Time spares nothing

Summary

There’s no denying that postilions are in a pretty bad way just now. Steam is asphyxiating them, immobilising them, giving them their marching orders. When electric power comes into its own, and that’s not far off, things will be still worse. Electricity will strike them like lightning and turn them to dust. Then finally the day will come, as we know it must, of the dirigible airship, and even the name of these cheerful drivers of horses will become an old French-language word whose meaning is completely beyond the comprehension of most travellers.

If some learned scholar, passing over Longjumeau in the post-balloon from Paris, takes it into his head to look at the village through his telescope and exclaim, “That’s where the postilion celebrated by an ancient composer came from!”, the ladies playing shuttlecock in the grand saloon of the airship will interrupt their game to ask him what he means. And he’ll reply:

“In the nineteenth century, Mesdames, the so-called civilised races crawled along the ground like snails. Travellers in those days of self-satisfied barbarism covered twenty-five or thirty miles an hour in heavy wagons propelled by steam along iron tracks, and took ludicrous pride in this “rapid” locomotion.

“But when people had to travel sixty or seventy miles from their native regions, a great many of them still shut themselves up in dreadful wooden crates with no room to stand up or lie down or even to stretch their legs. They suffered all the torments of cold, wind, rain, heat, foul ventilation, foul smells and dust. In addition to being shaken about like lead shot in a bottle they had to endure deafening and incessant noise. They slept as best they could at night, all on top of one another, passing on each other’s infections, no better or worse than the livestock we cram into our little farm transport ships.

“These awful cumbersome boxes, called ‘diligences’ by some sort of inverted logic, were dragged along muddy ravines designated as royal, imperial or departmental roads by horses capable of covering up to six and a half miles an hour. And the man astride one of the quadrupeds given the task of hauling the contraption was called a postilion, a ‘lion of the post’.