In provincial France it is quite another thing. Thechef-patronof a small hotel in a small town may be possessed of an imposing battery of pots and pans, but often, since he buys hispâtisserieand sweetmeats of the local pastry-cook, and since his guests may frequently not number a dozen at a time, he has no immediate use for all of hiscasserolesandmarmitesandplats rondsandsauteusesat one time, and accordingly, instead of being picturesquely hung about the wall in all their polished brilliancy, they are frequently covered with a coating of dull wax or, more banal yet, enveloped in an ancient newspaper with only their handles protruding. It's a pity to spoil the romantically picturesque idea which many have of the Frenchbatterie de cuisine, but the before-mentioned fact is more often the case than not.
Occasionally, on the tourist-track, there is a "show hotel," like the Hôtel du Grand Cerf at Louviers (its catering in this case is none the worse for its being a "show-place," it may be mentioned) where all the theatrical picturesqueness of the imagination may be seen. There is the timbered sixteenth-century house-front, the heavily beamed, low ceiling of thecuisine, the great open-fire chimney with itsbroche, and all the brave showing of pots and pans, brilliant with many scrubbings ofeau de cuivre, to present quite the ideal picture of its kind to be seen in France—without leaving the highroads and searching out the "real thing" in the byways.
On the other hand, in the same bustling town, is the Mouton d'Argent, equally as excellent in its catering (perhaps more so), where the kitchen is about the most up-to-date thing imaginable, with a modern range, mechanical egg-beaters, etc. This last is nothing very wonderful to an American, but is remarkable in France, where the average cook usually does the work quite as efficiently with a two-tined fork, or something which greatly resembles a chop-stick.
In thecuisineelectric lights are everywhere, but the up-to-dateness here stops abruptly; thesalle à mangeris bare and uninviting, and the rooms above equally so, and the electric light has not penetrated beyond the ground floor. Instead one finds ranged on the mantel, above the cook-stove in the kitchen, a regiment of candlesticks, in strange contrast to the rest of the furnishings. Electric bells, too, are wanting, and there is still found the row of janglinggrelots, their numbers half-obliterated, hanging above the great doorway leading to the courtyard.
The European waiter is never possessed of that familiarity of speech with those he serves, which the American negro waiter takes for granted is his birthright. It's all very well to have a cheerful-countenanced waiter bobbing about behind one's chair, indeed it's infinitely more inspiring than such of the old brigade of mutton-chopped English waiters as still linger in some of London's City eating-houses, but the disposition of the coffee-coloured or coal-black negro to talk to you when you do not want to be talked to should be suppressed.
The genuine French, German, or Swiss waiter of hotel, restaurant, or café is neither too cringingly servile, nor too familiar, though always keen and agile, and possessed of a foresight and initiative which anticipates your every want, or at any rate meets it promptly, even if you ask for it in boarding-school French or German.
There is a keen supervision of food products in France, by governmental inspection and control, and one is certain of what he is getting when he buys hisfiletat the butcher's, and if he patronizes hotels and restaurants of an approved class he is equally sure that he is eating beef in hisbouilleand mutton in hisragoût.
Horse-meat is sold largely, and perhaps certain substitutes for rabbit, but you only buy horsemeat at a horse butcher's, so there is no deception here. You buy horse-meat as horse-meat, and not as beef, in the same way that you buy oleomargarine as oleomargarine, and not as butter, and the French law deals hardly with the fraudulent seller of either.
The law does not interfere with one's private likes and dislikes, and if you choose to make your breakfast off of oysters and Crême Chantilly—as more than one American has been known to do on the Paris boulevards—there is no law to stop you, as there is in Germany, if you want beer and fruit together. Doubtless this is a good law; it sounds reasonable; but the individual should have sense enough to be able to select a menu from non-antagonistic ingredients.
Foreigners, by which English and Americans mean people of Continental Europe, know vastly more of the art of catering to the traveller than do Anglo-Saxons. This is the first, last, and intermediate verse of the litany of good cheer. We may catch up with our Latin and Teuton brothers, or we may not. Time will tell, if we don't expire from the over-eating of pie and muffins before that time arrives.
Europe
Europe
Chapter VThe Grand Tour
Chapter VThe Grand Tour
The advantages of touring by automobile are many: to see the country, to travel agreeably, to be independent of railways, and to be an opportunist—that is to say to be able to fly off at a tangent of fifty or a hundred kilometres at a moment's notice, in order to take in some fête or fair, or celebration or pilgrimage.
"Le tourisme en automobile" is growing all over the world, but after all it is generally only in or near the great cities and towns that one meets an automobile on the road. They hug the great towns and their neighbouring resorts with astonishing persistency. Of the one thousand automobiles at Nice in the season it is certain that nine-tenths of the number that leave their garages during the day will be found sooner or later on the famous "Corniche," going or coming from Monte Carlo, instead of discovering new tracks for themselves in the charming background of the foot-hills of the Maritime Alps.
In England, too, the case is not so very different. There are a thousand "week-enders" in automobiles on the way to Brighton, Southsea, Bournemouth, Scarborough, or Blackpool to ten genuine tourists, and this even though England and Wales and Scotland form a snug little touring-grounds with roads nearly, if not always, excellent, and with accommodations—of a sort—always close at hand.
In Germany there seems to be more genuine touring, in proportion to the number of automobiles in use, than elsewhere. This may not prove to be wholly the case, as the author judges only from his observations made on well-worn roads.
Switzerland is either all touring, or not at all; it is difficult to decide which. At any rate most of the strangers within its frontiers are tourists, and most of the tourists are strangers, and many of them take their automobiles with them in spite of the "feeling" lately exhibited there against stranger automobilists.
Belgium and Holland, as touring-grounds for automobilists, do not figure to any extent. This is principally from the fact that they are usually, so far as foreign automobilists are concerned, included in more comprehensive itineraries. They might be known more intimately, to the profit of all who pass through them. They are distinctly countries for leisurely travel, for their areas are so restricted that the automobilist who covers two or three hundred kilometres in the day will hardly remember that he has passed through them.
Northern Italy forms very nearly as good a touring-ground as France, and the Italian engineers have so refined the automobile of native make, and have so fostered automobilism, that accommodations are everywhere good, and the tourist to-day will not lack for supplies ofbenzinaandolioas he did a few years ago.
The bulk of the automobile traffic between France and Italy enters through the gateway of the Riviera, and, taken all in all, this is by far the easiest, and perhaps the most picturesque, of routes. Alternatives are through Gap and Cuneo, Briançon and Susa, Moutiers and Aosta, or by the Swiss passes, the latter perhaps the most romantic of routes in spite of their difficulties and other objections.
Automobiling in Spain is a thing of the future, and it will be a big undertaking to make the highroads, to say nothing of the by-roads, suitable for automobile traffic. The present monarchs' enthusiasm for the sport may be expected, however, to do wonders. The most that the average tourist into Spain by automobile will want to undertake is perhaps the run to Madrid, which is easily accomplished, or to Barcelona, which is still easier, or to just step over the border to Feuntarabia or San Sebastian, if he does not think overrefined Biarritz will answer his purpose.
More than one hardy traveller, before the age of automobiles, and even before the age of steam, has made "the grand tour," and then come home and written a book about it until there seems hardly any need that a modern traveller should attempt to set down his impressions of the craggy, castled Rhine, the splendid desolation of Pompeii, or the romantic reminders still left in old Provence to tell the story of the days of the troubadours and the "Courts of Love."
It is conceivable that one can see and enjoy all these classic splendours from an automobile, but automobilists from overseas have been known to rush across France in an attempt to break the record between some Channel port and Monte Carlo, or dash down the Rhine and into Switzerland for a few days, and so on to Rome, and ultimately Naples, where ship is taken for home in the western world.
This is, at any rate, the itinerary of many a self-made millionaire who thinks to enjoy himself between strenuous intervals of international business affairs. It is a pity he does not go slower and see more.
The real grand tour, or, as the French call it, the "Circuit Européen," may well begin at Paris, and descend through Poitou to Biarritz, along the French slope of the Pyrenees, finally skirting the Mediterranean coast by Marseilles and Monte Carlo, thence to Genoa, in Italy, and north to Milan, finally reaching Vienna. This city is generally considered the outpost of comfortable automobile touring, and rightly so, for the difficulty of getting gasoline and oil, along the route, and such small necessities as an automobile requires, continually oppresses one, and dampens his enthusiasm for the beauties of nature, the fascination of historic shrines, or the worship of art, the three chief things for which the most of us travel, unless we be mere vagabonds, and journey about for the sheer love of being on the move. From Vienna to Prague, to Breslau, to Berlin, Hanover, and Cologne, and finally to Paris via Reims finishes the "circuit," which for variety and excellence of the roads cannot elsewhere be equalled.
This, or something very near to it, would be the very best possible course for a series of reliability trials, and certainly nothing quite so suitable or enjoyable for the participants could otherwise be found. It is much better than a mere pegging away round and round a two hundred and fifty kilometre circuit, as some trials and races have been run. In all the distance is something like five thousand kilometres, which easily divides itself into stages of two hundred kilometres daily, and gives one an enjoyable twenty-five days or a month of travel, which, in all its illuminating variety, is far and away ahead of the benefits our forefathers derived from the box seat of a diligence or a post-chaise.
On this trip one runs the whole gamut of the European climate, and eats the food of Paris, of the Midi, of Italy, Austria, and Germany, and wonders why it is that he likes the last one partaken of the best. Given a faultlessly running automobile (and there are many today which can do the work under these conditions) and no tire troubles, and one could hardly improve upon the poetry of motion which enables one to eat up the long silent stretches of roadway in La Beauce or the Landes, to climb the gentle slopes skirting the Pyrenees, or the ruder ones of Northern Italy, until finally he makes that bee-line across half of Europe, from Berlin to Paris. One's impressions of places when touringen automobileare apt to be hazy; like those of the energetic American who, when asked if he had been to Rome, replied, "Why, yes; that's where I bought my panama(sic)hat!"
Such a "grand tour" as outlined by the "Circuit Européen" presents a variety which it is impossible to equal. It is a tour which embraces country widely differing in characteristics—one which takes in both the long, broad, ribbon-like roads of Central France, flanked by meadows, orchards, and farmsteads, and lofty mountains from the peaks of which other peaks capped with glistening snow may be gazed upon, sunlit valleys and sparkling lakes. It is a tour which no man could possibly make without a good machine, and yet it is a tour which, with a good machine, can be considered easy and comparatively inexpensive.
One does not require a car with excessive horsepower for the trip, though he does need a machine which has been carefully constructed and adjusted, and above all he must guard carefully that his motor does not overheat, for the hills are stiff for the most part.
When touring on an itinerary as varied as that here indicated one should have anti-skidding tires on the rear wheels, take descents with care, and, if you be the owner of a powerful machine, do not make that an excuse for rushing up the tortuous, twisting, and frightfully dangerous roads, banked by a cliff on one hand, and by a precipice on the other, which abound in all mountainous regions.
In taking turnings on such roads also always keep to the right, even if this necessitates slowing down at the bends. One never knows what is descending, and in such parts slow-moving carts drawn by cattle are numerous, and generally keep the middle of the road. Most of the automobile accidents which take place on mountain roads are due to this swishing round bends, heedless of what may be on the other side, and in allowing one's machine to gather too much speed on the long descents. This is gospel! There is both sport and pleasure to be had from such an itinerary as this, but it is a serious affair, for one has to have a lookout for many things that are unthought of in a two hours' afternoon suburban promenade. Thechauffeur, be he professional or amateur, who brings his automobile back from theCircuit Européenunder its own power is entitled to be called expert.
As for the value to automobilism of this great trial one can hardly overestimate it. There is no place here for the freak machine or scorchingchauffeur, such as one has found in many great events of the past. A great touring contest over such a course would be bound to have important results in many ways. The ordinary class ofcircuitis a very close approach to a racing-track, with gasoline and tire stations established at many points of the course. On the European Circuit such advantages would be out of the question, everything would have to be taken as it exists naturally. In a sense, such a competition would be a return to the contests organized in the early days of the automobile, the Paris-Bordeaux and Paris-Berlin races, when the driver had ever to be on the alert for unforeseen difficulties unknown on the racing-circuit as understood in recent years.
To follow theCircuit Européenone traverses France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Belgium; and one may readily enough, if time and inclination permit, get also a glimpse of Spain, Switzerland, and Holland. Generally the automobile tourist has confined his trip to France, as properly he might, but, if he would go further afield, the European Circuit, as it has become classically known, is an itinerary vouched for as to its practicability and interest by the allied automobile and touring clubs of many lands.
France is still far in the lead in the accommodation which it offers to the automobilist, but Germany has made great strides of late, and the other frontier boundary states have naturally followed suit. Roads improvement in Germany has gone on at a wonderful rate of late, due, it is said, to the interest of the German emperor in the automobile industry, both from a sportive and a very practical side.
From Paris to the Italian frontier one finds the roads uniformly excellent; but, as one enters Italy, they deteriorate somewhat, except along the frontiers, where, curiously enough, nations seem to vie with each other in a careful maintenance of the highroads, which is, of course, laudable. This is probably due to strategic military reasons, but so long as it benefits the automobilist he will not cry out for disarmament.
The Austrian roads are fair—near Vienna and Prague they are quite good; but they are dangerous with deep ditches and gullies which the French know ascanivaux, the Austrians by some unpronounceable name, and the Anglo-Saxon as "thank-you-marms." From Prague to Breslau the roads are twisting and turning, and large stones jut here and there above the actual road level. This is a real danger, a very considerable annoyance. From Breslau to Potsdam one gets as dusty a bit of road travelling as he will find in all Europe. One side of the road only is stone-rolled, the other apparently being merely loose sand, or some variety of dust which whirls up in clouds and even penetrates one's tightly closed bags and boxes. Hanover, the home of Continental tires, is surrounded in every direction with execrable cobblestones, or whatever the German equivalent is—"pflaster," the writer thinks. Probably the makers of the excellent tires for automobiles have nothing to do with the existence of this awfulpavé, and perhaps if you accused them of it they would repair your tires without charge! The writer does not know.
From Hanover to Minden the roads improve, and when one actually strikes the trail of Napoleon he finds the roads better and better. Napoleon nearly broke up Europe, or saved it—the critics do not agree, but he was the greatest road-builder since the Romans.
Finally, crossing the Rhine at Cologne and passing through Belgium, one enters France by the valley of the Meuse.
One of the most remarkable tours was that undertaken in 1904 by Georges Cormier, in a tiny six horse-power De Dion Populaire. He left the Automobile Club de France in mid-October for Sens, his first stop, 101 kilometres from Paris. His route thenceforth was by Dijon, Les Rousses, and the Col de la Faucille, whence he reached Geneva, after crossing the Swiss frontier, in a torrential rain.
From Geneva he reentered France by the Pont de la Caille, then to Aiguebelle and St. Jeanne de Maurienne, where the women wear the most theatrical picturesque costumes to be seen in France.
After passing Modane and Lanslebourg he followed the ascent of Mont Cenis for ten kilometres before he reached the summit of the pass. Within three kilometres he struck the snow-line, and the falling snow continued to the summit. Here he found twodouaniersand twogendarmes, who appeared glad enough to have the monotony of their lonely vigil relieved by the advent of an automobile, quite unlooked for at this season of the year.
The descent to Susa and the great plain of the Po was long and dangerous. It is sixty-two kilometres from Modane to Susa, either up-hill or down-hill, with the descent by far the longest. It is one of the most enjoyable routes between France and Italy. Once on the Italian side the whole climatic aspect of things changes. The towns are highly interesting whenever met with, and the panoramas superb, but there is a marked absence of that active life of the fields, of cattle and human labourers that one remarks in France.
From Turin the route of this energetic little car passed Plaisance, crossed the Appenines between Bologna and Florence, and so to Venice, or rather to Mestre, where the car was put in a garage while the conductor paid his respects to the Queen of the Adriatic.
From Mestre the route lay by Udine, Pontebba, Pontafel, Villac Judenburg, and Murzzuschlag, through Styria to Vienna, with the roadways continually falling off in excellence. Here are M. Cormier's own words: "Mais, par exemple, comme routes, Dieu que c'est mauvais! Malgré cela, j'y retournerai; le pays vaut la peine que l'on affronte les cailloux, les ornières, les dos d'âne at les dérapages sur le sol mouillé, comme je l'ai trop trouvé, hélas!"
Of the road from Vienna, through Moravia and Bohemia, the tourist wrote also feelingly. "May I never see those miserable countries again," he said. Things must have improved in the last two or three years, but the cause of the little De Dion's troubles was the frequent recurrence of culverts orcanivauxacross the road. Five hundred in one day nearly did for the little De Dion, or would have done so had not it been carefully driven.
From Prague the German frontier was crossed at Zinnwalo, a tiny hamlet well hidden on a mountain-top, beyond which is a descent of fifty kilometres to Dresden. From Dresden to Berlin the way lay over delightful forest roads, little given to traffic, and most enjoyable at any season of the year, unless there be snow upon the ground.
From Berlin the route was by Magdebourg, Hanover, Munster, and Wesel, and Holland was entered at Beek, a little village ten kilometres from Nymegen. At Nymegen the Waal was crossed by a steam ferry-boat, and at Arnhem the Rhine was passed by a bridge of boats, a surviving relic in Continental Europe still frequently to be found, as at Wesel and Dusseldorf in Germany, and even in Italy, near Ferrara on the Po.
Utrecht came next, then Amsterdam—"a little tour of Holland," as the De Dion's conductor put it. In the suburbs of the large Dutch towns, notably Utrecht, one makes his way through miles and miles of garden walls, half-hiding coquettish villas. The surface of the roads here is formed of a peculiar variety of paving that makes them beloved of automobilists, it being of small brick placed edgewise, and very agreeable to ride and drive upon.
From Utrecht the route was more or less direct to Antwerp. At the Belgian frontier acquaintance was made with that horrible granite-block road-bed, for which Belgium is notorious. After Antwerp, Brussels, then forty-five kilometres of road even worse—if possible—than that which had gone before. (The Belgianchauffeurscall that portion of the route between Brussels and Gemblout a disgrace to Belgium.) The French frontier was gained, through Namur, at Rocroi, and Paris reached, via Meaux, thirty-nine days after the capital had previously been quitted.
This was probably the most remarkable "grand tour" which had been made up to that time, and it was done with a little six horse-power car, which suffered no accidents save those that one is likely to meet with in an afternoon's promenade. The automobile itself weighed, with its baggage and accessories, practically six hundred kilos, and with its two passengers 760 kilos. The distance covered was 4,496 kilometres.
Part IITouring In FranceChapter IDown Through Touraine: Paris To Bordeaux
Part IITouring In FranceChapter IDown Through Touraine: Paris To Bordeaux
As old residents of Paris we, like other automobilists, had come to dread the twenty-five or thirty kilometres which lead from town out through Choisy-le-Roi and Villeneuve St. Georges, at which point the road begins to improve, and the execrable suburban Paris pavement, second to nothing for real vileness, except that of Belgium, is practically left behind, all but occasional bits through the towns.
At any rate, since our automobile horse was eating his head off in the garage at St. Germain, we decided on one bright May morning to conduct him forthwith by as comfortable a road as might be found from St. Germain around to Choisy-le-Roi.
Getting across Paris is one of the dreaded things of life. For the traveller by train who, fleeing from the fogs of London, as he periodically does in droves from November to February of each year, desires to make the south-bound connection at the Gare de Lyon, it is something of a problem. He may board the "Ceinture" with a distrust the whole while that his train may not make it in time, or he may go by cab, provided he will run the risk of some of his numerous impedimenta being left behind, for—speak it lightly—the Englishman is still found who travels with his bath-tub, though, if he is at all progressive, it may be a collapsible india-rubber affair which you blow up like the tires of an automobile.
For the automobilist there is the same dread and fear. To avoid this one has simply to make his way carefully from St. Germain, via Port Marly, or Marly-Bailly, to St. Cyr (where is the great military school), to Versailles, thence to Choisy-le-Roi via theRoute Nationalewhich passes to the south of Sceaux. The route is not, perhaps, the shortest, and it takes something of the skill of the old pathfinders to worry it out, but it absolutely avoids the pavements between St. Germain and Versailles and equally avoids the drive through Paris with its attendant responsibilities.
The automobilist, once clear of Paris, has only to think of the open road. There will be little to bother him now, save care in negotiating the oft-times narrow, awkward turnings of an occasional small town where, if it is market-day, untold disaster may await him if he does not look sharp.
On the occasion of our flight south, nothing on the whole journey happened to give us any concern, save at Pithiviers, where a market-wagon with a staid old farm-horse—who did not mean any harm—charged us and lifted off the right mud-guard, necessitating an hour's work or more at the blacksmith's to straighten it out again.
Midnight at a Wayside Inn in FranceMidnight at a Wayside Inn in France
Midnight at a Wayside Inn in FranceMidnight at a Wayside Inn in France
At any rate, we had covered a trifle over a hundred kilometres from Paris, and that was something. We lunched well at the Hôtel de la Poste, and sent off to city-bound friends in the capital samples of the lark patties for which the town is famous.
Nearly every town in France has its specialty; Pithiviers itspâté des allouettes;Montélimar itsnougat; Axat itsmousserons; Perigueux itstruffes, and Tours itsrillettes. When one buys them away from the land of their birth he often buys dross, hence it is a real kindness to send back eatable souvenirs of one's round, much more kind than would be the tawdry jugs and plates emblazoned in lurid colours, or white wood napkin-rings and card-cases, usually gathered in as souvenirs.
It is forty-two kilometres to Orleans, one of the most historic and, at the same time, one of the most uninteresting cities in France, a place wholly without local dignity and distinction. Its hotels, cafés, and shops are only second-rate for a place of its rank, and the manners and customs of its people but weak imitations of those of Paris. You can get anything you may need in the automobile line most capably attended to, and you can be housed and fed comfortably enough in either of the two leading hotels, but there is nothing inspiring or even satisfying about it, as we knew from a half-dozen previous occasions.
We slept that night beneath the frowning donjon walls of Beaugency's L'Ecu de Bretagne, for something less than six francs apiece for dinner, lodging, and morning coffee, and did not regret in the least the twenty-five kilometres we had put between us and Orleans.
At one time it was undecided whether we should come on to Beaugency, or put in at Meung, the attraction of the latter place being, for the sentimentalist, that it is the scene of the opening pages of Dumas's "Trois Mousquetaires," and, in an earlier day, the cradle of Jehan de Meung, the author of the "Roman de la Rose." No evidences of Dumas's "Franc Meunier" remained, and, as there was no inn with as romantic a name as that at Beaugency, we kept on another seven kilometres.
We had made it a rule, while on the trip, not to sleep in a large town when we could do otherwise, and that is why Orleans and Blois and Bordeaux are mere guide-posts in our itinerary.
From Beaugency to Blois is thirty odd kilometres only, along the flat, national highway, with glimpses of the broad, shining ribbon of the Loire here and there gleaming through the trees.
Blois is the gateway of the châteaux country; a score of them are within a day's compass by road or rail; but their delights are worthy of a volume, so they are only suggested here.
The châteaux of Blois, Chambord, Cheverny, Amboise, Chaumont, Chenonceaux, Loches, Azay le Rideau, Luynes, and Langeais, at any rate, must be included in even a hurried itinerary, and so we paid a hasty visit to them all in the order named, and renewed our acquaintance with their artistic charms and their historical memories of the days of François and the Renaissance. For the tourist the châteaux country of the Loire has no beginning and no end. It is a sort of circular track encompassing both banks of the Loire, and is, moreover, a thing apart from any other topographical division of France.
Its luxuriant life, its splendidly picturesque historical monuments, and the appealing interest of its sunny landscape, throughout the length and breadth of old Touraine, are unique pages from a volume of historical and romantic lore which is unequalled elsewhere in all the world.
The climate, too, combines most of the gentle influences of the southland, with a certain briskness and clearness of atmosphere usually found in the north.
By road the Loire valley forms a magnificent promenade; by rail, even, one can keep in close and constant touch with its whole length; while, if one has not the time or inclination to traverse its entire course, there is always the delightful "tour from town," by which one can leave the Quai d'Orsay by the Orleans line at a comfortable morning hour and, before lunch-time, be in the midst of the splendour and plenty of Touraine and its châteaux.
We made our headquarters at Blois, and again at Tours, for three days each, and we explored the châteaux country, and some other more humble outlying regions, to our hearts' content.
Blois is tourist-ridden; its hotels are partly of the tourist orders, and its shopkeepers will sell you "American form" shoes and "best English" hats. It is really too bad, for the overpowering splendours of the château, the quaint old Renaissance house-fronts, the streets of stairs, and the exceedingly picturesque and lively congregation of countryside peasants on a market-day would make it a delightful artists' sketching-ground were one not crowded out by "bounders" in bowler hats and others of the genus tripper.
The Hôtel d'Angleterre et de Chambord is good, well-conducted, and well-placed, but it is as unsympathetically disposed an hostelry as one is likely to find. Just why this is so is inexplicable, unless it be that it is a frankly tourist hotel.
At Tours we did much better. The praises of the Hôtel de l'Univers are many; they have been sung by most latter-day travellers from Henry James down; and the Automobile Club de France has bestowed its recommendation upon it—which it deserves. For all this one is not wholly at his ease here. We remembered that on one occasion, when we had descended before its hospitable doors, travel-worn and weary, we had been pained to find a sort of full-dress dinner going on where we expected to find an ordinarytable d'hôte. For this reason alone we passed the hotel by, and hunted out the quaintly named Hotel du Croissant, in a dimly lighted little back street, indicated by a flaring crescent of electric lights over itsporte-cochère.
We drove our automobile more or less noisily inside the little flagged courtyard, woke up two dozing cats, who were lying full-length before us, and disturbed a round dozen of sleek French commercial travellers at their evening meal.
They treated us remarkably well at Tours's Hôtel du Croissant. "Follow thecommis-voyageurin France and dine well (and cheaply)" might readily be the motto of all travellers in France. The bountiful fare, the local colour, the hearty greeting, and equally hearty farewell of thepatronne, and the geniality of the whole personnel gave us an exceedingly good impression of the contrast between the tourist hotel of Blois and themaison bourgeoisof Tours, always to the advantage of the latter.
The banks of the Loire immediately below Tours grow the only grape in France—perhaps in all the world—which is able to produce a satisfactory substitute for champagne.
Vineyard after vineyard line the banks for miles on either side and give great crops of the celebratedvin mosseaux, the most of which finds its way to Paris, to be sold by second-rate dealers as the "vrai vin de champagne." There's no reason why it shouldn't be sold on its own merits; it is quite good enough; but commerce bows down to American millionaires, English dukes, and the German emperor, and the king of wines of to-day must be labelled champagne.
From Tours to Niort is 170 kilometres, and we stopped not on the way except to admire some particularly entrancing view, to buy gasoline for the automobile, and for lunch at Poitiers.
The whole aspect of things was changing; there was a breath of the south already in the air; and there was an unspeakable tendency on the part of everybody to go to sleep after the midday meal.
We passed Chatellerault and its quaint old turreted and bastioned bridge at just the hour of noon, and were tempted to stop, for we had just heard of the latest thing in the way of a hotel which was brand-new, with steam heat, and hot and cold water, electric lights, baths, etc. Nothing was said about the bill of fare, though no doubt it was equally excellent. The combination didn't appeal, however; we were out after novelty and local colour, and so we rolled on and into Poitiers's Hôtel de l'Europe and lunched well in the most charmingly cool garden-environed dining-room that it were possible to conceive. We had made a wise choice, though on a hit-or-miss formula, and we were content.
Here at least the dim echo of the rustle and bustle of Paris, which drifts down the valley of the Loire from Orleans to the sea, was left behind; a whole new chromatic scale was being built up. No one hurried or rushed about, and one drank a "tilleuil" afterdéjeuner, instead of coffee, with the result that he got sleepy forthwith.
There are five magnificent churches at Poitiers, dating from Roman and mediæval times, but we saw not one of them as we passed through the town. Again we had decided we were out after local manners and customs, and, for the moment, churches were not in the category of our demands.
We had only faint glimmerings as to where Niort was, or what it stood for, but we were bound thither for the night. We left Poitiers in mid-afternoon, gaily enough, but within five kilometres we had stopped dead. The sparking of course; nothing else would diagnose the case! It took three hours of almost constant cranking of the unruly iron monster before the automobile could be made to start again.
Once started, the automobile ran but fitfully the seventy-five kilometres to Niort, the whole party, with fear and trembling, scarcely daring to turn sidewise to regard the landscape, or take an extra breath. There was no assistance to be had this side of Niort, and should the sparking arrangements go back on us again, and we were not able to start, there was no hope of being towed in at the back of a sturdy farm-horse; the distance was too great. Once we thought we had nearly lost it again, but before we had actually lost our momentum the thing recovered itself, and we ran fearingly down the broad avenue into Niort, and asked anxiously as to whether there might be agrand maison des automobilesin the town.
Indeed there was, and in the twinkling of an eye we had shunted our poor lame duck into the courtyard of a workshop which gave employment to something like seventy-five hands, all engaged in the manufacture of automobiles which were exported to the ends of the earth.
Here was help surely. Nothing could be too great or too small for an establishment like this to undertake, and so we left the machine with an easy heart and hunted out the excellent Hôtel de France—the best hotel of its class between Paris and Bordeaux. We dined sumptuously on all the good things of the north and the south, to say nothing of fresh sardines from La Rochelle, not far distant, and we gave not a thought to the automobile again that night, but strolled on the quay by the little river Sêvre-Niortaise, and watched the moon rise over the old château donjon, and heard the rooks caw, and saw them circle and swing around its battlement in a final night-call before they went to rest. It was all very idyllic and peaceful, although Niort is, as may be inferred, an important centre for many things.
We had planned to be on the road again by eight the next morning, but, on arrival at the garage, or more correctly stated, theusine, where we had left the automobile the night before, we found it the centre of a curious group who were speculating—and had been since six o'clock that morning—as to what might be the particular new variety of disease that had attacked its vital parts so seriously that it still refused to go.
It was twelve o'clock, high noon, before it was discovered—with the aid of the electrician from the electric light works—that two tiny ends of copper wire, inside the coil (which a Frenchman calls abobine), had become unsoldered, and only when by chance they rattled into contact would the sparking arrangements work as they ought.
This was something new for all concerned. None of us will be likely to be caught that way again. The cost was most moderate. It was not the automobile owner who paid for the experience this time, a thing which absolutely could not have happened outside of France. Pretty much the whole establishment had had a hand in the job, and, if the service had been paid for according to the time spent, it might have cost anything the establishment might have chosen to charge.
Ten francs paid the bill, and we went on our way rejoicing, after having partaken of a lunch, as excellent as the dinner we had eaten the night before, at the Hôtel de France.
La Rochelle, the city of the Huguenots, and later of Richelieu, was reached just as the setting sun was slanting its red and gold over the picturesque old port and the Tour de Richelieu. If one really wants to know what it looked like, let him hunt up Petitjean's "Port de la Rochelle" in the Musée de Luxembourg at Paris. Words fail utterly to describe the beauty and magnifycence of this hitherto unoverworked artists' sketching-ground.
La RochelleLa Rochelle
La RochelleLa Rochelle
We threaded our way easily enough through the old sentinel gateway spanning the main street, lined with quaint old arcaded, Spanish-looking houses, and drew up abreast of the somewhat humble-looking Hôtel du Commerce, on the Place d'Armes, opposite the ugly little squat cathedral, once wedded to the haughty Richelieu himself.
The Hôtel du Commerce at La Rochelle is the equal of the Hôtel de France at Niort, and has the added attraction of a glass-covered courtyard, where you may take your coffee and watch the household cats amusing themselves with the goldfish in the pool of the fountain which plays coolingly in the centre.
La Rochelle and its Hôtel du Commerce are too good to be treated lightly or abruptly by any writer; but, for fear they may both become spoiled, no more shall be said here except to reiterate that they are both unapproachable in quaintness, comfort, and charm by anything yet found by the writer in four years of almost constant wanderings by road and rail up and down France.
Offshore four kilometres is the Ile de Ré, an isle thirty kilometres long, where the inhabitants wear the picturesquecoiffeand costume which have not become contaminated with Paris fashions. The one thing to criticize is the backwardness of the lives of the good folk of the isle and their enormouspieds plats.
Northward from La Rochelle is a region, almost within sight of the Ile de Ré, where the women wear the most highly theatrical costumes to be seen anywhere in modern France, not even excepting the peasants of Brittany. The chief distinction of the costume is a sort of tiny twisted bandanna over the head, a tight-fitting or folded fichu, a short ballet sort of a skirt, black stockings, and a gaily bordered apron and dainty, high-heeled, tiny shoes—in strong contrast in size and form to the ungainly feet of the women of the Ile de Ré.
We left La Rochelle with real regret, passed the fortified town of Rochefort without a stop, and, in something over two hours, reeled off some sixty-eight kilometres of sandy, marshy roadway to Saintes.
Saintes is noted for many things: its antiquity, its religious history, its Roman remains, and the geniality of its toddling old dealer in sewing-machines (of American make, of course), who, as a "side" line, sells gasoline and oil at considerably under the prevailing rates elsewhere. Truly we were in the ideal touring-ground for automobilists.
To Cognac is sixty-seven kilometres. If we had ever known that Cognac was the name of a town we had forgotten it, for we had, for the moment, at any rate, thought it the name of the region where were gathered the grapes from which cognac was made.
Cognac is famous for the subtle spirit which is sold the world over under that name, and from the fact that it was the birthplace of the art-loving monarch, François Premier.
For these two reasons, and for the bountiful lunch of the Hôtel d'Orleans, and incidentally for the very bad cognac which we got at a café whose name is really and truly forgotten, Cognac is writ large in our note-books.
The house where was born François Premier is easily found, sitting by the river's bank. To-day it is the counting-house of one of the great brandy shippers whose name is current the world over. Its associations have changed considerably, and where once the new art instincts were born, in the person of the gallant François, is now the cradle of commercialism.
The question as to what constitutes good brandy has ever been a favourite one among possessors of a little knowledge. The same class has also been known to state that there is no good brandy nowadays, novrai cognac. This is a mistake, but perhaps a natural one, as the cognac district in the Charente was almost wholly devastated in the phylloxera ravages of half a century ago.
Things have changed, however, and there is as good cognac to-day as there ever was, though there is undoubtedly much more poor stuff being sold.
Down through the heart of the cognac region we sped, through Blaye to Bordeaux and all the busy traffic of its port.
Bordeaux is attractive to the automobilist in that one enters, from any direction, by wide, broad avenues. It is one of the great provincial capitals of France, a great gateway through which much of the intercourse with the outside world goes on.
It is not so cosmopolitan as Marseilles, nor so historically or architecturally interesting as Rouen, but it is the very ideal of an opulent and well-conducted city, where one does not need to await the arrival of the daily papers from Paris in order to know what has happened during the last round of the clock.
Hotels? The town is full of them! You may put up your automobile in the garage of the Hôtel du Chapon-Fin, along with forty others, and you yourself will be well cared for, according to city standards, for twelve or fifteen francs a day,—which is not dear. On the other hand, Bordeaux possesses second-class hotels where, all found, you may sleep and eat for the modest sum of seven francs a day. One of these is the Hôtel Français, a somewhat extensive establishment in a tiny back street. It is the cheapestcityhotel the writer has found in France. There was no garage at the Hotel Français, and we were forced to house our machine a block or two away, where, for the moderate sum of two francs, you might leave it twenty-four hours, and get it back washed and rubbed down, while for another fifty centimes they would clean the brass work,—a nasty job well worth the price. Yes! Bordeaux is pleasant for the automobilist!