Catharine Macaulay on the Road

I once read the observation that a group of people traveling together moves as fast as the slowest member and has as much fun as the grumpiest member.

Catharine Macaulay’s health dictated the slow pace of her travel through France with Elizabeth Arnold. As to whether she was a happy companion, Arnold later wrote about her with great admiration, but it doesn’t sound like a fun time.

Here are some anecdotes from the road as eventually published in Mary Hays’s Female Biography.

Between Calais and Paris, she looked in vain for the healthy and well-fed peasant, the beautiful and luxuriant meadows, the cultivated farms, and comfortable farm-houses, of her native island. Despotism had palsied the hand of industry; an indigent and miserable people appeared thinly scattered over wild and dreary plains. . . .

The travellers stopped one day at Chantilly, where they met with two of their friends, and where they had an opportunity of observing a royal residence [shown above], and contrasting it with the wretchedness which they had so recently witnessed. Mrs. Macaulay was not in a state of health to bear the fatigue of inspecting the palace.

To Dr. [Treadway Russell?] Nash, one of the gentlemen whom she met at Chantilly, and who would, with apparent satisfaction, have described to her the curiosities and magnificence of the prince’s residence, she replied (after thanking him courteously for the trouble he was about to give himself,) that she would spare him the repetition, since she could receive no pleasure in hearing of the splendor of one mortal, while the misery of thousands pressed upon her recollection.

Actually, I have to admire Macaulay’s force in shutting down a bore there.

…at the first post-house at which they stopped to change horses, the feelings of the travellers were again excited by the objects which, crowding around their carriage, clamorously implored their charitable donations, while they exhibited in their persons and squalid appearance every variety of want and of human wretchedness. ‘My God! my God!’ exclaimed Mrs. Macaulay, with a benevolent enthusiasm, bursting into tears, ‘have mercy on the works of thine own hand!’ She made her servant distribute to them each three livres, and divided among them the provisions she had in the carriage.

Britons, and British Whigs in particular, believed France was a country of widely unequal wealth and oppressed, starving peasants, so these rural sights confirmed what Macaulay and Arnold expected to see.

During a stop in Abbeville, when Macaulay’s “health was in a languishing state,” Arnold expressed some worry about her dying, prompting this response:

After reproving her friend’s too great sensibility and solicitude on her account, “I thought and hoped,” said she, ”that you viewed my death but as a short separation between virtuous friends, and that your assurance of a re-union with me, in a more perfect state, would have preserved you from being thus severely affected by the idea of my dissolution.” She went on to console her companion and fellow-traveller in the same strain, “Consider our parting,” said she, “but as a short privation; for, be assured, the friendship of the good will not be dissolved by death: we shall again unite in another life.”

The feeble state of her frame, and consequent sufferings, she said, naturally led her to these reflections.

Again with the illness.

Macaulay was sincerely and conventionally religious, though her politics verged on the radical. That made an interesting contrast with her rival historian David Hume, who was religiously skeptical and quite traditional in his politics.

TOMORROW: Paris at last.