Pickwick Abroad: or, The Tour in France — page 27: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

2 Pickiowk Abroad. *¢ Boz” as the biographer of one of the most extraordinary men the present or any other age has produced. - . In order to do meet justice to the memory of the individual whose adventures I am called upon to relate, I have associated with me in the delightful, though somewhat difficult task, my friend ALrrep CrowauiL_L. It is mine to edit, and his to illustrate, the biographical memoirs of which I now present the First Part to the reader, and which, according to minutest calculstion, will afford sufficient materials to enable me fo continue the sketches through twenty numbers of the Monthly Magasine. In conclusion, gentle reader, allow me to remark that if the talented ‘‘ Boz’’ have not chosen to enact the part of Mr. Pickwick’s biographer in his continental tour, it is not my fault. The field was open to him who had so well and so suc- cesefully traced the progress of that great man during his travels in England; and as it is now my destiny to compile and put in order the notes taken by him abroad, and reduce them to a systematic narrative, I cannot do otherwise than pledge myself for the sincerity and impartiality with which I shall present each Number of that important work to the public. ene eee ee Lee owen SEE CHAPTER I. A CONSIDERABLE SENSATION ON THE QUAY AT CALAIS; ITS CAUSE; AND OTHER PARTICULARS INTIMATELY CONNECTED WITH CERTAIN ILLUSTRIOUS CHARACTERS. ED AT an unusual hour in the moming of a very foggy and disagree- able day in the month of November: 1834, a crowd of washed and unwashed —English and French— male and female —residents in, or visitors to, the eminently respectable town of Calais, was assem- bled upon the quay where the steam-vessels generally land their pas- rs. Had the motley group met on the Grande Place, one might have fancied that the cause of co tion was a political ebul- lition, or the arrival of an itinerant juggler—either of which occur. rences is understood to afford an essential interest to the French in general. But on this occasion the quay was the point of rendezvous ; and as two or three hundred people seldom meet together for the purpose of gazing upon the sea, which is almost the same as gazing | Ww upon nothing, when there are no ships to attract attention, we must suppose that a more important object called them thither. e fact of the matter was, that a king’s messenger, on his way to Paris, in the company of a bag full of sheets of writing-paper, with much profound diplomatic lore scribbled thereon, had informed the waiter of Dessin’s Hotel the day before the one on which these me- moirs commence, that an illustrious personage, accompanied by his servant and two friends, intended to cross the water on the following morning ; for which purpose he had already arrived as far as Dover, his habitual residence having lately been in the neighbourhood of London. M. Deassin's waiter, being gifted with just so much curiosity as to originate the question, enquired who the illustrious traveller might be; and when the magic name of Pickwick was breathed in his ear by the important king’s messenger, he immediately communicated the intelligence to his comrades in the kitchen, whence the news Gomi q) NOOO KS (c@