Six Spanish-crossed bulls, were brought up in a great closed van and loosed in an improvised bull-ring, of which the church wall formed one side, and the roof a sort of a tribune. What the curé thought of all this is not clear, but as the alms-coffers of the church were already full to the lids, and the parish depends largely upon the contributions of visitors to replenish its funds, any seeming sacrilege was winked at.
For three days we had "made the fête" and saw it all, and did most of the things that the others did, except that we always slept at St. Gilles, far away by the long flat road which winds in and out among the marshes, flamingo nests, and rice-fields of the Camargue.
The "bull-fight," so called, was nothing so very bloodthirsty or terrifying; merely the worrying by the "amateurs" of a short-legged, little black bull, about the size of a well-formed Newfoundland dog, or perhaps a little larger—appearances are often deceptive when one receives a disappointment.
Truly, as Mistral says, Provence is a land of joy and, laughter, and fêtes followed close on one another, it seemed.
We had seen the announcements in the local journals of a "Mis à Mort" at Nîmes, and a "Corrida de Meurte"—borrowing the phrase from the Spanish—at Arles, each to take place in the great Roman arenas, which had not seen bloodshed for centuries; not since the days when the Romans matched men against each other in gladiatorial combat, and turned tigers loose upon captive slaves.
The "to-the-death" affairs of Arles and Nîmes appealed to us only that we might contrast the modern throngs that crowd the benches with those which history tells us viewed the combats of old. Doubtless there is little resemblance, but all the same there is a certain gory tradition hanging about the old walls and arches of those great arenas which is utterly lacking in the cricket-field, tawdry plazas of some of the Spanish towns. The grim arcades of these great Roman arenas are still full of suggestion.
We did not see either the "Mis à Mort" at Arles, or the "Corrida de Meurte" at Nîmes; the automobile got stalled for a day in the midst of the stony Crau, with a rear tire which blew itself into pieces, and necessitated a journey by train into Arles in order to get another to replace it. Owing to the slowness of this apology for a railway train, and the awkwardness of the timetable, the great "Mis à Mort" at Arles was long over ere we had set out over the moonlit Crau for Martigues on the shores of the Etang de Berre.
St. BlaiseLes SaintesSt. MitreAt Martigues
St. BlaiseLes SaintesSt. MitreAt Martigues
We knew Martigues of old, itsbouillabaisse, thePère Chabasand all the cronies of the Café du Commerce where you kept your own special bottle, of whateverapéritifpoison you fancied, in order that you might be sure of getting it unadulterated.
"La Venise de Provence," Martigues, is known by artists far and wide. Chabas and his rather grimy little hotel, which he calls the Grand Hotel something or other, has catered for countless hundreds of artist folk who have made the name and fame of Martigues as an artist's sketching-ground. After a three weeks' pretty steady automobile run the artist of the party craved peace and rest and an opportunity of putting Martigues's glorious sunsets on canvas, and so we camped out with Chabas, and atebouillabaisseand thebeurre de Provenceandlangousteand Chabas's famous straw potatoes and rum omelette for ten days, and were sorry when it was all over.
Chapter IVBy Rhône And Saône
Chapter IVBy Rhône And Saône
It is the dream of the Marseillais that some day the turgid Rhône may be made to empty itself at the foot of the famous Cannebière, and so add to the already great prosperity of the most cosmopolitan and picturesque of Mediterranean ports.
The idea has been thought of since Roman times, and Napoleon himself nearly undertook the work. In later days radical and vehement candidates for senatorships and deputyships have promised their Marseilles and Bouches-du-Rhône constituencies much more, with regard to the same thing, than the hand of man is ever likely to be able to accomplish.
The Rhône still pushes its way through the Crau and the Camargue and comes to the sea many kilometres west of the Planier light and Château d'If, which guard the entrance to Marseilles's Old Port.
We had backed and filled many times between Martigues and Marseilles during the interval which we so enjoyably spentchez Chabas, and we had come to know this unknown little corner of old Provence intimately, and to love it.
Marseilles was our great dissipation, its hotels, its cafés and restaurants, its cosmopolitan life and movement, its gaiety and the picturesqueness of its old streets and wharves. Marseilles is a neglected tourist point; it should be better known; but it is no place for automobilists, unless they are prepared for ten kilometres, in any direction, of the most villainous suburban roadway in France. The roadways themselves are good enough; it is the abnormal and the peculiar nature of the traffic that makes them so disagreeable; great hooting tramways,charettesloaded with all the products of the earth and the hands of man, and drawn by long tandem lines, three, four, five, and even six horses to a single cart. Added to this, the exits and entrances are all up and down hill, and, accordingly, the roadways of suburban Marseilles are a terror to stranger automobilists and an eternal regret to those who live near-by.
We went up the Rhône in a howling mistral, against it, mark you, for it pleases the Ruler of the universe to have that cyclonic breeze of the Rhône valley, one of the three plagues of Provence, blow always from the north.
We left Martigues in an extraordinary and unusual fog, reminiscent of London, except that it was not black and sooty. It was dense, however; dense as if it were enshrouding the Grand Banks, and of the same impenetrable, milky consistency. To be sure the morning sun had not had an opportunity as yet to burn it off—automobilists on tour are early birds, and the autumn sun rises late.
Up around the eastern shore of the Etang de Berre we went, and, crossing the Tête Noire, passed Salon just as a pale yellow light struggled through the rifts just topping the Maritime Alps off to the eastward. We could not see the mountains, but we knew they were there, for we still had lingering memories of a long pull we once made off in that direction, with an old crock of an automobile of primitive make in the early days of the sport, or the art, whichever one chooses to call it, though it unquestionably was an art then to keep an automobile going at all.
By the time Arles was reached the sun was burning with a midsummer glare, as it does here for three hundred or more days in the year.
At Arles one is in the very cauldron of the atmosphere of things Provençal, art, letters, history, and romance, all of which are kept alive by theFélibresand their fellows.
Mistral, the poet, is the master-singer of them all, and whether he chants of his "Own glad Kingdom of Provence," at Maillane among the olive-trees, far inland, or of:
"The peace which descends upon the troubled oceanAnd he his wrath forgets,Flock from Martigues the boats with wing-like motion,And fishes fill their nets,"
it is all the same; the subtle, penetrating atmosphere and sentiment of Provence is over all.
Arles is the head centre. It is a city of monumental and celebrated art, and one may spend a day, a week, or a month, wandering in and out and about its old Roman arena (still so well preserved that it presents its occasional bull-fight for the delectation of the bloodthirsty), its antique theatre, its museums, its cathedral and its cloister, or among the tombs of the Aliscamps.
We did all these things, indeed we had done them before, but they were ever marvellous just the same, and in the museum we were always running on Mistral himself, who, in his waning years, finds his greatest delight in arranging and rearranging the exhibits of his newly founded Musée Arletan.
The hotels of Arles are a disappointment. The Hôtel du Nord, with a portico of the old Forum built into its walls, and the Hôtel du Forum, on the Place du Forum, are well enough in their way,—they are certainly well conducted,—but they lack "atmosphere," and instead of thecuisine du pays, you get ham and eggs andbifteckserved to you. This is wrong and bad business, if the otherwise capable proprietors only knew it.
One does better in the environs. At St. Rémy, at the Grand Hôtel de Provence, you will get quite another sort of fare:hors d'œuvresof a peculiarly pungent variety, not forgetting the dark purple, over-ripe olives, aragoût en casserole, afilet d'agneauwith asauce Provençale, and apouletand a salad which will make one dream of the all but lost art of Brillat-Savarin. They are good cooks, thechefsof Provence, of the small cities and large towns like St. Rémy, Cavaillon, Salon, and Carpentras, but everybody will not like their liberal douches of oil any more than they will the penetrating garlic flavour in everything.
We took a turn backward on our route from Arles and went to Les Baux, the now dismal ruin of a once proud feudal city whose seigneurs held sway over some sixty cities of Provence.
To-day it is a Pompeii, except it is a hill town worthy to rank with those picturesque peaks of Italy and Dalmatia. Its château walls have crumbled, but its subterranean galleries, cut three stories down into the rock itself, are much as they always were. Everywhere are grim, doleful evidences of a glory that is past and a population that is dead or moved away. The sixteen thousand souls of mediæval times have shrunk to something like two hundred to-day—most of them shepherds, apparently, and the others picture post-card sellers.
It is a very satisfactory little mountain climb from the surrounding plain up to the little plateau just below the peak at Les Baux, though the entire distance from Arles is scarcely more than fifteen kilometres, and the actual climb hardly more than four. The razor-back mountain chain, upon one peak of which Les Baux sits, is known as the Alpilles.
All of the immediate neighbourhood (scarce a dozen kilometres from where the beaten track passes through Arles) is a veritable museum of relics of the glory of the heroic age. Caius Marius entrenched himself within these walls of rock and two thousand years ago planted the foundations of the Mausoleum and Arc de Triomphe which are the pride of the inhabitant of St. Rémy and the marvel of what few strangers ever come. They are veritable antiques—"Les Antiquités," as the people of St. Rémy familiarly call them, and rise to-day as monuments of the past, gilded by the Southern sun and framed with all the brilliancy of a Provençal landscape.
We slept at St. Rémy, and made the next morning for Tarascon, with memories of Dumas and Daudet and Tartarin and the Tarasque pushing us on.
Tarascon has a real appeal for the stranger; at every step he will picture thelocaleof Daudet's whimsical tale, and will well understand how it was that the prisoners' view from the narrow-barred window of the Château at Tarascon was so limited.
There is a fine group of Renaissance architectural monuments at Tarascon, and a street of arcaded house-fronts which will make the artist of the party want to settle down to work.
Across the river is Beaucaire, famous for its great fair of ages past, the greatest trading fair of mediæval times, when merchants and their goods came from Persia, India, and Turkey, and all corners of the earth. The Château of Beaucaire is a fine ruin, but no more; it is not worth the climbing of the height to examine it.
A little farther on is Bellegarde, where Dumas placed Caderousse's little inn, the unworthy Caderousse and his still more unworthy wife, who finished the career of Edmond Dantès while he was masquerading as the Abbé. There is no inn here to-day which can be identified as that of the romance, but Dumas's description of its sun-burnt surroundings, the canal, the scanty herbage, and the white, parched roadway, is much the same as what one sees today, and there is a tinyaubergebeside the canal, which might satisfy the imaginative.
Avignon, the city of the seven French popes, who reigned seventy years, was the next stopping-place on our itinerary.
We put up at the Hôtel Crillon and fared much as one fares in any provincial large town. We were served with imitation Parisian repasts, and were asked if we would like to read the LondonTimes. Why the LondonTimesno one knew: why not the New OrleansPicayuneand be done with it?
We did not want to do anything of the sort, we merely wanted to "do" the town, to see the tomb of Pope Jean XXII. in the cathedral, to walk, if possible, upon the part left standing of St. Benezet's old Pont d'Avignon, a memory which was burned into our minds since our schooldays, when we played and sang the French version of "London Bridge is falling down"—"Sur le pont d'Avignon."
The greatest monument of all is the magnificent Palais des Papes, its crenelated walls and battlements vying with the city walls and ramparts as a splendid example of mediæval architecture. We saw all these things and the museum with its excellent collections, and the library of thirty thousand volumes and four thousand manuscripts.
One thing we nearly missed was Villeneuve-les-Avignon, a ruined wall-circled town on the opposite bank of the Rhône. Its machicolated crests glistened in the brilliant Southern sunlight like an exotic of the Saharan country. It is quite the most foreign and African-looking jumble of architectural forms to be seen in France. It took us three hours to cross the river and stroll about its debris-encumbered streets and get back again and start on our way northward, but it was worth the time and trouble.
From St. Rémy to Orange, perhaps sixty kilometres, was not a long daily run by any means, and we would not have stopped at Orange for the night except that it was imperative that we should see the fine antique theatre, the most magnificent, the largest, and the best preserved of all existing Roman theatres.
We saw it, and seeing it wondered, though, when one tries to project the mind back into the past and picture the scenes which once went on upon its boards, the task were seemingly impossible.
The Roman Arc de Triomphe, too, at Orange, which spans the roadway to the North—the same great natural road which all its length froth Paris to Antibes is known as the Route d'Italie—is a monument more splendid, as to its preservation, than anything of the kind outside Italy itself.
There is ample and excellent accommodation for the automobilist at Orange, at the Hôtel des Princes, which sounds good and is good. They have even a writing-room in the hotel, a silly, stuffy little room which no one with any sense ever enters. One simply follows a well-fedcommis-voyageurto the nearest popular café and writes his letters there, as a well-habituated traveller should do.
Once on the road again we passed Montelimar—"le pays du nougât et de M. l'ex-President Loubet," we were told by theoctroiofficial who held us up at the barrier of this self-sufficient, dead-and-alive, pompous little town. We didn't know M. Loubet and we didn't likenougât, so we did not stop, but pushed on for Tournon. There, at the little Hôtel de la Poste, beneath the donjon tower of the oldchâteau, we ate the most marvellously concocteddéjeunerwe had struck for a long time. There's no use describing it; it won't be the same the next time; though no doubt it will be as excellent. It cost but two francs fifty centimes, includingvin du St. Peray, the rich red wine of the Rhône, a rival to the wines of Burgundy.
We might have done a good deal worse had we stopped at progressive, up-to-date Valence, where automobile tourists usually do stop, but we took the offering of the small town instead of the large one, and found it, as usual, very good.
We had passed La Voute-sur-Rhône, that classic height which has been pictured many times in old books of travel. It, and Tournon, and Valence, and Viviers, and Pont St. Esprit were once riverside stations for thecoches d'eauwhich did a sort of omnibus service with passengers on the Rhône, between Lyons and Avignon. There is a steamboat service to-day which also carries passengers, but it is not to be recommended if one has the means of getting about by road.
This town, too, and Valence, were directly on the route of themalle-postefrom Lyons to Marseilles. The differentpostesor relays were marked on the maps of the day by little twisted hunting-horns. For the most part an old-time route map of the great trunk lines of themalle-posteand themessagerieswould, serve the automobilist of to-day equally as well as a modern road map.
Themalle-poste, and the hiring out of post-horses, in France was an institution more highly developed than elsewhere.
Post-horses were only delivered one in France upon the presentation of a passport and payment, in advance, according to the following tariff. The price was fixed by law, being the same throughout all France.
The postilion usually got one franc fifty perposte, but could only demand seventy-five centimes.
Certain carriages (chaises and cabriolets) would carry only portmanteaux (vaches), butvoitures fermées,calèches, and the like might carry also a trunk (malle).
As one goes north, sunburnt Provence, its olive groves and its oil and garlic-seasoned viands are left behind, until little by little one draws upon the Burgundian opulence of the Côte d'Or, a land where the native's manner of eating and drinking makes a full life and a merry one.
We were not there yet; we had many kilometres yet to go, always by the banks of the Rhône until Lyons was reached.
Near Givors, at eight o'clock at night, within twenty kilometres of Lyons, the motor gave a weak asthmatic gasp, and stopped short. Like the foolish virgins, we had no oil in our lamps, and dusk had already fallen, and no amount of coaxing after the habitual manner would induce the thing to move a yard.
There was nothing for it but to get out the tow-ropes and wait—for aremorqueur, as the French call any four-footed beast strong enough to tow an automobile at the end of a line. (They also call a tug-boat the same thing, but as an automobile is not an amphibious animal it was a landremorqueurthat we awaited.)
We did not get to Lyons that night. There are always uncalled for "possibilities" rising up in automobiling that will upset the best thought-out schedule. This was one of them.
What had happened to the machine no one yet really knows, but we had to be ignominiously towed, to the great amusement of the natives, at the end of a long rope by the power of a diminutive donkey which finally came along. The beast did not look as though he could draw a perambulator, but he buckled down to it with a will, and brought us safely through the half-kilometre or so of crooked streets which led to the centre of Givors.
Finally, we, or the car rather, was pushed into an old wash-house, once a part of an ancient château, theremiseof the hotel itself, a dependance of the château of other days, having been preempted by an itinerant magic-lantern exhibittion ("La Cinémetographe Americaine," it was called on the bills), which proposed to show the good people of Givors—"for one night only, and at ten sous each"—moving pictures of Coney Island, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, Niagara Falls, New York's "Flat Iron" building, and other exotics from the New World.
We dined and slept well at Givors in spite of our accident, and were "up bright and early," as Pepys might have said (Londoners to-day do not get up bright and early, however!), to find out, if possible, what was the matter with the digestive apparatus of the automobile. Nothing was the matter! The human, obstinate thing started off at the first trial, and probably would have done the same thing last night had we given the starting-crank one more turn. Such is automobiling!
We made our entrance into Lyonsen pleine vitesse, stopping not until we got to the centre of the city. Theoctroiregulations had just been revised, and the gates were open to passing traffic without the obligation of having to declare one's possessions. Progressive Lyons!
Lyons is truly progressive. It is beautifully laid out and kept. It is nothing like as filthy as a large city usually is, on the outskirts, and its island faubourg, between the Saône and the Rhône, is the ideal of a well-organized and planned centre of affairs.
Lyons has, moreover, two up-to-date hotels, the very latest things, one might say, in the hotel line: the Terminus Hotel, which well serves travelers by rail, and the Hôtel de l'Univers et de l'Automobilisme—rather a clumsy name, but that of a good, well-meaning hotel. Its progressiveness consists in having abolished thepourboire. You have ten per cent. added on to your bill, however. This looks large when it comes to figures,—paying something for nothing,—but at least one knows where he stands, and he fears no black looks from chambermaid or boots. The thing is announced, by a little placard placed in every room, as an "innovation." It remains to be seen if it will prove successful.
From Lyons to Dijon, 197 kilometres between breakfast and lunch, was not bad. Now, at last, we were in that opulent land of good living and good drinking, where the food and wine are alike both rich.
He's a contented, fat, sleek-looking type, the native son of the Côte d'Or, and he looks with contempt on the cider-nourished Norman and Breton, and does not for a moment think that cognac is to be compared with theeau de vie de marcof his own vineyards.
The Côte d'Or is the richest wine-growing region of all the world. Every direction-post and sign-board is like a review of the names on a wine card,—Beaune, Chambertin, St. Georges, Clos Vougeot,—and of these the Clos Vougeot wines are the most renowned.
A line drawn across France, just north of the confines of ancient Burgundy, divides the region of thevins ordinaires—the light wines of thetables d'hote—and that of those vintages which have no price. This, at least, is the way the native puts it, and to some extent the simile is correct enough.
The Côte begins and the plain ends; the hillsides rise and the river-bottoms dwindle away in the distance: such is the feeling that one experiences as he climbs these vine-clad slopes from either the Rhône, the Loire, or the Seine valleys, and here it is that the imaginary line is drawn between thevins ordinairesand thevins sans prix.
Since there is no possibility of increasing the quantity of these rich, red Burgundian wines, the highly cultured area being of but small extent, and because their quality depends upon the peculiar nature of the soil of this restricted tract, there is no question but that the monopoly of Burgundian wines will remain for ever with the gold coast of France, whatever Australian and Californian patriots may claim for their own imitations.
The phylloxera here, as elsewhere in France, caused a setback to the commerce in wines, as serious in money figures as the losses sustained during the Franco-Prussian War, but the time has now passed and the famous Côte d'Or has once more attained its time-honoured opulence and prosperity.
"Le vin de BourgogneMet la bonne humeurAu cœur."
Still northward, across the plateau of Langres, we set a roundabout course for Paris. There is one great pleasure about automobiling that is considerably curtailed if one sets out to follow precisely a preconceived itinerary, and for that reason we were, in a measure, going where fancy willed.
We might have turned westward, via Moulins, Nevers, and Montargis, from Lyons, and followed the old coaching road into Paris, entering by the same gateway through which we set out, but we had heard of the charms of the valley of the Marne, and we wanted to see them for ourselves.
Our first acquaintance with it was at Bar le Duc, which is not on the Marne at all, but on a little confluent some twenty or thirty miles from its junction.
For a day we had been riding over corkscrew roads with little peace and comfort for the driver, and considerable hard work for the motor. The hills were numerous, but the surface was good and the scenery delightful, so, since most of us require variety as a component of our daily lives, we were getting what we wanted and no one complained.
It was easy going by Château Thierry and the episcopal city of Meaux, retracing almost the itinerary of the fleeing Louis XVI., and, as we entered Paris by the Porte de Vincennes,—always by villainous roadways, this getting in and out of Paris,—we red-inked another twelve hundred kilometre stretch of roadway on our record map of France.
Chapter VBy Seine And Oise—A Cruise In A Canot-Automobile
Chapter VBy Seine And Oise—A Cruise In A Canot-Automobile
If automobiling on land in France is a pleasure, a voyage up a picturesque and historic French river in acanot-automobileis a dream, so at least we thought, four of us—and a boy to clean the engine, run errands, and to climb overboard and push us off when we got stuck in the mud.
Our "home port" was Les Andelys on the Seine, and we meet in the courtyard of the Hôtel Bellevue at five o'clock one misty, gray September morning for a fortnight's voyage up the Oise, which joins the Seine midway between Les Andelys and Paris.
There is nothing mysterious about an automobile boat any more than there is about the land automobile. It has its moods and vagaries, its good pointsand some bad ones. It is not as speedy as an automobile on shore, but it is more comfortable, a great deal more fun to steer, and less dangerous, and there is an utter absence of those chief causes of trouble to the automobile, punctures and what not happening to your tires. Then again there is, generally speaking, no crowd of traffic to run you into danger, and there is an absence of dust, to make up for which, when you are lying by waiting to go through a lock, you have mosquitoes of a fierce bloodthirsty kind which even the smoke from the vile tobacco of French cigarettes will not keep at a distance.
Our facile little automobile boat was called the "Cà et Là." Rightly enough named it was, too. The French give singularly pert and appropriate names to their boats. "Va t'on," "Quand même," and "Cà et Là" certainly tell the stories of their missions in their very names.
The boat itself, and its motor, too, was purely a French production, and, though of modest force and dimensions, would do its dozen miles an hour all day long.
We got away from the landing-stage of the Touring Club de France at Les Andelys in good time, our provisions, our gasoline and oil, our river charts, our wraps and ourselves all stowed comfortably away in the eight metres of length of our little boat. Our siren gave a hoot which startled the rooks circling about the donjon walls of Château Gaillard over our heads, and we passed under the brick arches of the bridge for a twelve-mile run to the first lock at Courcelles.
The process of going through a river lock in France is not far different from the same process elsewhere, except that the all-powerful Touring Club de France has secured precedence for all pleasure boats over any other waiting craft. It really costs nothing, but you give a franc to theéclusier, and the way is thereby made the easier for the next arrival. The objection to river-locks is their frequency in some parts. There is one stretch of thirty or forty kilometres on the Marne with thirty-three locks. That costs something, truly.
We knew the Seine valley intimately, by road along both its banks, at any rate, and we were hopeful of reaching Triel that night, near the junction of the Seine and Oise.
We passed our first lock at Courcelles, just before seven o'clock, and had a good stretch of straight water ahead of us before Vernon was reached.
You cannot miss your way, of course, when travelling by river, but you can be at a considerable loss to know how far you have come since your last stopping-place, or rather you would be if the French government had not placed little white kilometre stones all along the banks of the "navigable" and "flottable" rivers, as they have along the great national roads on land. Blessed be the paternal French government; the traveller inla belle Francehas much for which to be grateful to it: its excellent roadways, its sign-boards, and its kilometre stones most of all. The motor-boat is highly developed in France from the simple fact that you can tour on it. You can go all over France by a magnificent system of inland waterways; from the Seine to the Marne; from the Oise to the Sambre—and so to Antwerp and Ghent; from the Loire to the Rhône; and even from the Marne to the Rhine; and from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. France is the touring-ground par excellence for the automobile boat.
Here's a new project of travel for those who want to do what others have not done to any great extent. Africa and the Antartic continent have been explored, and the North Pole bids fair to be discovered by means of a flying-machine ere long, so, with no new worlds to conquer, one might do worse in the way of pleasurable travel than to explore the waterways of France.
Maistre wrote his "Voyage Autour de Ma Chambre" and Karr his "Voyage Autour de Mon Jardin," hence any one who really wants to do something similar might well make the tour of the Ile de France by water. It can be done, and would be a revelation of novelty, if one would do it and write it down.
For the moment we were bound up the Oise; we had passed Vernon and Giverny, sitting snug on the hillside by the mouth of the Ept, where we knew there were countless Americans, artistsand others, sitting in Gaston's garden or playing tennis on a sunburnt field beside the road. Foolish business that, with a river like the Seine so near at hand, and because it was the custom at Giverny, a custom grown to be a habit, which is worse, we liked not the place, in spite of its other undeniable charms.
We put in for lunch at La Roche-Guyon, a trim little town lying close beneath the Renaissance château of the La Rochefoucauld's. There are two waterside hotels at La Roche-Guyon, beside the ugly wire-rope bridge, but we knew them of old, and knew they were likely to be full of an unspeakable class of Parisian merrymakers. There may be others who patronize these delightfully situated riverside inns, but the former predominate in the season. Out of season it may be quite different.
We hunted out a little café in the town, whosepatronwe knew, and prevailed upon his good wife to give us our lunchen famille, which she did and did well.
It wastrès bourgeois, but that was what we wanted, and, after a couple of hours eating and lolling about and playing with the cats and talking to the parrot,—a Martinique parrot who knew some English,—we took to the river again, and, after passing the locks at Bonnières, arrived at Mantes at five o'clock.
The nights draw in quickly, even in the early days of September, and we were bound to push on, if we were to reach Triel that night. We could have reached it, but were delayed at a lock, while it emptied itself and half a score of downriver barges, and, spying a gem of a riverside restaurant at Meulan, overhanging the very water itself, and hung with great golden orange globes of light (so-called Japanese lanterns, and nothing more), we were sentimentally enough inclined to want to dine with such Claude Melnotte accessories. This we did, and hunted up lodgings in the town for the night, vowing to get an extra early start in the morning to make up for lost time.
The Seine at Meulan takes on a certain luxuryous aspect so far as river-boating goes. There is even a "Cercle à la Voile," with yachts which, in the narrow confines of the river, look like the real thing, but which after all are very diminutive members of the family.
From this point the course of the Seine is a complicated winding amongilesandilots, which gives it that elongation which makes necessary hours of journeying by boat as against a quarter of the time by the road—as the crow flies—to the lower fortifications of Paris.
On either side, however, arechemins vicinales, which continually produce unthought-of vistas which automobilists who are making a record from Trouville to Paris know nothing of.
Triel possesses an imposing thirteenth-century Gothic church and an abominably ugly suspension-bridge of wire rope. It is a good place to buy a boat or a cargo of gypsum, which we know as "plaster of Paris;" otherwise the town is not remarkable, though charmingly situated.
The Oise is the first really great commercial tributary of the Seine. There is a mighty flow of commerce which ascends and descends the bosom of the Oise, extending even to the Low Countries and the German Ocean, through the Sambre to Antwerp and the Scheldt.
The Oise is classed asflottablefrom Beautor to Chauny, a distance of twenty kilometres, andnavigablefrom Chauny to the Seine. Mostly it runs through the great plain of Picardie and forms the natural northern boundary to the ancient Ile de France. Thenavigableportion forms two sections. One, of fifty-five kilometres, extends between Chauny and Janville, and has been generally abandoned by water-craft because of the opening of the Canal Lateral à la Oise; the other section, of one hundred and four kilometres, is canalized in that it has been straightened here and there at sharp corners, dredged and endowed with seven locks.
The barge traffic of the Oise is mostly towed in convoys of six, but there is achemin de halage, a tow-path, throughout the river's length. In general, the boats are of moderate size, thepénichesbeing perhaps a hundred and twenty feet in length, thebateaux picardssomewhat longer, and thechalandsapproximating one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy-five feet.
While, as stated above, the traction is generally by steam towboat, the more picturesque, if slower and more humble, tow-horse is more largely in evidence here than elsewhere in France.
The environs of Conflans-fin-d'Oise are of a marvellous charm, but the immediate surroundings, great garages of coal boats and barges, coal-yards where towboats are filling up, and all the grime of an enormous water-borne traffic which here divides, part to go Parisward and part down-river, make it unlovely enough.
Three kilometres up-river is a little riverside inn called the "Goujon de l'Oise." It is a pleasant place to lunch, but otherwise "fishy," as might be supposed.
Back toward Meulan and on the heights above Triel are nestled a half-dozen picturesque little red-roofed villages which are not known at all to travellers from Paris by road or rail. It is curious how many sylvan spots one can find almost within plain sight of Paris. There are wheat-fields within sight of Montmartre and haystacks almost under the shadow of Mont Valerian.
At Evequemont, just back of Conflans, some eight hundred souls eke out an existence on their small farms and live the lives of their grandfathers before them, with never so much as a thought as to what may be happening at the capital twenty kilometres away.
Boisemont is another tiny village, with an eighteenth-century château which would form an idyllic retreat from the cares of city ways. Courdimanche, a few miles farther on, is unknown and unspoiled. It crowns a hilltop, with its diminutive and unusual red-roofed church overtopping all and visible from the river, or from the rolling country round about, for many miles. Here the Oise makes a long parallelogram-like turn from Maurecourt around to Eragny, perhaps two miles in a bee-line, but seemingly twenty by the river's course.
The land automobile has a distinct advantage here in speed over thecanot, but one's point of view is not so lovely. It is only twelve kilometres to Pontoise, where one passes thebarragejust below the town and saunters on shore for a spell, just to get acquainted with the place that Parisians know so well by name, and yet so little in reality.
Pontoise is the metropolis of the Oise, though it, too, is a veritable French country town, such as one would hardly expect to find within twenty kilometres of Paris. The islands of the river are dotted with trees andpetit maisons de campagne, and the right bank is bordered with great chalky cliffs, as is the Seine in Normandy.
The general appearance of Pontoise is most pleasing. At first glance it looks like a mediæval Gothic city, and again even Oriental. At any rate, it is an exceedingly unworldly sort of a place, with here and there remains of its bold ramparts and its zigzag and tortuous streets, but with no very great grandeur anywhere to be remarked, except in the Eglise St. Maclou.
The history of Pontoise is long and lurid, beginning with the times of the Gauls when it was known asBriva Isaroe. It is a long time since the ramparts protected the old Château of the Counts of Vexin—literally the land dedicated to Vulcan(pagus Vulcanis)—where many French kings often resided. Many religious establishments flourished here, too, all more or less under royal patronage, including the Abbeys of St. Mellon and St. Martin, and the Couvent des Cordeliers, in whose splendid refectory the exiled Parlement held its sessions in 1652, 1720, and 1753. Out of this circumstance grew the proverb or popular saying, "Avoir l'air de revenir de Pontoise." The domain of Pontoise belonged in turn to many seigneurs, but up to the Revolution it was still practicallyune ville monastique.
As one comes to the lower streets of the town, near the station, and between it and the river, the resemblance to a little corner of the Pays Bas is remarkable, and therein lies its picturesqueness, if not grandeur. Artists would love the narrow Rue des Attanets, with its curious flanking houses of wood and stone, and the Rue de Rouen, which partakes of much the same characteristics. Along the river are great flour-mills, with wash-houses and red-armed, blue-bloused women eternally washing and rinsing. All this would furnish studies innumerable to those who are able to fabricate mouldy walls and tumble-down picturesqueness out of little tubes of colour and gray canvas. Here, too, at Pontoise, in its little port, none too cleanly because of the refuse and grime of ashes and coal soot, one sees the first of the heavychalandsloaded with iron ore from the Ardennes, or coal from Belgium, making their way to the wharves of Paris via the Canal St. Denis.
More distant, and more pleasing to many, is that variety of landscape made famous, and even popular, by Dupré and Daubigny. So, on the whole, Pontoise, and the country round about, should properly be classed among the things to which few have ever given more than a passing glance, but which have a vast reserve fund of attractions hidden behind them, needing only to be sought out to be admired.
St. Ouen l'Aumône, a tiny little town of a couple of thousand souls, opposite Pontoise, has two remarkable attractions which even a bird of passage might well take the time to view. One is the very celebrated Abbaye de Maubisson, indeed it might be called notorious, if one believed the chronicles relating to the proceedings which took place there under Angelique d'Estrees, sister of the none too saintly Gabrielle.
It was founded in 1236 by Blanche of Castile, for the formerreligieusesof Citeaux, and was justly celebrated in the middle ages for the luxuriousness of its appointments and the excellence of its design.
The other feature of St. Ouen l'Aumône, which got its name, by the way, from a former Archbishop of Rouen, is a remarkable example of one of those great walled farmyards in which the north of France, Normandy in particular, formerly abounded. It is all attached to what was known as the Parc de Maubisson, which itself is closed by a high, ancient wall with two turrets at the corners. This wall is supposed to date from the fourteenth century, and within are the remains of a vast storehouse orgrangeof the same century. The only building at all approaching this great storehouse is the Halle au Blé at Rouen, which it greatly resembles as to size. It is now in the hands of a grain merchant who must deal on a large scale, as he claims to have one hundred thousandgerbes(sheaves) in storage at one time. The interior is divided into three naves by two files of monocylindrical columns, though the eastern aisle has practically been demolished.
At Auvers, just above Pontoise, which is bound to Méry by an ugly iron bridge across the Oise, is a fine church of the best of twelfth and thirteenth century Gothic, with a series of Romanesque windows in the apse. Here, too, the country immediately environing Auvers and Méry is of the order made familiar by Daubigny and his school. French farmyards, stubble-thatched cottages, and all the rusticity which is so charming in nature draws continually group after group of artists from Paris to this particular spot at all seasons of the year. The homely side of country life has ever had a charm for city dwellers. Auvers is somewhat doubtfully stated as being the birthplace of François Villon—that prince of vagabonds. Usually Paris has been given this distinction.
Mêry is an elevated little place of something less than fifteen hundred souls. It has a church of the thirteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries, and a château which was constructed at the end of the fourteenth century by the Seigneur de Méry, Pierre d'Orgemont, grand chancellor of France. The domain was created amarquisatin 1665. The famous banker, Samuel Bernard, it seems, became the occupant, of the château in the reign of Louis XIV., and there received king and court.
On a certain occasion, as the season had advanced toward the chill of winter, the opulent seigneur made great fires of acacia wood. The king, who was present, said courteously to his host: "Know you well, Samuel, it is not possible for me to do this in my palace;" from which we may infer that it was a luxury which even kings appreciated.
There were no river obstructions to the free passage of our little craft between Pontoise and L'Isle-Adam, above Auvers. We were going by easy stages now, even the long tows of grain and coal-laden barges were gaining on us, for we were straggling disgracefully and stopping at almost every kilometre stone.
We tied up at Auvers, "Daubigny's Country," as we called it, and stayed for the night at the Hostellerie du Nord, a not very splendid establishment, but one with a character all its own. Auvers, and its neighbour Méry, together form one of the most delightful settlements in which to pass a summer, near to Paris, that could be possibly imagined, but with this proviso, that on Sunday one could take a day in town, for thentout le monde, the proprietor of the Hostellerie du Nord tells you, comes out to breathe the artistic atmosphere of Daubigny. How much they really care for Daubigny or his artistic atmosphere is a question.
At such times the tiny garden and the dining-room of the Hostellerie attempt to expand themselves to accommodate a hundred and fifty guests, whereas their capacity is perhaps forty. Something very akin to pandemonium takes place; it is amusing, no doubt, but it is not comfortable. Nothing ever goes particularly awry here, however; M. T—, thepatron, is too good a manager for that, and a popular one, too, to judge from hisSalon d'Exposition, which is hung about with a couple of hundred pictures presented by his admiring painter guests from time to time. The viands are bountiful and splendidly garnished and theconsommations au premier choix. Then there are the occupants of "les petits ménages" to swoop down on your table for crumbs,—pigeons only,—and in cages a score or more of canary-birds, and, as a sort of contrast, dogs and cats and fowls of all varieties of breed.
It sounds rather uncomfortable, but we did not find it so at all, and, speaking from experience, it is one of the most enticing of the various "artists' resorts" known.