From an illustration in the book Voyage pittoresque de Genève à Milan par le Simplon by the Swiss artists Gabriel Lory and son (© The Trustees of the British Museum), it depicts the village of Simplon situated in the alpine pass of that name. The road in the picture, constructed between 1801-05, was the first carriage route through the Alps, where there had been nothing but mule-tracks previously. Bridging chasms, tunnelling through rock, the new road was a remarkable feat of French and Italian engineering. The Lorys’ book with thirty-six attractive colour plates was published in 1811, no doubt in anticipation of the many travellers who would want a memento of their journey.
The road had not been built for the convenience of travellers, however. Its construction was ordered by Napoleon after he led his army on a hazardous march through the snows of the Great Saint-Bernard Pass in 1800 to defeat the Austrians at the battle of Marengo. If France were to defend its new Italian possessions against Austrian attempts to reclaim them, French troops and artillery must have a rapid and easy passage through the Alps. The Simplon pass was also the most direct route from Paris to Milan, capital of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy created in 1805 from the former Austrian dominions. Ironically, Napoleon never travelled the road himself, since it wasn’t completed in time for his coronation in Milan’s Duomo. And as events turned out, it would be an Austrian army in 1815 that would profit from the road’s convenience. Thus one of the emperor’s undeniable achievements contributed to his final defeat.
Each of the Lory illustrations is accompanied by a written description of the site and its history by Jean Frédéric d’Ostervald, who pays homage to its instigator. ‘Only the sovereign of a great empire, the conqueror of Italy, could conceive and execute such an undertaking and link [. . . ] these two beautiful countries that nature seemed to have separated by an invincible barrier. Posterity will always see in this road one of the finest monuments of the reign of Napoleon the Great, a permanent and useful monument to his genius and his glory.’
Nine years later with Napoleon now exiled on the remote island of St Helena, the English edition (London: Ackermann, 1820) has a very different comment by its British editor: ‘Had he by whose command this road was constructed, confined the efforts of his power to the erection of such monuments only, how different at this moment would be his lot! The road of the Simplon [. . . ] as strongly attests his unprincipled ambition and his insatiable thirst of universal dominion as [. . . ] the ashes of Moscow.’
Like the British editor refusing to utter the tyrant’s name, the Swiss, reclaiming the canton of Valais from France in 1815, were anxious to eradicate all signs that glorified the road’s creator. But many of the travellers who took the Simplon road found his presence inescapable. If some, like the poet Wordsworth walking the road with his wife and sister in 1820, condemned the hubris of a man bent on conquering the Alps and dominating the world, others like the composer Felix Mendelssohn felt differently. Traversing the Simplon in 1831, he wrote to his father that he’d been reading Napoleon’s letters to the chief engineer Céard, admiring the emperor’s vision and enthusiasm and feeling a little sad that the great man had never seen the road that he had caused to be built. (Such sympathy is all the more surprising in that the Mendelssohn family had left Hamburg in 1811 fearing Napoleon’s reprisals for the family bank’s breaking of the embargo against trade with Britain.) That mixed reaction would not be untypical for 19th century travellers, many of whom admired Napoleon’s socio-political achievements and deplored the wave of reaction that engulfed Europe after his downfall.
To see more of the Lory illustrations depicting such sights as the Pissevache waterfall and the Gondo gorges as seen by the travellers in A Promise on the Horizon, go to http://www.camptocamp.org/articles/873714/fr/les-alpes-avant-la-photo-gabriel-lory-père-et-fils and click on the thumbnail images that include the date 1811. They are not all grouped together, unfortunately, and some of the best (showing features of the road’s engineering) come towards the end.
On the road in 1811
The vehicle in the foreground of the cover is most likely a private carriage. The dog attached underneath is there to guard passengers, vehicle and contents against thieves and highway robbers. For information on these dogs, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carriage_dog
But the travellers in A Promise on the Horizon are taking the public diligence. In function, the French diligence was like the English stage-coach — a public conveyance halting every ten or twelve miles at a posting station to change horses and pick up or set down passengers. But in appearance it was quite different from its English counterpart, being made up of two separate compartments — coach and cabriolet — as described by John Carr in A Stranger in France or, A Tour from Devonshire to Paris (1803).
A more uncouth clumsy machine can scarcely be imagined. In the front is a cabriolet fixed to the body of the coach, for the accommodation of three passengers, who are protected from the rain above by the projecting roof of the coach, and in front by two heavy curtains of leather. . . . The inside, which is capacious and lofty, and will hold six people with great comfort, is lined with leather padded and surrounded with little pockets, in which the travellers deposit their bread, snuff, night caps, and pocket handkerchiefs. . . .
The writer William Hazlitt, however, in his Notes on a Journey through France and Italy (1826), remarked that despite its primitive appearance the diligence was much roomier and airier than a stagecoach and that the English ‘are so fond of elegance . . . that we sacrifice ease to show and finish’. Crossing the Alps in the open cabriolet of a diligence he did not regret his choice, even in the intense cold of dawn. ‘We had come a thousand miles to see the Alps. . . . and we did see them in perfection, which we could not have done inside.’
Another difference between diligence and stagecoach was that instead of the English coach driver, there was a conducteur, who was in charge of the vehicle and rode on the roof, but it was the mounted postilion who actually drove the horses. John Carr’s drawing of the diligence he took from Le Havre to Paris shows the postilion in his enormous boots (designed for easy exit should his leg be trapped underneath a fallen horse).
While the diligences on provincial roads may have looked ‘uncouth’, it seems probable that Napoleon’s Imperial Route No 6 from Paris to Milan would have been served by a superior model. Certainly the diligence in the 1803 painting by Louis-Léopold Boilly ‘Arrival of a diligence in the Cour des Messageries’ looks less primitive than the one described by Carr.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Louis-Léopold_Boilly_002.jpg
Boilly’s painting depicts the Paris terminus from which Henri Beyle will set off for Milan eight years later and gives a lively portrayal of the social types to be found there. Apart from the central group of the respectable bourgeois family, note the army officer on the left and the décrotteur at his feet offering to scrape the Paris mud off his boots. Behind them a flower-seller is offering her wares, ignoring a soldier who is plainly after something more.
For a satirical view, see George Cruikshank’s 1818 cartoon ‘Travelling in France or the departure of a diligence’ which shows English tourists amid a crowd of gawkers outside a country inn. A telling piece of social commentary, it hints at France’s sufferings after Napoleon’s fall — the one-legged officer, the pitifully thin, barefoot woman and child begging alms from the fat English passengers are very different figures from Boilly’s crowd. 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cruikshank_-_Traveling_in_France.png
Within a few years the original diligence had been enlarged by the addition of a third compartment at the rear, as in this picture circa 1820 which shows a diligence speeding along a road. It gives a good view of the cabriolet on the front and conveys some idea of the noisy, dusty, but enthralling ride it offered. It was in that cramped compartment, the perfect vantage point for watching the sunrise, that Henri Beyle came across the volume of Mary Wollstonecraft left by the unknown traveller. . . .
Benard, A. (?). Diligence des Messageries royales de la ligne Rouen-Le Havre, lithographie rehaussée, vers 1820, inv. CMV.3762.
Phot. Musée national de la Voiture et du Tourisme, Palais de Compiègne. © Musée national de la Voiture et du Tourisme, Palais de Compiègne.
THE TRAVELLERS
Henri Beyle (not yet Stendhal)
Twenty-eight years old, a minor official in Napoleon’s administration, though hoping to rise thanks to his powerful cousin, the new Secretary of State, Henri Beyle is bored, restless, disillusioned with Paris. Seizing the chance of two months’ unexpected freedom, he’s quit his desk for an unauthorised trip to Italy where he’d spent the happiest months of his life in 1800 as a seventeen-year-old in the wake of Napoleon’s army.
Though Beyle was convinced he was ugly, he had his portrait done at least twice as a young man, once by the fashionable physionotrace method which created a rather flattering profile — http://www.stendhalclub.fr/galerie/ — and a little later (probably in 1812) by the painter Louis-Léopold Boilly — the portrait below, of which his grandfather said, ‘This one is the true likeness.’
This is the way Marie Vernet sees him, the annoying young man with ‘an air of self-satisfaction on his plump face’ who kept taking her preferred place in the cabriolet. ‘Educated certainly,’ she judges him. ‘But expensive tailoring can’t disguise that plebeian appearance. And those ridiculous trinkets on his watch chain!’
Beyle had one of those bull-necked, barrel-chested, short-legged physiques that even the flattering fashions of the day couldn’t disguise, though he employed the best tailor in Paris. He was quite a dandy with a wardrobe that included twenty-seven frilled shirts and eighteen waistcoats. The fashionable watch-chain ornaments that Marie Vernet scorns were known as a ‘charivari’ [a word denoting loud discordant sound] because they rattled or jingled when the watch was pulled out of the fob-pocket. But even if Beyle looked like ‘an Italian butcher’ as he said himself, his expressive eyes (sparkling with wit and intelligence or filled with unspoken tenderness) were said to compensate for the rest.
It seems a little unkind to mention the hair. It had dropped out when he was sixteen from the effects of medecine prescribed by a Parisian doctor who assumed the lad had a sexually transmitted disease rather than the more likely gastro-intestinal infection from cheap food. But did it grow back when he recovered? He mentions buying a wig then and it’s clear enough from later portraits that he wore a hair-piece in middle age. But are those fashionable curls above his forehead in the physionotrace profile real or false?
Marie-Félicité-Honorine de Vernet
A single woman of thirty. Born into the minor provincial nobility, she spent part of her youth in England when her parents fled the Revolution. Shy, bookish, introverted, wary of others and something of a snob, she longs to meet fellow-spirits. A small inheritance has opened new possibilities and, unconventional though it is for a woman to travel alone, she is inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft’s example to set off for Italy.
This is how Henri Beyle, her fellow-passenger in the Milan diligence, sees her.
‘. . . a slim figure in grey, her face hidden by a travelling veil.’
‘. . . she had her back turned, so absorbed in writing . . . that she hadn’t sensed his gaze, and he’d seen nothing more than a patch of bare nape between her dress and the plait of fair hair that encircled her head. . . He’d admired her graceful attitude as she wrote, her slender back perfectly upright, her blonde head aureoled by the candle. It was a rare glimpse into a secret feminine existence.’
Looking for an image to evoke this elusive figure, I came across Georg Friedrich Kersting’s 1817 painting of a woman embroidering. Although Marie Vernet is writing her journal by candlelight when Henri Beyle spies on her at the inn, she is also a talented embroiderer who later sits in her window in Milan like the woman in the picture, making thank you gifts for her friends.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kersting_-_Die_Stickerin_-_2._Fassung.jpg
