Horse traffic

I've read somewhere that a century ago almost every male adult could ride a horse; now, hardly any can. It was one of the least remarked of social revolutions.  (The author must have meant in parts of the world where there were plenty of horses, not e.g. tsetse areas of Africa where horses catch nagana.)

Few people in the west can now remember the time of horse-drawn vehicles, though even in the 1960s they still vied with motor vehicles in remote communities e.g. in the rural north of Sweden, as I discovered from reading Bo R. Holmberg's Dagsmeja.

Through the nineteenth century some of the quintessential elements of motoring were already appearing in the car's horse-drawn predecessors. 

Their two head lamps reached out yellowish fingers of light on to the road, with its thin coating of rimy ice. The cones of illumination raced ahead, picking out the ditches on either side with jerky bounds.

Every motorist will recognize that, but it's from Zola's Madeleine Férat (1868). Guillaume and Madeleine are travelling from Vétheuil towards Paris. (The D147 joining the A13 at Mantes, I see on Google Maps, and, so to speak, nod understandingly. I was on the A13 at nightfall myself, a week ago.)

Their vehicle was "a two-seater with a collapsible leather hood". Alec Brown mistranslates it as a "brougham" but Zola's original word is "cabriolet". A brougham was a specific brand, four-wheeled with paired horses, and the passengers were enclosed with the driver outside; but a cabriolet was two-wheeled, drawn by a single horse, and it seated just two people, one of whom drove.

(Brown was anglicizing, as when he turned the inn at Mantes from the Grand-Cerf to The White Hart.)

I didn't know any of this carriage info until now. In all my years of reading nineteenth-century novels I've blanked the innumerable hansoms and gigs and dogcarts and troikas and whatever, barouche or surrey with the fringe on top, treating them all as basically interchangeable. But for contemporary readers these would have been precise terms carrying a host of connotations, like Citroën or  Mitsubishi.

Apparently Jane Austen mentions horse-drawn traffic over 400 times. 

This cabriolet has two relevant connotations in Zola's novel.  Guillaume is really starting to lose it. A cabriolet is a far from ideal vehicle for driving all the way to Paris through a winter night, it's a slightly crazy idea, verging on desperate (they were too late to get the last train). And it shows how Guillaume in acute distress always clings to the idea of solitude with his wife. Just the two of us; that's his recipe for security. 

Apart from head lamps, the horse days were also like ours in terms of traffic accidents. The vehicles didn't travel so quickly, but they had minimal protection, horses were unpredictable and so were the roads. Geri Walton has an interesting post about this:

https://www.geriwalton.com/carriage-accidents-and-remedies/

The topic often appears in local history, e.g. here from New Hampshire and Maine:

https://eu.seacoastonline.com/story/news/local/exeter-news-letter/2011/01/07/historically-speaking-dangers-horse-buggy/51322350007/

where I learned that Sarah Orne Jewett's writing career ended with a carriage accident in 1902. Her horse slipped on a loose stone and she sustained head and spinal injuries. Here's her entry on Poetry Foundation:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sarah-orne-jewett

She was one of many, I mean as regards the accident.  

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life was doubtless shortened on October 24 1776 when he got trapped between a speeding carriage and the Great Dane that was running alongside it; a head injury again. 

The profoundly deaf Ludwig van Beethoven was reported as being struck by a carriage in 1819, but this report may be rather exaggerated or even founded on a mere tumble.  

https://bibliolore.org/2011/10/15/beethovens-traffic-accident/

In the days when horses were essential working animals many people found it convenient to regard them as undifferentiated disposables, like the nags in a bullring or like the contents of a burger. Some people even got off on the spectacles of cruel mistreatment at London's many horsefairs, as I learned here:

https://www.thehistoryoflondon.co.uk/horses-and-carriages-in-the-victorian-era/

But horses were also the focus of the first glimmerings of more humane sentiments, which I wrote about here: 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-silent-cry.html

Guillaume's neurotic sensitivity doesn't seemingly extend to the horse that he urges "to faster gait with flicks of the whip" and the occasional "sharp word of encouragement". It's 66 kms from Vétheuil to Paris, which is no way to treat a horse, 30 miles is usually considered the upper limit for a single horse-drawn journey, but maybe Guillaume was reckoning on changing horses. That's if he was thinking clearly at all. (In fact, the ill-fated couple will get no further than Mantes.)

The other book I've been reading recently, Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (1960), might be regarded as a sort of apocalyptic epitaph to the horse age, amid the carnage of anachronistic French cavalry in the early days of WW2. This extract from Georges' thoughts begins with a race meeting before reverting sharply to the present.

... and she (she hadn’t turned her head either, hadn’t shown that she had seen him) sitting on one of those iron chairs in the shade, and perhaps in her hand one of those yellow or pink sheets with the last odds written on them (but not looking at that either), talking desultorily with (or listening desultorily to, or not listening to) one of those men, one of those retired colonels or commandants never seen except in such places, wearing striped trousers, a grey bowler (and probably stored away somewhere, fully dressed, for the rest of the week and taken out only on Sundays, quickly dusted off, smoothed out and set here along with the baskets of flowers on the balconies and the staircases of the grandstand, and immediately afterwards stored away in their box again), and finally Corinne standing up casually, moving calmly – her vaporous and indecent red dress swaying, swirling around her legs – towards the grandstand… 

But there was no grandstand, no elegant public to look at us: I could still see them silhouetted ahead of us (Quixotic shapes diminished by the light that gnawed, corroded the outlines), ineffaceable against the blinding sunlight, their black shadows sliding beside them on the road like their faithful doubles, now foreshortened, hunched or rather telescoped, dwarfed and deformed, now stretched, spindly and distended, repeating in miniature and symmetrically the movements of their vertical doubles to which they appeared to be joined by invisible links: four points – the four hoofs – ....... the four hoofs and the four telescoped shadows separating and rejoining in a kind of motionless oscillation, a monotonous trampling, the dusty ground the cobblestones or grass running underneath like an ink blot spreading and shrinking, leaving no trace on the rubbish, the dead, the scar, the stain, the wake of wreckage war leaves behind it, and that must have been where I saw it for the first time, a little before or a little after we stopped to drink, discovering it, staring at it through that kind of half-sleep, that kind of brownish mud in which I was somehow caught, and maybe because we had to make a detour to avoid it, and actually sensing it more than seeing it: ... (like everything lying along the road: the trucks, the cars, the suitcases, the corpses) something unexpected, unreal, hybrid, so that what had been a horse (that is, what you knew, what you could recognize as having been a horse) was no longer anything now but a vague heap of limbs, of dead meat, of skin and sticky hair, three-quarters-covered with mud – ... 

(from Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (1960), translated by Richard Howard)

Simon's prose is endlessly quotable but interlaced in a complex way. From the midst of that passage I reluctantly omitted a wonderful and painstaking description of rain dripping from a roofline; it could have formed the centrepiece of another post.

*

Sarah Orne Jewett was an unknown author to me, and of course I couldn't leave it like that, so I've just finished her best-known novella, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), an absorbing and beautiful book. 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/367/367-h/367-h.htm

[The fir in question is the conically-shaped Balsam Fir (Abies balsamea), which along with the Black and White Spruce is a principal component of Maine's heavily wooded landscape.]

Given today's topic, I've chosen an extract where they're discussing having to borrow the grocery wagon rather than the chaise. 

MRS. TODD never by any chance gave warning over night of her great projects and adventures by sea and land. She first came to an understanding with the primal forces of nature, and never trusted to any preliminary promise of good weather, but examined the day for herself in its infancy. Then, if the stars were propitious, and the wind blew from a quarter of good inheritance whence no surprises of sea-turns or southwest sultriness might be feared, long before I was fairly awake I used to hear a rustle and knocking like a great mouse in the walls, and an impatient tread on the steep garret stairs that led to Mrs. Todd's chief place of storage. She went and came as if she had already started on her expedition with utmost haste and kept returning for something that was forgotten. When I appeared in quest of my breakfast, she would be absent-minded and sparing of speech, as if I had displeased her, and she was now, by main force of principle, holding herself back from altercation and strife of tongues.

These signs of a change became familiar to me in the course of time, and Mrs. Todd hardly noticed some plain proofs of divination one August morning when I said, without preface, that I had just seen the Beggs' best chaise go by, and that we should have to take the grocery. Mrs. Todd was alert in a moment.

“There! I might have known!” she exclaimed. “It's the 15th of August, when he goes and gets his money. He heired an annuity from an uncle o' his on his mother's side. I understood the uncle said none o' Sam Begg's wife's folks should make free with it, so after Sam's gone it'll all be past an' spent, like last summer. That's what Sam prospers on now, if you can call it prosperin'. Yes, I might have known. 'Tis the 15th o' August with him, an' he gener'ly stops to dinner with a cousin's widow on the way home. Feb'uary n' August is the times. Takes him 'bout all day to go an' come.”

I heard this explanation with interest. The tone of Mrs. Todd's voice was complaining at the last.

“I like the grocery just as well as the chaise,” I hastened to say, referring to a long-bodied high wagon with a canopy-top, like an attenuated four-posted bedstead on wheels, in which we sometimes journeyed. “We can put things in behind—roots and flowers and raspberries, or anything you are going after—much better than if we had the chaise.”

Mrs. Todd looked stony and unwilling. “I counted upon the chaise,” she said, turning her back to me, and roughly pushing back all the quiet tumblers on the cupboard shelf as if they had been impertinent. “Yes, I desired the chaise for once. I ain't goin' berryin' nor to fetch home no more wilted vegetation this year. Season's about past, except for a poor few o' late things,” she added in a milder tone. “I'm goin' up country. No, I ain't intendin' to go berryin'. I've been plottin' for it the past fortnight and hopin' for a good day.”

“Would you like to have me go too?” I asked frankly, but not without a humble fear that I might have mistaken the purpose of this latest plan.

“Oh certain, dear!” answered my friend affectionately. “Oh no, I never thought o' any one else for comp'ny, if it's convenient for you, long's poor mother ain't come. I ain't nothin' like so handy with a conveyance as I be with a good bo't. Comes o' my early bringing-up. I expect we've got to make that great high wagon do. The tires want settin' and 'tis all loose-jointed, so I can hear it shackle the other side o' the ridge. We'll put the basket in front. I ain't goin' to have it bouncin' an' twirlin' all the way. Why, I've been makin' some nice hearts and rounds to carry.”

(The Country of the Pointed Firs, opening of Ch XVI.)

It's strange how randomly assembled authors may suddenly reveal curious resemblances to each other. You could say of Sarah Orne Jewett, as of Claude Simon, that she was one of those novelists who had no particular interest in or talent for making up stories, she worked with her own experiences. And what's immediately arresting about both authors is their styles, so different yet both distinguished for a certain effortless buoyancy and a constant flow of insight. 

*

Or consider this surprising crossover, when Guillaume and Madeleine reach Mantes and put up at an inn:

This room, which the innkeeper had thought he had made most comfortable by putting a mat under the round table, exuded that indefinable odour which is common to all such places. That is, it was redolent of airlessness and mould, plus a vague suspicion of old linen, threadbare upholstery and damp dust. Big, ramshackle and chilly, it was like a public hall through which the whole world had passed without anybody leaving behind anything of his heart or his habits. It had the vacant commonplaceness and the stupid bareness of a dormitory in any barracks. Here, in this narrow bed, half-way between double and single in size, men and women, old and young, had spent their passing nights, and all left it as cold as a bench in a public vestibule. No doubt both sorrow and delight had sojourned here, but the room had absorbed no trace of either any tears or laughter which had passed through it. ...

(from Émile Zola's Madeleine Férat (1868), Ch 9, translated by Alec Brown)

Cut to Claude Simon:

... and he floating in the shadows, listening to the silence, the night, the peace, the imperceptible breathing of a woman beside him, and after a while he made out the second rectangle of the wardrobe mirror reflecting the dim light from the window – the eternally empty wardrobe of hotel rooms with two or three hangers dangling inside, the wardrobe itself (with its triangular pediment framed by two pineapples) made of that urine-yellow wood with reddish veins which is apparently used only for this kind of furniture doomed never to hold anything except its own dusty void, the dusty coffin of the reflected ghosts of thousands of lovers, thousands of naked, furious and clammy bodies, thousands of embraces absorbed, mingled in the glaucous depths of the cold, unalterable and virginal mirror – and he remembering:) ...

(from Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (1960), translated by Richard Howard)

The passage from Madeleine Férat proves ironic: in this novel of ripped-down defences, Guillaume will soon learn that he is not insulated from the past, the room is not silent and its previous occupants are not without trace.

But bringing Claude Simon alongside Zola provokes another line of thought, that novels like hotel rooms are not impermeable, that every writer is unwittingly contributing to a vast communal book, and every reader's occupation consists of reading that one book to the best of their ability, and in fact all our lives are part of one single life, the subject of the one book that we can only gesture at comprehending.