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Thread: Duelling, horses and passports

  1. #1
    Registered User kev67's Avatar
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    Duelling, horses and passports

    The copy of The Count of Monte Cristo that I read had no notes. I am not that bothered, but there were several things I kept wondering about:

    • Quite a lot of duelling take place in French society.In fact quite a lot in Europe generally at that time. In the last 13 months I have read six books where a challenge to a duel took place. It must have been a significant factor of mortality in them days.
    • Horses: horses get tired and have to be changed at coaching inns. I have recently been reading Bleak House and there is a fair bit of coach travel in that too. So how did that work? How did the horse owners get their horses back? If you hire a team of horses at one inn, they have to be fed and stabled at another inn. This will cost money so how was it all worked out?
    • This seems to be uniquely French, but passports just to get into and out of Paris - how long did that go on for? It seems very curious to me, Couldn't a Frenchman go where he liked in his own country?
    According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
    Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

  2. #2
    On the road, but not! Danik 2016's Avatar
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    I`m afraid there isn´t much help for you in the internet, background infos are very superficial. Don´t you have a good library at hand, preferably a university library, where you could find a version with notes or a detailed account of the background?
    "I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
    Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row

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