Even for the rich and well-connected, however, travel was far from easy. Robb quotes from Mme de Genlis’s phrasebook for travellers of 1799 such gems as:
Your carriage is heavy and overloaded.
The horse is worthless. It is restive. It is skittish…. Please give me a different one.
What kind of road is it?
It is very sandy.
It is strewn with rocks.
It is full of mountains, forests and precipices.
One must avoid passing through forests at dusk or at night.
And even those who could pay would not necessarily eat well. Robb explains how the French tradition of fine dining has its roots not in tradition, but 19th-century development. Most people lived on a monotonous basic diet that could apparently barely sustain life, and stale bread was the staple. In the Alps bread was baked once a year or even less often, then hung in the sun to dry or smoked in the eaves. It was softened with buttermilk or whey - or for rich people, wine. Anything that could be eaten was: in the Alps marmots, in the Morvan red squirrel.
It barely sounds survivable as a staple diet - but Robb explains how it was, quoting from the memoirs of the socialist Proudhon, who while he described meals of roasted cornmeal, potatoes, and vegetable soup also “grazed” in the fields on poppy seeds, peas, rampion, salsify, cherries, grapes, rosehips, blackberries, and sloes. And there were in 1862 more than 3 million beehives in France, one for every 13 inhabitants.
One more huge, and now clearly almost forgotten aspect of provincial life that Robb outlines is who did the work. I thought of the Parisienne who told me “cutting wood isn’t women’s work” when reading of how “in the mid to late 29th-century, almost everywhere in France, … at least half the people working in the open air were women. In many parts women appeared to do the lion’s share of the work…. Some tasks, like fetching water, were considered exclusively female. Very little was considered exclusively male.” Often their men folk were away for long periods - working as pedlars, as fishermen, on the high pastures, so women were in charge. And often they stuck to their own lives - 19th-century census show that over a third of all women were single and 12% of women over 50 had never married.
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