was even more pertinent in the context of Day’s plan. Without a word of French between them, the two orphans were completely divorced from any source of aid and every outside influence except for that of Day himself. To make doubly sure that the girls were cut off from any other contact, Day took no English servants, so that, as one friend noted, “They might receive no ideas, except those which himself might choose to impart.”

Even Rousseau, in stipulating that Émile should be educated in the countryside to protect him from external vices, had not dreamed up quite so foolproof a shield against unwanted influences. Day’s belief that the
flaws inherent in the female sex were largely owing to the foolish, faddish world in which girls were brought up had convinced him that the orphan destined to become his future wife should be educated inside a virtual bubble. In France, he knew, he could control his experiment just as effectively as the philosopher turning on and off the oxygen to the imprisoned cockatoo in Joseph Wright’s painting.

Having settled himself and the girls in a Paris hotel, Day devoted the week to exploring the French capital. He had been pleasantly surprised by the welcoming inns, the well-cultivated countryside and the “well cloth’d and healthy” peasants on the journey from Calais—so different from the “Wretchedness and Misery” he had been led to expect. But his prejudices now reasserted themselves with a vengeance as he trod the capital’s crowded streets. Paris, he was delighted to report to his mother in a dutiful letter sent on November 18, was no match for London. “Its streets are narrow, always dirty, without foot-ways, and the houses high—nothing can be more inconvenient than walking in this most elegant and polite City, for you are in continual Danger of being run over by the Carriages.” Furthermore, the Parisian shops were inferior to those in London and the French food less palatable.

Like many an English traveler visiting France, Day yearned for hearty roast beef instead of fancy dishes smothered in rich sauces. He marveled that the French could “cook up a dish out of any thing,” and reported: “I have had one Dish almost every day I have been in Paris, which is compos’d of nothing but the Pinions of Fowls, fricasied.” But he told his mother, “I own I am yet so little Frenchified, that I prefer, or should prefer if I could get it, one good joint of Meat, to all their Fricasies.” There was nothing like home cooking.

Naturally Day did not mention the single most interesting aspect of his travels: the two young companions who shared his journey, nor their thoughts on Parisian street life or French cuisine. Not surprisingly, he had divulged nothing of his experiment to his mother or stepfather. So whether the two girls were enjoying chicken wings every day, or even spreading their own wings in the Paris air, was left unsaid. But Day had obviously not lost sight of the main motive for his trip since he was paying close attention to the women he saw with his usual eye for detail. His
scorn for the female sex was plainly undiminished. The women of Paris exhibited “the most fantastic Mixture of Slovenliness and Finery,” he spluttered. On the one hand they wore their hair “drest to the highest Ex-travigance of the Mode”—following the contemporary fashion for lavishly piled up hairstyles—and yet their clothes were “dirty, splash’d and sluttish beyond Conception.”

Day, of course, was not alone in denigrating his French neighbors. As soon as the Seven Years War with England’s oldest enemy had ended in 1764, English travelers had flocked to France chiefly to reassure themselves of their national superiority. Samuel Johnson’s friend Hester Thrale was shocked by the contradictions of French fashions when she noticed a countess who sported diamond earrings yet wore a “dirty black handkerchief” around her neck. Another seasoned traveler, Robert Wharton, turned his nose up at the French habit, among both men and women, of urinating in public—even though this was not uncommon in London streets. Others pined for clean beds, decent roads and plain cooking yet their complaints did nothing to deter most English visitors from merrily extending their French leave. Day, likewise, pronounced Paris “altogether very disagreeable” and immediately resolved to explore France further.

Just as disagreeable to Day as the city of Paris itself was no doubt the sizable community of British living in or visiting the capital. With large numbers of well-to-do families passing through on their holidays and young men fresh out of university making their first stop on their grand tours, along with assorted businessmen, diplomats, tutors, servants and hangers-on, the French capital positively bustled with English visitors—and buzzed with English gossip almost as much as London did. There was even an English coffeehouse where customers could read the English papers and circulate the latest rumors. If he stayed in the city for long, Day could be sure to run into somebody he knew, or worse, who knew his mother. And so after just one week of sightseeing, he decided to press on south toward Lyon. On November 19 he paid his hotel bills, gathered his two girls and set off in search of more convenient surroundings and warmer climes.

It is possible, in making for Lyon, that Day was hoping to track down his hero Rousseau and seek advice on training his orphans just as other
disciples pestered the writer for guidance on educating their children. After fleeing England in 1767, the philosopher had laid low in various refuges in northern France under a false name, Jean-Joseph Renou—he was no master of disguise—with Thérèse masquerading as his sister, until friends persuaded him it was unsafe to remain. With his books still banned and the arrest warrant still in force throughout most of France, there was a real risk that Rousseau might end up in the Bastille, where his publisher, Pierre Guy, had already been incarcerated. Just because he was paranoid does not mean that Rousseau was free of danger.

By 1769, when Day arrived in France, Rousseau had settled in a village less than thirty miles from Lyon but in a district outside the jurisdiction of the Parisian Parlement. Feeling as tormented as ever, he devoted his days to writing his saucy and candid
Confessions.
Since Day had made sure to pack his trusty copy of the banned
Émile
as child-care guidance when leaving England, he too risked prosecution if he stayed within the environs of Paris. And so he followed in his idol’s footsteps on the road south.

The route from Paris to Lyon was a major thoroughfare for continental travelers meandering through France toward Italy. Most took the
diligence
or alternatively hired a chaise as far as Chalon-sur-Saône from where they could continue to Lyon by boat—the
diligence par eau
—on a picturesque two-day voyage down the Saône. Most made the trip in spring or summer. To undertake the journey at the onset of winter, when heavy rains transformed the rivers into swollen torrents that washed away the bridges and flooded the roads or made them impassable with mud, was courageous if not downright foolish. For a man with little knowledge of the language and no experience of the terrain to take two young girls on such a journey might be regarded as reckless.

One British traveler who had braved the same route in November 1742, twenty-seven years before Day, complained that in places the road was so flooded that his coach was forced to make a detour through fields and vineyards. At other points the rushing floodwaters coursed down the ruts in the roadway so fast that they threatened to overturn his carriage meaning that the only safe course was to walk.

Taking the two-day boat trip was plainly far too dangerous with the Saône in full spate. So Day and his wards traveled by the
diligence
where
possible and hired post chaises and drivers where not. By day they negotiated flooded roads and crossed surging torrents on flimsy wooden bridges at risk of being swept away, stopping every twelve miles or so to change their exhausted horses. At each posting stage Day had to cajole the postmasters to supply fresh horses and attempt the next stage of the journey. French postilions, whose job was to ride one of the leading horses, had a reputation for obstinacy among British visitors. One exasperated traveler exclaimed: “I might just as effectually argue with a horse as with a French postilion.” By night, Day found refuge for himself and his two girls in cold country inns with lumpy beds and lumpier suppers. At Lyon, where most travelers veered east toward the classical ruins of Italy, Day continued due south for a further 140 miles. Finally they arrived at the towering medieval walls of Avignon.

It was here, in the Church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon, at mass on Good Friday, April 6, 1327, that the Italian poet Petrarch had first seen the mysterious and unattainable Laura who would unleash his lifelong infatuation and inspire more than 300 sonnets. She may have been Laure de Noves, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a local nobleman, who had already been married for two years to a French count—an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade. Exiled in Avignon with his parents, Petrarch, in his early twenties, followed her obsessively. By all accounts she spurned Petrarch’s devotion, for she gave her husband eleven children before she died, aged thirty-eight. She was buried in the city’s Franciscan Church. Day was not the first Englishman to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of Petrarch’s elusive perfect woman; in Avignon he hoped to succeed where Petrarch had famously failed.