Montpellier is thought little enough of as regards climate since, though ‘it bears a name familiar as the type of salubrity and mildness of climate, the place will not in reality answer the expectations of those who seek either a soft air or a beautiful position. Indeed it is difficult to understand how it came to be chosen by the physicians of the North as a retreat for consumptive patients; since nothing is more trying to weak lungs than its variable climate … Though its sky be clear, its atmosphere is filled with dust, which must be hurtful to the lungs.’
The sad story is told of how Mrs Temple, the adopted daughter of Young, the poet (no relation of Arthur Young the gentleman farmer) died suddenly at Montpellier, ‘at a time when the laws which accompanied the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, backed by the superstition of a fanatic populace, denied Christian burial to Protestants. Narcissa was buried at Lyons, eventually.’ One can imagine the bereaved man travelling from place to place with his daughter’s body in the coach, searching for a decent grave for her interment.
Further down the road, the Hôtel du Nord at Béziers was declared by Murray in 1848 to be ‘filthy in the extreme and exorbitant’. At that place we are reminded of the fanaticism of the Middle Ages, ‘of the horrible slaughter of 1209, which followed the memorable siege by the Crusading army, raised at the call of the Church of Rome, to exterminate the heretical Albigenses, who were numerous in this devoted city. The inhabitants refusing to yield, the crusaders carried the city by storm, led by the Bishop Reginald of Montpellier and the Abbot of Citeaux, who had prepared a list of the proscribed victims. In the confusion of the assault, however, the soldiers were perplexed to distinguish the heretics from the orthodox, whereupon the abbot is said to have exclaimed: “Kill all! The Lord will know his own.” The number massacred amounted to 60,000 according to some historians, though the Abbot of Citeaux himself modestly avows that he could only slay 20,000.’
When Henry James visited the region (A Little Tour of France), carrying his ‘faithful Murray’, he slept in a bad bed at Carcassonne, but a worse one at Narbonne, where the hotel was ‘crowded from cellar to attic’, causing him to spend the night in a room at the local blacksmith’s. Breakfasting at the Hôtel de France next morning, ‘the dirty little inn and Narbonne at large seemed to me to have the infirmities of the south without its usual graces … At ten o’clock in the morning there was a table d’hôte for breakfast — a wonderful repast, which overflowed into every room and pervaded the whole establishment. I sat down with a hundred hungry marketers, fat, brown, greasy men, with a good deal of the rich soil of the Languedoc adhering to their hands and boots. I mention the latter articles because they almost put them on the table. It was very hot, and there were swarms of flies; the viands had the strongest odour … which my companions devoured in large quantities. A man opposite to me had the dirtiest fingers I ever saw; a collection of fingers which in England would have excluded him from a farmers’ ordinary.’
After a cursory visit to the cathedral and museum in Narbonne, James seems to like Montpellier rather better as a town. The Hôtel Nevet is ‘the model of a good proverbial inn; a big rambling, creaking establishment, with brown, labyrinthine corridors, a queer old open-air vestibule, into which the diligence used to penetrate, and an hospitality more expressive than that of the new caravanserais’.
He spent two days there, ‘mostly in the rain, and even under these circumstances I carried away a kindly impression. I think the Hôtel Nevet had something to do with it, and the sentiment of relief with which, in a quiet, even a luxurious room that looked out on a garden, I reflected that I had washed my hands of Narbonne.’ Then, as if to boast of his heartlessness, he goes on: ‘The phylloxera has destroyed the vines in the country that surround Montpellier, and at that moment I was capable of rejoicing in the thought that I should not breakfast with vintners.’ Perhaps he didn’t know, or maybe he would not have cared, but in the nearby villages people were hungry to the extent that they had only snails to eat from their ravaged vineyards.
Murray’s 1881 version of the Hôtel Nevet is quite different, for it is said to have ‘200 bed-rooms, dirty and bad smells’, whereas in 1848 it was ‘a splendid, new, and large edifice, 200 bed-rooms — one of the best hotels in France’. In the Baedeker of 1895 it is the first on the list, and without deleterious comment, while in the issue of 1914 there is no mention of it at all.
The business of hotels could fall off alarmingly after a few adverse remarks in guidebooks, and perhaps some landlords could be forgiven for suspecting that a certain solitary traveller might be an emissary of one of the publishing firms who had come to check his establishment. An unassuming British voyageur spotted in the hotel dining-room might cause the waiting maid to spill a tureen of soup at the table, the wine waiter to fall over with his carafe of local wine (‘the most one might say about it is that it could be called the best vinegar in France’). The proprietor in trying to be pleasant would be accused in the next edition of obsequiousness, and the early-morning chambermaid would be so rattled as to spill one of the overful pots she was carrying along the corridor — and thereby utterly spoil the reputation of a perfectly good hostelry for the next twenty years because a stray traveller had remarked that the smells were too odious to be endured.
It is fair to say that Murray recognized the possible volatility of his readers’ reports when he wrote in Southern Germany, 1858: ‘The number of good rooms in an inn, especially a country inn, is generally limited: if the traveller gets one of these, and the house is not too full to prevent his being well attended to, he gives it a good character, if it is crowded, and he gets an inferior room, he condemns it. I am sure I have been in the same inn, and during the same summer, under such different circumstances, that I could hardly believe it the same.’
The problem of hotel classification is commented on by Sabine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century novelist who also wrote travel books or, rather, what would be today called ‘companion guides’. In the preface to A Book of the Cévennes he modestly writes that his work is but ‘an introduction to the country, to be supplemented by guide-books. For inns, consult the annual volume of the French Touring Club; Baedeker and Joanne cannot always be relied on, as proprietors change, either for the better or for the worse. I have been landed in unsatisfactory quarters by relying on one or other of these guide-books, owing to the above-mentioned reason.’
In very plain prose Baring-Gould describes the scenery and gives some account of local history, as well as telling of such bizarre customs as the following about the Cévennes: ‘When the chestnuts have been gathered, then in November they are dried in sechoirs. These are small square structures with a door and window on one side, and on the other three or more long narrow loopholes that are never closed. A fire of coals is lighted and kept burning incessantly in the drying-house, and the smoke passes through shelves on which the chestnuts are laid, in stages, and escapes by loopholes. To any one unaccustomed to the atmosphere, in these sechoirs, it is hard to endure the smoke, and one stands the risk of being asphyxiated. Nevertheless the peasants spend two months in the year in these habitations, amidst cobwebs and soot, swarming with mice and rats, and the smoke at once acrid and moist, for in drying the chestnuts exude a greenish fluid that falls in a rain from the shelves. The natives do not seem to mind the dirt and smell of these horrible holes. Moreover, if there be in a village any one suffering from phthisis, at the end of autumn the patient is taken by the relations in his or her bed, and this is deposited in a corner of the sechoir. The sick person is not allowed to leave the drying-house, and it is a singular phenomenon that not infrequently, under the influence of the heat and the sulphurous smoke, the tuberculosis is arrested, and the sufferer lives on for many long years.’