To those tourists who are looking for out-of-the-way corners of Europe I commend Billy. It is not pronounced in our frivolous way, but "Bee-yee," which you see gives it at once the French dignity. I call Billy "out-of-the-way" because we saw no tourists in the neighborhood, and we had never before heard of the place, which has a bare three-line mention in Baedeker.
Billy is on the Allier, a beautiful river, and, seen from a distance, with its towering ruin, is truly picturesque. Of course the old castle is the chief feature of Billy—a ruin of great extent, and unrestored! The last item alone makes it worth seeing. A good many of the ruins of France have been restored under the direction of that great recreator of the architectural past, Viollet le Duc, who has done his work supremely well and thoroughly—oh, thoroughly, no name! I am glad he did it, for it means preservation for the ages, but I am so glad that there is now and then a ruin that
Monsieur V. le DucHappened to overlook.
I even drift into bad poetry when I think of it.
The Château de Billy seems to have been builtabout 1232 by one of the sires of Bourbon Robert of Clermont, son of St. Louis, to control the river traffic. It was a massive edifice of towers and bastions, and walls of enormous thickness. A good portion of the walls and some of the towers still stand. And there is a dungeon into which no light or air could come, once used to convince refractory opposition. They put a man in there for an hour. When they took him out he was either convinced or dead, and so, in either case, no longer troublesome.
The guardian of Billy was a little old woman as picturesque as the ruins, and lived in a little house across the way, as picturesque as herself. When we had seen the castle she let us look into her house. It consisted of just one small room with a tiny stove in one corner and a bed in the other. But the stove, with its accessories of pans and other ware all so shining and neat, and her tiny, high-posted, canopied bed so spotless and pretty with its white counterpane and gay little curtains, set us to wondering why anybody in the world needed a home more ample or attractive than that.
It seemed amusing to us that the name of the next place along that route should be Bessey. We lunched between Billy and Bessey, on a green level roadside, under some big trees, where there was a little stream which furnished our cooking water. It is not always easy to select the luncheon place. A dry spot with water and shade is not everywhere to be had, and then we do not always instantly agree on the conveniences of a place, and while we are discussing it we are going right along at a fifteen or twenty-milerate and that place has drifted a mile or two behind before the conference ends. But there alwaysisa place somewhere that has most of the things we want, and it lies around the next turn or over the next hill, and it is always so new and strange and foreign, so away and away from the world we have known, so intimately a part of a land and of lives we have never seen before and shall never see again.
A gypsy of very poor class came along while we were at luncheon. His little wagon-house was quite bare of furnishings. The man walked outside beside the meager donkey—a young woman with a baby sat on the floor in the wagon.
Gypsies, by the way, are an institution in France. The French call themnomades, and provide them with special ordinances and road limitations. At first, when we saw signs "Limites de Nomades" in the outskirts of villages we wondered what was meant, and did not associate the notice with the comfortable and sometimes luxurious house-wagons that we met or overtook, or found solidly established by some pleasant waterside. Then it dawned upon us that these gypsy folk were thenomadesand that the signs were provided for their instruction.
We met them, presently, everywhere. France, with its level roads and liberal laws, is gypsy heaven. A house on wheels, a regular little flat, with parlor, bedroom and kitchen, big enough to hold a family and its belongings, can be drawn by a single horse over the hard, perfectly graded highways. They work north in the summer, no doubt, and in the autumn the Midi calls them. Every little way wesaw them camped, working at their basketry or some kindred industry. Not all the villages limit them, and often we found them located in the midst of a busy town. I do not think they do any harm, and I always envied them. Some of their little houses are so cozy and neat, with tiny lace curtains and flower pots, and pictures on the walls. When we first saw such wagons we thought they belonged to artists.
The particular day of which I am now writing was Sunday, and when we came to Moulin, the ancient capital of the Bourbonnais, there was a baptismal ceremony going on in the cathedral; the old sexton in the portico outside was pulling the rope that led up to the great booming bell. He could pull and talk too, and he told us that the bell was only rung for baptisms, at least that was what we thought he said as he flung himself aloft with the upward sweep, and alow with the downward sweep, until his chin nearly touched the stone floor. I got into the swing of it directly, and signified that I should like to ring the bell a little myself. I realize now that it was decidedly brazen to ask to assist at a sacred function like that, but he let me do it, and I took the rope and for a minute or two swayed up and down in a pride I can hardly express, ringing that five-hundred-year-old bell to notify the world of the latest baptism in France.
We came upon an unexpected treat at Moulin—the Souvigny bible, an illuminated manuscript of 1115, with one hundred and twenty-two marvelously executed pictorial designs. The bible was in a museum across from the cathedral, a splendid museum indeed for little Moulin, being the reconstructedchâteau of the Bourbons, filled with beautiful things of the Bourbon period. The bible is in a room by itself in a glass case, but the guardian opened it for us and turned the leaves. This bible, discovered at the old priory of the little town of Souvigny, is in perfect condition and presents a gorgeous piece of hand illumination. The drawing itself is naturally primitive, but the coloring is rich beyond telling, the lettering marvelously perfect. J. Pierpont Morgan is said to have offered a million francs for the Souvigny bible, a vast sum to little Moulin. I am glad they did not sell it. It seems better in the quiet, choice museum which was once the castle of the Bourbon dukes.
It is curious how conventions establish themselves in the different districts and how absolutely they prevail in the limits of those districts. In certain sections, for instance, we found the furnishings in each hotel exactly alike. The same chairs, the same little table, the same bedsteads and wardrobes, the same tableware. We could tell by the change of furnishing when we had reached a new district. A good portion of the Auvergne remains to us the "Land of Squatty Pitchers," because in every bedroom the water pitcher was a very short, very corpulent and saucy-looking affair that amused us each evening with its absurd shape. Then there were the big coffee bowls and spoons. They got larger and larger from Nîmes northward until we reached Issoire. There the bowls were really immense and the spoons had grown from dessert spoons to table spoons, from table spoons to soup spoons until atIssoire they were like enormous vegetable spoons, such as cooks use to stir the pot with. From Moulin northward we entered the "Land of Little Ladders." All the houses outside the larger towns were story-and-a-half affairs, built facing the road, and the half-story was not reached by an inside stairway, but by a short outside ladder that led up to a central gable window, which was really a door. It was curious to see a string of these houses, all with the little ladders, and all just alike. Our first thought was that the ladders were used because they were cheaper to build than a stairway, and saved inside room. But, reflecting later, I thought it more likely that they originated in the old need of defense. I think there was a time when the family retired to the loft at night and drew the ladder up after them, to avoid a surprise.
It had been raining softly when we left Moulin. Somehow we had strayed from the main road, and through the misty mid-region of the Haute-Loire followed ways uncharted, but always good—always interesting, and somewhere in that lost borderland we came to Dornes, and the daintiest inn, kept by the daintiest gray-haired woman, who showed us her kitchen and her flower garden and her tame pheasants, and made us love her dearly. Next day at St. Pierre le Moutier we got back on our route, and when Narcissa, out of the book she had been reading, reminded us that Joan of Arc had once fought a battle there the place became glorified. Joan must have been at Nevers, too, though we found no record of it.
I think we should have stayed longer at Nevers.There was an ancient look about portions of it that in a brighter day would have invited us. Crossing the Loire and entering the city, with its ancient bastioned walls, carried one back a good way into the centuries. But it was still dull and drizzly, and we had a feeling for the open road and a cozier lodgment.
The rain ceased, the sun tried to break through the mist. The glistening world became strangely luminous, a world not of hard realities at all. The shining river winding away into mystery; far valley reaches fading into haze; blurred lines of ancient spires and towers—these things belonged only to a land of romance. Long ago I saw a painting entitled a dream of Italy. I did not believe then that any real land could be as beautiful— I thought it only an artist's vision. I was mistaken. No painting was ever so beautiful—so full of richness and light and color as this haze-haunted valley of the Loire.
We rested at Neuvy, at the little red-book inn, Hôtel de la Paix, clean and inviting like the rest. It is the best compliment we can pay these little hotels that we always want to remain in them longer, and plan some day to come back to them.
There are more fine-looking fishing places in France than in any country I ever saw. There are also more fishermen. In every river town the water-fronts are lined with them. They are a patient lot. They have been sitting there for years, I suppose, and if they have ever caught anything the fact has been concealed. I have talked with numbers of them, but when I came to the question of their catch they became vague, not to say taciturn. "Pas grande chose" ("No great thing"), has been the reply, and there was no exhibit. I have never seen one of those fishermen get a nibble.
But the water is certainly seductive. Following the upper Loire from Neuvy to Gien, I was convinced that with a good rod I could stop almost anywhere and fill the car. Such attractive eddies, such fascinating, foam-flecked pools! Probably it is just as well I did not have the rod. I like to persuade myself that the fish were there.
Gien on the Loire is an old place, but not much that is old remains. Joan of Arc stopped there on her way to the king at Chinon, and it was from Gien, following the delivery of Orléans and the battle of Patay, that she set out with Charles VII for thecoronation at Rheims. But there are no Joan relics in Gien to-day. There are, however, two interesting features here: the two-story wells and the hard-working dogs. The wells have a curb reaching to the second story, with an opening below for the downstairs tenants. It seems a good idea, and the result is picturesque. The dogs are hitched to little wagons and the Giennese—most of whom seem to be large and fat—first load those wagons and then get in themselves and ride. We saw one great hulk of a man approaching in what at first seemed to be some sort of a go-cart. It was not until he got close up that we discovered the dog—a little sweltering dog, his eyes popping out, his tongue nearly dragging the ground. I think the people of Gien are lazy and without shame.
"Through Hillside Villages Where Never a Stone Had Been Moved, I Think, in Centuries""Through Hillside Villages Where Never a Stone Had Been Moved, I Think, in Centuries"
We missed the road leaving Gien and wandered off into narrow, solid little byways that led across fields and along hedges, through hillside villages where never a stone had been moved, I think, in centuries. Once we turned into what seemed a beautiful wood road, but it led to a grand new château and a private drive which had a top dressing of deep soft sand. Fortunately nobody was at home, for we stalled in the sand and the head of the family and Narcissa and the Joy were obliged to get out and push while I put on all backing power and made tracks in that new sand that would have horrified the owner. We are the right sort, however. We carefully repaired the scars, then made tracks of another kind, for remoter districts.
Miles away from anywhere, by a pool at the edgeof a field of bushes, we established a luncheon place, and in a seclusion of vines and shrubbery the Joy set up a kitchen and made coffee and boiled eggs and potatoes and "kept house" for an hour or so, to her heart's content. We did not know where we were, or particularly care. We knew that the road would lead somewhere, and that somewhere would be a wayside village with a little hotel that had been waiting for us ever so long, with inviting comforts and generous hospitality. Often we said as we drove along, "What little hotel do you suppose is waiting for us to-night?" But we did not worry, for we always knew we should find it.
The "little hotel" this time proved to be at Souppes on the Loing, and if I had to award a premium to any of the little hotels that thus far had sheltered us, I think I should give it to the Hôtel du Mouton, Souppes. The name naturally amused us, and we tried to make jokes out of it, but the dainty rooms and the delicious dinner commanded only our approval. Also the price; nineteen francs and forty centimes, or less than four dollars, for our party of four, dinner, lodging, and breakfast, garage free.
Souppes is a clean town, with a wide central street. Most of the towns up this way were cleaner than those of the farther south. Also, they had better buildings, as a rule. I mean the small towns. Villages not large enough even to be set down on the map have churches that would do credit in size and luxury to New York City. Take Bonny, for instance. We halted there briefly to watch some quaintly dressed people who were buying and selling at a littlebutter and egg market, and then we noticed a big, gray, ancient-looking church somewhat farther along. So we went over there and wandered about in its dim coolness, and looked at its beautiful treasures—among them the fine marble statue of Joan which one meets to-day in most of the churches in France. How could Bonny, a mere village, ever have built a church like that—a church that to-day would cost a million dollars?
Another thing we noticed up this way was the "sign of the bush." Here and there along the road and in the villages there would be a house with an upward-slanting hole in the outside wall, about halfway to the eaves, and in the hole a branch of a tree, usually evergreen. When we had seen a few of these we began to wonder as to their meaning. Then we noticed that houses with those branches were all cafés, and some one suddenly remembered a proverb which says, "A good wine needs no bush," and how, in a former day, at least, the sign of the bush had indicated a wine shop. That it still does so in France became more and more evident as we went along. Every wine shop had its branch of green. I do not think there was one along that road that considered its wine superior to the traditional announcement.
Just outside of Souppes there is a great flinty rock upon which some prehistoric race used to sharpen knives. I suppose it was back before Cæsar's time, but in that hard stone, so hard that my own knife would not scratch it, the sharpening grooves and surfaces are as fresh as if those old fellows had leftthere only yesterday. I wish I could know how they looked.
We came to the woods of Fontainebleau and ate our luncheon in its deep lucent shade. There is romance in the very name of Fontainebleau, but we would return later to find it. We drove a little through the wide avenues of that splendid forest that for three centuries or more was a hunting ground and pleasure park for kings, then we headed away for Juvisy on the Seine, where we spent the night and ate on a terrace in the open air, in a company not altogether to our liking—it being rather noisy, rather flashy, rather unwholesome—in a word, Parisian. We had left the region of simple customs and unpretentious people. It was not a pleasant change.
Also, we had left the region of good roads. All that I have said about the perfection of French roads I wish to retract, so far as those in the environs of Paris are concerned. Leaving Juvisy, we were soon on what is called the "pave," a road paved with granite blocks, poorly laid to begin with, and left unrepaired for years. It is full of holes and humps and wallows, and is not really a road at all, but a stone quarry on a jamboree. We jiggled and jumped and bumped, and only by going at the slowest permissible speed could stand it. Cars passed us going quite fast, but I could see that their occupants were not enjoying themselves. They were holding on to the backs of the seats, to the top supports, to one another. They were also tearing their cars to pieces, though the average Frenchman does not mind that. I love France, and every Frenchman is my friend,but I do not wish him to borrow my car. He drives helter-skelter, lickety-split, and never takes care of his car at all. When the average Frenchman has owned a car a year it is a rusty, smoking, clattering box of tinware, ready for the can-heap.
The informed motorist does not arrive at the gates of Paris with a tankful of gasoline. We were not informed, and when theoctroiofficials had measured our tank they charged us something like four dollars on its contents. The price of gasoline is higher inside, but not that much higher, I think. I did not inquire, for our tankful lasted us the week of our stay.
To tell the truth, we did but little motoring in Paris. For one thing, the streets are just a continuation of the pave, and then the traffic regulations are defective. I mean there are no regulations. It's just a go-as-you-please, each one for himself. Push, crowd, get ahead of the fellow in front of you—that is the rule. Here and there agendarmestands waving his arms and shouting, "Sacre bleu!" but nobody pays the least attention to him. The well-trained American motorist finds his hair getting gray after an hour or two of that kind of thing.
But we enjoyed Paris, though I am not going to tell about it. No one attempts to tell of Paris any more—it has all been told so often. But I may hint to the conservative motorist that below the Seine, in the neighborhood of the Luxembourg Gardens, about where the rue de Vaugirard crosses the BoulevardSt. Michel, he will find choice little hotels, with rooms very moderate indeed.
And perhaps here is a good place to speak of the cost of our travel. We had stinted ourselves in nothing except style. We had traveled leisurely, happily, enjoying everything to the full, and our average expense was a trifle less than forty francs a day—that is, eight dollars for four persons and the car. Our bill each day at the little hotels for dinner, lodging, andpetit déjeuner(rolls, coffee, and jam) averaged about twenty-two francs, garage free.[14]That, of course, is absurdly cheap.
The matter of gasoline is different. "Essence" or benzine, as they call it, is high in Europe, and you would think it was some fine liqueur, the way they handle it. They put it up in sealed five-liter cans, and I have seen motorists, native motorists, buy one can—a trifle more than a gallon—probably fearing evaporation, or that somebody would rob the tank. One of those cans cost us about fifty cents, and, being of extra refined quality, it would carry us on French roads between eighteen and twenty miles. Sixty miles a day was about our average, which is aplenty for sight-seeing, even for an American. Our gasoline and oil expense came to about eight francs a day. The remainder of our eight dollars went for luncheon by the roadside and for tips. The picnic luncheon—bread and butter (deliciousunsalted butter), jam, eggs, tinned meats, cheese, sausage, etc.—rarely cost to exceed four francs, and was usually cheaper. Our hotel tips were about 10 per cent of the bill, which is the correct amount, and was always satisfactory. When one gives more he gains nothing but servility, and makes it difficult for those who follow him. On the other hand an American cannot give less and keep his self-respect. There were usually but two servants at little inns, a waitress and a chambermaid. They were entitled to a franc each, and the boy at the garage to another. Two or three francs a day was quite enough for incidental tips at churches, ruined castles, and the like, unless there should be a fee, which would naturally be reckoned outside the regular budget. In any case, such fees were small and infrequent. I think I will add a brief summary of the foregoing figures which I seem to have strung along in a rather loose, confusing way.
Average daily cost of dinner, lodging, and breakfast22 francs ($4.40)Average daily cost of gasoline and oil8 francs ( 1.60)Average daily cost of roadside luncheon4 francs (.80)Average daily cost of tips at hotel3 francs (.60)Average daily cost for sight-seeing3 francs (.60)————————-Total40 francs ($8.00)
That was reasonable motor travel, and our eightdollars bought as much daily happiness as any party of four is likely to find in this old world.[15]
Another thing I wish to record in this chapter is the absolute squareness we found everywhere. At no hotel was there the slightest attempt to misrepresent, to ring in extras, to encourage side-adventures in the matter of wines or anything of the sort. We had been led to believe that the motorist was regarded as fair game for the continental innkeeper. Possibly there were localities where this was true, but I am doubtful. Neither did the attendants gather hungrily around at parting. More than once I was obliged to hunt up our waitress, or to leave her tip with the girl or man who brought the bags. The conclusion grew that if the motorist is robbed and crucified in Europe, as in the beginning a friend had prophesied we should be, it is mainly because he robs and crucifies himself.
It is easy enough to get into almost any town or city, but it is different when you start to leave it. All roads lead to Rome, but there is only here and there one that leads out of it. With the best map in the world you can go wrong.
We worked our way out of Paris by the Bois de Boulogne, but we had to call on all sorts of persons for information before we were really in the open fields once more. A handsome young officer riding in the Bois gave us a good supply. He was one of the most polite persons I ever met; also, the most loquacious. The sum of what he told us was to take the first turn to the right, but he told it to us for fully five minutes, with all the variations and embroideries of a young and lively fancy that likes to hear itself in operation. He explained how the scenery would look when we had turned to the right; also how it would continue to look when there was no longer a necessity of turning in either direction and what the country would be in that open land beyond the Bois. On the slightest provocation I think he would have ridden with us, even into Cherbourg. He was a boon, nevertheless, and we were truly grateful.
Beyond the Bois de Boulogne lay thepave, milesof it, all as bad as it could be. Sometimes we could not really tell when we were in the road. Once I found myself on a sort of private terrace without knowing how I got there or how to get down. We went through St. Germain, but we did not stop. We wished to get far from Paris—back to the simple life and good roads. It was along the Seine, at last, that we found them and the quiet villages. Imagine the luxury of following a silent, tranquil road by that placid stream, through the sweetness of a May afternoon. Imagine the peace of it after the jar and jolt and clatter and dazzle of detestable, adorable Paris.
I am sorry not to be able to recommend the hotel at Rosny. For a time it looked as if it were going to be one of the best of our selections, but it did not turn out so. When we found a little toy garden at the back, our rooms a string of tiny one-story houses facing it, with roses blooming at every doorway, we were delighted. Each of us had a toy house to himself, and there was another for the car at the back. It was a real play place, and we said how nice it was and wished we might stay a good while. Then we went for a walk down to the river and in the sunset watched a curious ferryboat run back and forth on a wire, taking over homefaring teams, and some sheep and cattle, to the village on the farther bank of the little, but historic, river. In the early gloaming we walked back to our hotel.
The dinner was very good—all dinners in France are that—but alas for our pretty playhouse rooms! When candles were brought in we saw what I hadbegun to suspect from the feeling, the walls were damp—worse, they were soaked—almost dripping. It seems they were built against a hill and the recent rains had soaked them through. We could not risk it—the landlady must give us something in the main house. She was a good soul—full of regrets, even grief. She had not known about those walls, she said, and, alas! she had no rooms in the main house. When we insisted that shemustfindsomething, she admitted that there was, indeed, just one room, but so small, so humble—fine folk like us could never occupy it.
She was right about its being small, but she was wrong in thinking we could not occupy it. She brought in cots and bedding, and when we were all in place at last we just about filled it from side to side. Still, it was dry and ventilated; those other places had been neither. But it seemed to us amusing that our fine pretension of a house apiece opening on a garden had suddenly dwindled to one inconsiderable room for the four of us.
We were in Normandy, now, and enjoying it. Everything was quite different from the things of the south. The picturesque thatched-roof houses; the women in dainty caps, riding on donkeys, with great brass milk jugs fore and aft; the very ancient cross-timber architecture; those, to us, were new things in France.
The architecture and some of the costumes were not new to one who had visited England. William the Norman must have carried his thatched-roof and cross-timber architecture across the Channel; also, certain dresses and smocks and the pattern of themen's whiskers. In some of these towns one might almost believe himself in rural England.
Lisieux, especially, is of the type I mean. It has a street which might be in Shrewsbury, though I think the Shrewsbury houses would not be as old as those of Lisieux, one of which—"The House of the Salamander"—so called from the decoration on its carved façade—we were permitted to visit. Something about it gave me more the feeling of the ancient life than I have found in most of the castles. Perhaps because it is wood, and wood holds personality longer than stone.
There is an old church at Lisieux, and it has a chapel built by Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who hounded Joan of Arc to the stake. Cauchon earned the Beauvais appointment by convicting Joan, but later, especially after Joan had been rehabilitated, he became frightened of the entertainment which he suspected Satan was preparing for him and built this chapel in expiation, hoping to escape the fire. It is a beautiful chapel, but I think Cauchon wasted his money. If he didn't there is something wrong with justice.
The Normandy road to Cherbourg is as wonderful as any in France. All the way it is lined with trees, and it goes straight on, mile after mile, up hill and down—long, long hills that on the approach look as if they reached to the sky, but that flatten out when you get to them, and offer a grade so gradual and a surface so smooth that you need never shift your speed levers. Workmen are always raking and touching up those roads. We had something morethan two days of them, and if the weather had not been rather windy and chilly out on that long peninsula the memory of that run would be about perfect.
Cherbourg is not the great city we had imagined it to be. It is simply a naval base, heavily fortified, and a steamer landing. Coming in on the Paris road you are in the center of activities almost as soon as you reach the suburbs and there is none of the crush of heavy traffic that one might expect. There is a pleasant beach, too, and if travelers were not always going somewhere else when they arrive at Cherbourg, the little city might become a real resort. We were there a week before our ship came in, then sailed out one quiet June evening on the harbor tender to meet the missing member and happily welcome her to France. Our hotel had a moving-picture show in the open air, and we could look down on it from our windows. The Joy especially liked this, and we might have stayed there permanently, but the long roads and still unvisited glories of France were calling.
We had barely hesitated at Bayeux on the way to Cherbourg, but now we stopped there for the night. Bayeux, which is about sixty miles from Cherbourg, was intimately associated with the life of William the Conqueror, and is to-day the home of the famous Bayeux tapestry, a piece of linen two hundred and thirty feet long and eighteen inches wide, on which is embroidered in colored wools the story of William's conquest of England.
William's queen, Matilda, is supposed to have designed this marvelous pictorial document, and even executed it, though probably with the assistance of her ladies. Completed in the eleventh century, it would seem to have been stored in the Bayeux cathedral, where it lay scarcely remembered for a period of more than six hundred years. Then attention was called to its artistic and historic value, and it became still more widely known when Napoleon brought it to Paris and exhibited it at the Louvre to stir the French to another conquest of England. Now it is back in Bayeux, and has a special room in the museum there, and a special glass case, so arranged that you can walk around it and see each of its fifty-eight tableaux.
It was the closing hour when we got to the Bayeuxmuseum, but the guardian gave us plenty of time to walk around and look at all the marvelous procession of horses and men whose outlines have remained firm and whose colors have stayed fresh for more than eight hundred years.
Matilda was ahead of her time in art. She was a futurist—anybody can see that who has been to one of the later exhibitions. But she was exactly abreast in the matter of history. It is likely that she embroidered the events as they were reported to her, and her records are above price to-day. I suppose she sat in a beautiful room with her maids about her, all engaged at the great work, and I hope she looked as handsome as she looks in the fine painting of her which hangs above the case containing her masterpiece.
There is something fine and stirring about Matilda's tapestry. No matter if Harold does seem to be having an attack of pleurisy when he is only putting on his armor, or if the horses appear to have detachable legs. Matilda's horses and men can get up plenty of swift action on occasion, and the events certainly do move. Tradition has it that the untimely death of the queen left the tapestry unfinished, for which reason William's coronation does not appear. I am glad we stopped at Bayeux. I would rather have seen Matilda's faithfully embroidered conquest than a whole gallery full of old masters.
Next day at Caen we visited her grave. It stands in a church which she herself founded in expiation of some fancied sin connected with her marriage. Her remains have never been disturbed. We alsovisited the tomb of the Conqueror, on the other side of the city at the church of St. Étienne. But the Conqueror's bones are not there now; they were scattered by the Huguenots in 1562.
We enjoyed Caen. We wandered about among its ancient churches and still more ancient streets. At one church a wedding was going on, and Narcissa and I lingered a little to assist. One does not get invited to a Normandy wedding every day, especially in the old town where William I organized his rabble to invade England. No doubt this bride and groom were descendants of some of William's wild rascals, but they looked very mild and handsome and modern to us. Narcissa and I attended quite a variety of ceremonials in the course of our travels: christenings, catechisms, song services, high mass, funerals—there was nearly always something going on in those big churches, and the chantings and intonings, and the candles, and the incense, and the processions and genuflections, and the robes of the priests and the costumes of the assemblages all interested us.
Caen became an important city under William the Conqueror. Edward III of England captured and pillaged it about the middle of the fourteenth century, at which time it was larger than any city in England, except London. It was from Caen that Charlotte Corday set out to assassinate Marat. To-day Caen has less than fifty thousand inhabitants and is mainly interesting for its art treasures and its memories.
We left the Paris-Cherbourg road at Caen. Our program included Rouen, Amiens, and Beauvais,cathedral cities lying more to the northward. That night we lay at the little Norman village of Bourg-Achard, in an inn of the choicest sort, and next morning looked out of our windows on a busy cattle market, where men in clean blue smocks and women in neat black dresses and becoming headgear were tugging their beasts about, exhibiting them and discussing them—eating, meantime, large pieces of gingerbread and other convenient food. A near-by orchard was filled with these busy traders. At one place our street was lined with agricultural implements which on closer inspection proved to be of American manufacture. From Bourg-Achard to Rouen the distance seemed all too short—the road was so beautiful.
It was at Rouen that we started to trace backward the sacred footprints of Joan of Arc, saint and savior of France. For it is at Rouen that the pathway ends. When we had visited the great cathedral, whose fairy-like façade is one of the most beautiful in the world, we drove to a corner of the old Market Place, and stopped before a bronze tablet which tells that on this spot on a certain day in May, 1431 (it was the 29th), the only spotless soul in France, a young girl who had saved her country from an invading and conquering enemy, was burned at the stake. That was five hundred years ago, but time has not dulled the misery of the event, its memory of torture, its humiliation. All those centuries since, the nation that Joan saved has been trying to atone for her death. Streets have been named for her; statues have been set up for her in every church and in publicsquares, but as we read that sorrowful tablet I could not help thinking that all of those honors together are not worth a single instant of her fiendish torture when the flames had found her tender flesh. Cauchon, later Bishop of Beauvais, her persecutor, taunted his victim to the last. If the chapel of expiation he built later at Lisieux saved him, then chapels must indeed be held in high esteem by those who confer grace.
Nothing is there to-day that was there then, but one may imagine an open market place thronged with people, and the horrid structure of death on which stood Joan while they preached to her of her sins. Her sins! when she was the only one among them that was not pitch black, steeped to the hair in villainy. Cauchon himself finished the sermon by excommunicating her, cutting off the church's promise of salvation. On her head she wore a cap on which was printed:Heretic, Relapsed, Apostate, Idolater. Cauchon had spared nothing to make her anguish complete. It is curious that he allowed her to pray, but he did, and when she prayed—not for herself, but for the king who had deserted her—for his glory and triumph, Cauchon himself summoned the executioners, and they bound her to the stake with chains and lighted the fire.
There is little more to see of Joan in Rouen. The cathedral was there in her time, but she was never permitted to enter it. There is a wall which was a part of the chapel where she had her final hearing before her judges; there are some houses which she must have passed, and there is a tower which belongedto the castle in which she was confined, though it is not certain that it is Joan's tower. There is a small museum in it, and among its treasures we saw the manuscript articleSt. Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain, who, in hisPersonal Recollections, has left to the world the loveliest picture of that lovely life.
It was our purpose to leave Rouen by the Amiens road, but when we got to it and looked up a hill that about halfway to the zenith arrived at the sky, we decided to take a road that led off toward Beauvais. We could have climbed that hill well enough, and I wished later we had done so. As it was, we ran along quite pleasantly during the afternoon, and attended evening services in an old church at Grandvilliers, a place that we had never heard of before, but where we found an inn as good as any in Normandy.
It is curious with what exactness Fate times its conclusions. If we had left Grandvilliers a few seconds earlier or later it would have made all the difference, or if I had not pulled up a moment to look at a lovely bit of brookside planted with poplars, or if I had driven the least bit slower or the least bit faster, during the first five miles, or—
Oh, never mind—what happened was this: We had just mounted a long steep hill on high speed and I had been bragging on the car, always a dangerous thing to do, when I saw ahead of us a big two-wheeled cart going in the same direction as ourselves, and beyond it a large car approaching. I could have speeded up and cut in ahead of the cart, but I was feeling well, and I thought I should do the courteousthing, the safe thing, so I fell in behind it. Not far enough behind him, however, for as the big car came opposite, the sleepy driver of the cart pulled up his horse short, and we were not far enough behind for me to get the brakes down hard and suddenly enough to stop before we touched him. It was not a smash. It was just a push, but it pushed a big hole in our radiator, mashed up one of our lamps, and crinkled up our left mudguard. The radiator was the worst. The water poured out; our car looked as if it had burst into tears.
We were really stupefied at the extent of our disaster. The big car pulled up to investigate and console us. The occupants were Americans, too, from Washington—kindly people who wanted to shoulder some of the blame. Their chauffeur, a Frenchman, bargained with the cart driver who had wrecked us to tow us to the next town, where there were garages. Certainly pride goes before a fall. Five minutes before we were sailing along in glory, exulting over the prowess of our vehicle. Now all in the wink of an eye our precious conveyance, stricken and helpless, was being towed to the hospital, its owners trudging mournfully behind.
The village was Poix, and if one had to be wrecked anywhere, I cannot think of a lovelier spot for disaster than Poix de la Somme. It is just across in Picardy, and the Somme there is a little brook that ripples and winds through poplar-shaded pastures, sweet meadows, and deep groves. In every direction were the loveliest walks, with landscape pictures at every turn. The village itself was drowsy, kindly,simple-hearted. The landlady at our inn was a motherly soul that during the week of our stay the Joy and I learned to love.
For the others did not linger. Paris was not far away and had a good deal in the way of shopping to recommend it. The new radiator ordered from London might be delayed. So early next morning they were off for Paris by way of Amiens and Beauvais, and the Joy and I settled down to such employments and amusements as we could find, while waiting for repairs.
We got acquainted with the garageman's family, for one thing. They lived in the same little court with the shop, and we exchanged Swiss French for their Picardese, and were bosom friends in no time. We spruced up the car, too, and every day took long walks, and every afternoon took some luncheon and our little stove and followed down the Somme to a tiny bridge, and there made our tea. Then sometimes we read, and once when I was reading aloud from Mark Twain'sJoan of Arc, and had finished the great battle of Patay, we suddenly remembered that it had happened on the very day on which we were reading, the 18th of June. How little we guessed that in such a short time our peaceful little river would give its name to a battle a thousand times greater than any that Joan ever fought!
Once when we were resting by the roadside a little old lady with a basket stopped and sat with us while she told us her history—how her husband had been a great physician and invented cures that to-day are used in all the hospitals of France. Now shewas poor, she said, and lived alone in a little house, but if we would visit her she would give us some good Picardese cooking. I wish we might have gone. One day I hired a bicycle for the Joy and entertained the village by pushing her around the public square until she learned to ride alone. Then I hired one for myself and we went out on the road together. About the end of the third day we began to look for our radiator, and visited the express office with considerable regularity. Presently the village knew us, why we were there and what we were expecting. They became as anxious about it as ourselves.
One morning as we started toward the express office a man in a wagon passed and called out something. We did not catch it, but presently another met us and with a glad look told us that our goods had arrived and were now in the delivery wagon on the way to the garage. We did not recognize either of those good souls, but they were interested in our welfare. Our box was at the garage when we arrived there, and in a little more it was opened and the new radiator in place. The other repairs had been made, and once more we were complete. We decided to start next morning to join the others in Paris.
Morning comes early on the longest days of the year, and we had eaten our breakfast, had our belongings put into the car, and were ready to be off by seven o'clock. What a delicious morning it was! Calm, glistening, the dew on everything. As long as I live I shall remember that golden morning when the Joy, aged eleven, and I went gypsying together, following the winding roads and byways that led us through pleasant woods, under sparkling banks, and along the poplar-planted streams of Picardy. We did not keep to highways at all. We were in no hurry and we took any lane that seemed to lead in the right direction,so that much of the time we appeared to be crossing fields—fields of flowers, many of them, scarlet poppies, often mingled with blue cornflowers and yellow mustard—fancy the vividness of that color.
Traveling in that wandering fashion, it was noon before we got down to Beauvais, where we stopped for luncheon supplies and to see what is perhaps the most remarkable cathedral in the world. It is one of the most beautiful, and, though it consists only of choir and transepts, it is one of the largest. Its inner height, from floor to vaulting, is one hundred and fifty-eight feet. The average ten-story building could sit inside of it. There was once a steeple that towered to the giddy heights of five hundred feet, but in 1573, when it had been standing three hundred years, it fell down, from having insufficient support. The inner work is of white stone, marble, and the whole place seems filled with light. It was in this cool, heavenly sanctuary that Cauchon, who hounded Joan to the stake, officiated as bishop. I never saw a place so unsuited to a man. I should think that spire would have tumbled off then instead of waiting until he had been dead a hundred years. There is a clock in this church—a modern clock—that records everything, even the age of the world, which at the moment of our visit was 5,914 years. It is a very large affair, but we did not find it very exciting. In the public square of Beauvais there is a bronze statue of Jeanne Laine, called "Jeanne Hachette," because, armed with a hatchet, she led others of her sex against Charles the Bold in 1472 and captured a banner with her own hands.
Beauvais has many interesting things, but the day had become very warm and we did not linger. We found some of the most satisfactory pastries I have ever seen in France, fresh and dripping with richness; also a few other delicacies, and, by and by, under a cool apple tree on the road to Compiègne, the Joy and I spread out our feast and ate it and listened to some little French birds singing, "Vite! Vite! Vite!" meaning that we must be "Quick! Quick! Quick!" so they could have the crumbs.
It was at Compiègne that Joan of Arc was captured by her enemies, just a year before that last fearful day at Rouen. She had relieved Orléans, she had fought Patay, she had crowned the king at Rheims; she would have had her army safely in Paris if she had not been withheld by a weakling, influenced by his shuffling, time-serving counselors. She had delivered Compiègne the year before, but now again it was in trouble, besieged by the Duke of Burgundy. Joan had been kept in partial inactivity in the Loire district below Paris during the winter, but with the news from Compiègne she could no longer be restrained.
"I will go to my good friends of Compiègne," she said, and, taking such force as she could muster, in number about six hundred cavalry, she went to their relief.
From a green hill commanding the valley of the Oise we looked down upon the bright river and pretty city which Joan had seen on that long-ago afternoon of her final battle for France. Somewhere on that plain the battle had taken place, and Joan's little force for the first time had failed. There had beena panic; Joan, still fighting and trying to rally her men, had been surrounded, dragged from her horse, and made a prisoner. She had led her last charge.
We crossed a bridge and entered the city and stopped in the big public square facing Leroux's beautiful statue of Joan, which the later "friends of Compiègne" have raised to her memory. It is Joan in semi-armor, holding aloft her banner, and on the base in old French is inscribed "Je Yray voir mes bons amys de Compiègne" ("I will go to see my good friends of Compiègne").
Many things in Compiègne are beautiful, but not many of them are very old. Joan's statue looks toward the handsome and richly ornamented Hôtel de Ville, but Joan could not have seen it in life, for it dates a hundred years after death. There are two handsome churches, in one or both of which she doubtless worshiped when she had first delivered the city; possibly a few houses of that ancient time still survive.
We looked into the churches, but they seemed better on the outside. Then I discovered that one of our back tires was down, and we drew up in a secluded nook at the rear of St. Jacques for repairs. It was dusk by the time we had finished, the end of that long June day, and we had no time to hunt for a cozy inn. So we went to a hotel which stands opposite the great palace which the architect Gabriel built for Louis XV, and looked across to it while we ate our dinner, and talked of our day's wanderings, and of palaces in general and especially queens; also of Joan, and of the beautiful roads and fields offlowers, and of the little birds that tried to hurry us along, and so were very happy and very tired indeed.
Next morning we visited the palace. It has been much occupied by royalty, for Compiègne was always a favorite residence of the rulers of France. Napoleon came there with the Empress Marie Louise, and Louis Philippe and Napoleon III both found retirement there.
I think it could not have been a very inviting or restful home. There are long halls and picture galleries, all with shiny floors and stiffly placed properties, and the royal suites are just a series of square, prettily decorated and upholstered boxes, strung together, with doors between. One might as well set up a series of screens in a long hall. Even with the doors shut there could not have been much sense of privacy, certainly none of snugness. But then palaces were not meant to be cozy. We saw the bedrooms and dressing rooms and what not of the various queens, and we looked from an upper window down a long forest avenue that was finer than anything inside. Then we went back to the car and drove into the big forest for ten miles or more, to an old feudal castle—such a magnificent old castle, all towers and turrets and battlements—the château of Pierrefonds, one of the finest in France.
It stands upon a rocky height overlooking a lake, and it does not seem so old, though it had been there forty years when Joan of Arc came, and it looks as if it might be there about as long as the hill it stands on. It was built by Louis of Orléans, brother of Charles VI, and the storm of battle has raged often about its base. Here and there it still shows the markof bombardment, and two cannon balls stick fast in the wall of one of its solid towers. Pierrefonds was in bad repair, had become well-nigh a ruin, in fact, when Napoleon III, at his own expense, engaged Viollet le Duc to restore it, in order that France might have a perfect type of the feudal castle in its original form. It stands to-day as complete in its structure and decoration as it was when Louis of Orléans moved in, more than five hundred years ago, and it conveys exactly the solid home surroundings of the mediæval lord. It is just a show place now, and its vast court, its chapel and its halls of state are all splendid enough, though nothing inside can be quite so magnificent as its mighty assemblage of towers and turrets rising above the trees and reflecting in the blue waters of a placid lake.
It began raining before we got to Paris, so we did not stop at Crépy-en-Valois, or Senlis, or Chantilly, or St. Denis, though all that land has been famous for kings and castles and bloodshed from a time farther back than the days of Cæsar. We were interested in all those things, but we agreed we could not see everything. Some things we saw as we went by; great gray walls and crumbling church towers, and then we were at the gates of Paris and presently threading our way through a tangle of streets, barred, many of them, because the top of the subway had been tumbling in a few days before and travel was dangerous. It was Sunday, too, and the streets were especially full of automobiles and pedestrians. It was almost impossible to keep from injuring something. I do not care for Paris, not from the driving seat of a car.
In fact, neither the Joy nor I hungered for any more Paris, while the others had seen their fill. So we were off, with only a day's delay, this time taking the road to Versailles. There we put in an hour or two wandering through the vast magnificence of the palace where the great Louis XIV lived, loved, and died, and would seem to have spent a good part of his time having himself painted in a variety of advantageous situations, such as riding at the head of victorious armies, or occupying a comfortable seat in Paradise, giving orders to the gods.
They were weak kings who followed him. The great Louis reigned seventy-two years—prodigal years, but a period of military and artistic conquest—the golden age of French literature. His successor reigned long enough—fifty-nine years—but he achieved nothing worth while, and the next one lost his head. We saw the little balcony where the doomed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette showed themselves to the mob—the "deluge" which the greater Louis had once predicted.
The palace at Versailles is like other royal palaces of France—a fine show place, an excellent museum, but never in its day of purest domesticity could it have been called "a happy little home." Everythingis on too extended a scale. Its garden was a tract of marshy land sixty miles in circumference until Louis XIV set thirty-six thousand men at it, turning it into fairyland. Laborers died by the score during the work, and each night the dead were carted away. When this was mentioned to the king he was troubled, fearing his supply of men might not last. However, the garden was somehow completed. Possibly Louis went out and dug in it a little himself.
It is still a Garden of Eden, with leafy avenues, and lakes, and marvelous fountains, and labyrinths of flowers. Looking out over it from the palace windows we remembered how the king had given Madame Maintenon a summer sleigh-ride, causing long avenues to be spread with sugar and salt to gratify her idly-expressed whim. I am sorry, of course, that the later Louis had to lose his head, but on the whole I think it is very well that France discouraged that line of kings.
Versailles is full of palaces. There is the Grand Trianon, which Louis XIV built for Madame Maintenon when she had grown weary of the great palace, and the Petit Trianon, which Louis XV gave to Du Barry and where Marie Antoinette built her Swiss village and played at farm life. There is no reason I should dwell on these places. Already volumes have been written of the tragic, gay, dissolute life they have seen, the gorgeous moving panoramas that might have been pictures passing in a looking-glass for all the substance they have left behind.
Somewhere below Versailles, in the quietest spot we could find, by a still stream that ran between themeadow and the highroad, we made our luncheon and were glad we were not kings. Being royalty was a gaudy occupation, but too doubtful, too open to criticism. One of those Louis families, for instance, could never have stopped their motor by the roadside and prepared their luncheon in our modest, unostentatious way. They would have had all manner of attendants and guards watching them, and an audience would have collected, and some excited person might have thrown a brick and hit the jam. No, we would rather be just plain, unobtrusive people, without audience, and with no attendance but the car, waiting there in the shade to carry us deeper into this Land of Heart's Desire.
It was at Rambouillet that we lodged, an ancient place with a château and a vast park; also an excellent inn—the Croix Blanche—one of those that you enter by driving through to an inner court. Before dinner we took a walk into the park, along the lakeside and past the château, which is a curious architectural mixture and not very sightly. But it is mingled with history. Francis I died there in 1547, and as late as 1830 the last Charles, the tenth of that name, signed his abdication there.
It was too late for the place to be open, and in any case we did not care to go in. We had had enough of palaces for one day. We followed around the lake to an avenue of splendid Louisiana cypresses which some old king had planted. Beyond the avenue the way led into deeper wildernesses—a noble wood. We made a backward circuit at length, for it was evening and the light was fading. In the mysterioushalf-light there was something almost spectral in that sylvan place and we spoke in hushed voices. Presently we came to a sort of bower, and then to an artificial grotto—old trysting places. Ah, me! Monsieur and mademoiselle, or madame, are no longer there; the powdered hair, the ruffled waist-coat and looped gown, the silken hose and dainty footgear, the subdued laugh and whispered word, all have vanished. How vacant those old places seemed! We did not linger—it was a time for ghosts.
We were off next morning, halting for a little at Maintenon on the road to Chartres. The château attracted us and the beautiful river Eure. The widow of the poet Scarron, who married Louis XIV and became Marquise de Maintenon, owned the château, and it belongs to the family to this day. An attendant permitted us to see the picture gallery and a portion of the grounds. All seemed as luxurious as Versailles. It is thirty-five miles from Maintenon to Versailles, but Louis started to build an aqueduct to carry the waters of the Eure to his gardens. He kept thirty thousand soldiers working on it for four years, but they died faster than he could replace them, which was such a bother that he abandoned the undertaking.
Following the rich and lovely valley of the Eure, we came to Chartres, and made our way to the Cathedral square. We had seen the towers from a long distance, and remembered the saying that "The choir of Beauvais, the nave of Amiens, the portal of Rheims, and the towers of Chartres would together make the finest church in the world." Toconfess the truth, I did not think the towers of Chartres as handsome as those of either Rouen or Amiens. But then I am not a purist in cathedral architecture. Certainly the cathedral itself is glorious. I shall not attempt to describe it. Any number of men have written books, trying to do that, and most of them have failed. I only know that the wonder of its architecture—the marvel of its relief carving, "lace in stone," and the sublime glory of its windows—somehow possessed us, and we did not know when to go. I met a woman once who said she had spent a month at Chartres and had put in most of it sitting in the cathedral looking at those windows. When she told me of it I had been inclined to be scornful. I was not so any more. Those windows, made by some unknown artist, dead five hundred years, invite a lifetime of contemplation.
It is about nine hundred years since the cathedral of Chartres was begun, and it has known many changes. Four hundred years ago one of its towers was rebuilt in an altogether different pattern from the other. I believe this variation is regarded as a special feature of their combined beauty. Chapels have been added, wings extended; changes inside and out were always going on during the first five hundred years or so, but if the builders made any mistakes we failed to notice them. It remains a unity, so far as we could see—a supreme expression of the old faith, whose material labor was more than half spiritual, and for whom no sacrifice of money or endeavor was too great.
We left Chartres by one of the old city gates, andtook the wrong road, and presently found ourselves in an open field, where our way dwindled out and stopped. Imagine a road good enough to be mistaken for a highway, leading only to a farmer's grainfield. So we went back and got set right, and through a heavenly June afternoon followed the straight level way to Châteaudun, an ancient town perched upon the high cliffs above the valley of the Loir, which is a different river from the Loire—much smaller and more picturesque.
The château itself hangs on the very edge of the cliffs with startling effect and looks out over a picture valley as beautiful as any in France. This was the home of Dunois, Bastard of Orléans, who left it to fight under Joan of Arc. He was a great soldier, one of her most loved and trusted generals. We spent an hour or more wandering through Dunois's ancient seat, with an old guardian who clearly was in love with every stone of it, and who time and again reminded us that it was more interesting than many of the great châteaux of the Loire, Blois especially, in that it had been scarcely restored at all. About the latest addition to Châteaudun was a beautiful open stairway of the sixteenth century, in perfect condition to-day. On the other side is another fine façade and stairway, which Dunois himself added. In a niche there stands a fine statue of the famous soldier, probably made from life. If only some sculptor or painter might have preserved for us the features of Joan!