Mistral describes it of course:

"On a great branding-day came this throng, A help for the mighty herd-mustering, Li Santo, Aigo Marto, Albaron, And from Faraman, a hundred horses strong Came out into the desert."

Here we were in the midst of the land of fetes, and if we could not see a ferrande in all its savage, unspoiled glory, we would see what we could.

We were in luck, as we learned when we put into St. Gilles for the night, and comfortably enough housed our auto in the remise of the company, or individual, which has the concession for the stage line across the Camargue, which links up the two loose ends of a toy railway, one of which ends at Aigues-Mortes, and the other at Stes. Maries-de-la-Mer.

Our particular piece of luck was the opportunity to be present at the pilgrimage to the shrine of the three Marys of Judea, which took place on the morrow.

The poet Mistral sets it all out in romantic verse in his epic "Mireio," and one and all were indeed glad to embrace so fortunate an opportunity of participating in one of the most nearly unique pilgrimages and festivals in all the world.

We entered the little waterside town the next morning soon after sunrise, en auto. Others came by rail, on foot, on horseback, or by the slow-going roulotte, or caravan; pilgrims from all corners of the earth, the peasant folk of Provence, the Arlesiens and Arlesiennes, and the dwellers of the great Camargue plain.

The picture is quite as "Mireio" saw it in the poem: the vision of the lone sentinel church by the sea, which rises above the dunes of the Camargue to-day, as it did in the olden time.

"'It looms at last in the distance dim, She sees it grow on the horizon's rim, The Saintes' white tower across the billowy plain, Like vessel homeward bound upon the main."

On the dunes of the Camargue, between the blue of the sky and the blue of the Mediterranean waves, sits the gaunt, grim bourg of fisherfolk and herders of the cattle and sheep of the neighbouring plain. The lone fortress-church rises tall and severe in its outlines, and the whole may be likened to nothing as much as a desert mirage that one sees in his imagination.

At the foot of the crenelated, battlemented walls of the church are the white, pink, and blue walled houses of the huddling population, and the dory-like boats of the fishers.

Officially the town is known as Stes. Maries-de-la-Mer, but the reliques of the three Marys, who fled from Judea in company with Sts. Lazare, Maxim, and Trophime, and other followers, including their servant Sara, have given it the popular name of "Les Saintes."

The exiles, barely escaping death by drowning, came to shore here, and, thankful for being saved from death, thereupon celebrated the first mass to be said in France, the saints Maxim and Lazare officiating.

Maxim, Lazare, Sidoine, Marthe, and Madeleine immediately set out to spread the Word throughout Provence in the true missionary spirit, but the others, the three Marys, St. Trophime, and Sara, remained behind to do what good they might among the fishers.

The pilgrimage to this basilique of "Les Saintes" has ever been one of great devotion. In 1347 the Bishops of Paris and of Coutances, in Normandy, accorded their communicants many and varied indulgences for having made "la feste S. Mari Cleophee qui est le XXVe Mai, et la feste S. Marie Salome, XXIIe Octobre, festeront, O l'histoire d'elles prescherent, liront ou escouteront attentilment et devotement."

In the fourteenth century three thousand or more souls drew a livelihood from the industries of "Les Saintes" and the neighbourhood, and its civic affairs were administered by three consuls, who were assisted in their duties by three classes of citizen office-holders—divities, mediocres, and paupers, the latter doubtless the "povres gens" mentioned in the testament of Louis I. of Provence, he who bequeathed the guardianship of his soul to "Saintes Maries Jacobe et Salome, Catherine, Madeleine et Marthe."

The first day's celebration was devoted to the further gathering of the throng and the "Grand Mess." At the first note of the "Magnificat" the reliques were brought forth from the upper chapel and the crowd from within and without broke into a thunderous "Vivent les Saintes Maries!" Then was sung the "Cantique des Saintes:"

"O grandes Saintes Maries Si cheries De notre divin Sauveur," etc.

On the second day a procession formed outside the church for the descent to the historic sands, upon which the holy exiles first made their landing, the men bearing on their shoulders a representation of the barque which brought the saints thither. There were prelates and plebeians and tourists and vagabond gipsies in line, and one and all they entered into the ceremony with an enthusiasm—in spite of the sweltering sun—which made up for any apparent lack of devoutness, for, alas! most holy pilgrimages are anything but holy when taken in their entirety.

The church at "Les Saintes" is a wonder-work. As at Assisi, in Italy, there are three superimposed churches, a symbol of the three states of religion; the crypt, called the catacombs, and suggestive of persecution; the fortified nave, a symbol of the body which prays, but is not afraid to fight; and the chapelle superieure, the holy place of the saints of heaven, the Christian counsellors in whose care man has been confided. This, at any rate, is the professional description of the symbolism, and whether one be churchman or not he is bound to see the logic of it all.

Deep down in the darkened crypt are the reliques of the dusky Sara, the servant of the holy Marys. She herself has been elevated to sainthood as the patronne of the vagabond gipsies of all the world. On the occasion of the Fete of Les Saintes Maries the nomads, Bohemians, and Gitanos from all corners of the globe, who have been able to make the pilgrimage thither, pass the night before the shrine of their sainted patronne, as a preliminary act to the election of their queen for the coming year.

The gipsy of tradition is supposed to be a miserly, wealthy, sacrilegious fellow who goes about stealing children and dogs and anything else he can lay his hands upon. He may have his faults, but to see him kneeling before the shrine of his "patronne reine Sara," ragged and travel-worn and yet burning costly candles and saying his Aves as piously and incessantly as a praying-machine of the East, one can hardly question but that they have as much devoutness as most others.

The hotels of "Les Saintes" offer practically nothing in the way of accommodation, and what there is, which costs usually thirty sous a night, has, during the fete, an inflated value of thirty or even fifty francs, and, if you are an automobilist, driving the most decrepit out-of-date old crock that ever was, they will want to charge you a hundred. You will, of course, refuse to pay it, for you can eat up the roadway at almost any speed you like,—there is no one to say you nay on these lonesome roads,—and so, after paying fifty centimes a pailful for some rather muddy water to refresh the water circulation of your automobile, you pull out for some other place—at least we did. One must either do this, or become a real nomad and sleep in the open, with the stars for candles, and a bunch of beach-grass for a pillow. If you were a Romany cheil you would sleep in, or under, your own roulotte, on a mattress, which, in the daytime, is neatly folded away in the rear of your wagon, or hung in full view, temptingly spread with a lace coverlet. This in the hope that some passing pilgrim will take a fancy to the lace spread and want to buy it; when will come a trading and bargaining which will put horse-selling quite in the shade, for it is here that the woman of the establishment comes in, and the gipsy woman on a trade is a Tartar.

Finally, on the last day, came the "Grande Entree des Tauraux," which, it would seem, was the chief event which drew the Camargue population thither. They came in couples, a man and a woman on the back of a single Camargue pony, whole families in a Provencal cart, on foot, on bicycles, and in automobiles.



Six Spanish-crossed bulls, were brought up in a great closed van and loosed in an improvised bull-ring, of which the church wall formed one side, and the roof a sort of a tribune. What the cure thought of all this is not clear, but as the alms-coffers of the church were already full to the lids, and the parish depends largely upon the contributions of visitors to replenish its funds, any seeming sacrilege was winked at.

For three days we had "made the fete" and saw it all, and did most of the things that the others did, except that we always slept at St. Gilles, far away by the long flat road which winds in and out among the marshes, flamingo nests, and rice-fields of the Camargue.

The "bull-fight," so called, was nothing so very bloodthirsty or terrifying; merely the worrying by the "amateurs" of a short-legged, little black bull, about the size of a well-formed Newfoundland dog, or perhaps a little larger—appearances are often deceptive when one receives a disappointment.

Truly, as Mistral says, Provence is a land of joy and, laughter, and fetes followed close on one another, it seemed.

We had seen the announcements in the local journals of a "Mis a Mort" at Nimes, and a "Corrida de Meurte"—borrowing the phrase from the Spanish—at Arles, each to take place in the great Roman arenas, which had not seen bloodshed for centuries; not since the days when the Romans matched men against each other in gladiatorial combat, and turned tigers loose upon captive slaves.

The "to-the-death" affairs of Arles and Nimes appealed to us only that we might contrast the modern throngs that crowd the benches with those which history tells us viewed the combats of old. Doubtless there is little resemblance, but all the same there is a certain gory tradition hanging about the old walls and arches of those great arenas which is utterly lacking in the cricket-field, tawdry plazas of some of the Spanish towns. The grim arcades of these great Roman arenas are still full of suggestion.

We did not see either the "Mis a Mort" at Arles, or the "Corrida de Meurte" at Nimes; the automobile got stalled for a day in the midst of the stony Crau, with a rear tire which blew itself into pieces, and necessitated a journey by train into Arles in order to get another to replace it. Owing to the slowness of this apology for a railway train, and the awkwardness of the timetable, the great "Mis a Mort" at Arles was long over ere we had set out over the moonlit Crau for Martigues on the shores of the Etang de Berre.



We knew Martigues of old, its bouillabaisse, the Pere Chabas and all the cronies of the Cafe du Commerce where you kept your own special bottle, of whatever aperitif poison you fancied, in order that you might be sure of getting it unadulterated.

"La Venise de Provence," Martigues, is known by artists far and wide. Chabas and his rather grimy little hotel, which he calls the Grand Hotel something or other, has catered for countless hundreds of artist folk who have made the name and fame of Martigues as an artist's sketching-ground. After a three weeks' pretty steady automobile run the artist of the party craved peace and rest and an opportunity of putting Martigues's glorious sunsets on canvas, and so we camped out with Chabas, and ate bouillabaisse and the beurre de Provence and langouste and Chabas's famous straw potatoes and rum omelette for ten days, and were sorry when it was all over.

Chapter IV By Rhone And Saone



It is the dream of the Marseillais that some day the turgid Rhone may be made to empty itself at the foot of the famous Cannebiere, and so add to the already great prosperity of the most cosmopolitan and picturesque of Mediterranean ports.

The idea has been thought of since Roman times, and Napoleon himself nearly undertook the work. In later days radical and vehement candidates for senatorships and deputyships have promised their Marseilles and Bouches-du-Rhone constituencies much more, with regard to the same thing, than the hand of man is ever likely to be able to accomplish.

The Rhone still pushes its way through the Crau and the Camargue and comes to the sea many kilometres west of the Planier light and Chateau d'If, which guard the entrance to Marseilles's Old Port.

We had backed and filled many times between Martigues and Marseilles during the interval which we so enjoyably spent chez Chabas, and we had come to know this unknown little corner of old Provence intimately, and to love it.

Marseilles was our great dissipation, its hotels, its cafes and restaurants, its cosmopolitan life and movement, its gaiety and the picturesqueness of its old streets and wharves. Marseilles is a neglected tourist point; it should be better known; but it is no place for automobilists, unless they are prepared for ten kilometres, in any direction, of the most villainous suburban roadway in France. The roadways themselves are good enough; it is the abnormal and the peculiar nature of the traffic that makes them so disagreeable; great hooting tramways, charettes loaded with all the products of the earth and the hands of man, and drawn by long tandem lines, three, four, five, and even six horses to a single cart. Added to this, the exits and entrances are all up and down hill, and, accordingly, the roadways of suburban Marseilles are a terror to stranger automobilists and an eternal regret to those who live near-by.

We went up the Rhone in a howling mistral, against it, mark you, for it pleases the Ruler of the universe to have that cyclonic breeze of the Rhone valley, one of the three plagues of Provence, blow always from the north.

We left Martigues in an extraordinary and unusual fog, reminiscent of London, except that it was not black and sooty. It was dense, however; dense as if it were enshrouding the Grand Banks, and of the same impenetrable, milky consistency. To be sure the morning sun had not had an opportunity as yet to burn it off—automobilists on tour are early birds, and the autumn sun rises late.

Up around the eastern shore of the Etang de Berre we went, and, crossing the Tete Noire, passed Salon just as a pale yellow light struggled through the rifts just topping the Maritime Alps off to the eastward. We could not see the mountains, but we knew they were there, for we still had lingering memories of a long pull we once made off in that direction, with an old crock of an automobile of primitive make in the early days of the sport, or the art, whichever one chooses to call it, though it unquestionably was an art then to keep an automobile going at all.

By the time Arles was reached the sun was burning with a midsummer glare, as it does here for three hundred or more days in the year.

At Arles one is in the very cauldron of the atmosphere of things Provencal, art, letters, history, and romance, all of which are kept alive by the Felibres and their fellows.

Mistral, the poet, is the master-singer of them all, and whether he chants of his "Own glad Kingdom of Provence," at Maillane among the olive-trees, far inland, or of:

"The peace which descends upon the troubled ocean And he his wrath forgets, Flock from Martigues the boats with wing-like motion, And fishes fill their nets,"

it is all the same; the subtle, penetrating atmosphere and sentiment of Provence is over all.

Arles is the head centre. It is a city of monumental and celebrated art, and one may spend a day, a week, or a month, wandering in and out and about its old Roman arena (still so well preserved that it presents its occasional bull-fight for the delectation of the bloodthirsty), its antique theatre, its museums, its cathedral and its cloister, or among the tombs of the Aliscamps.

We did all these things, indeed we had done them before, but they were ever marvellous just the same, and in the museum we were always running on Mistral himself, who, in his waning years, finds his greatest delight in arranging and rearranging the exhibits of his newly founded Musee Arletan.

The hotels of Arles are a disappointment. The Hotel du Nord, with a portico of the old Forum built into its walls, and the Hotel du Forum, on the Place du Forum, are well enough in their way,—they are certainly well conducted,—but they lack "atmosphere," and instead of the cuisine du pays, you get ham and eggs and bifteck served to you. This is wrong and bad business, if the otherwise capable proprietors only knew it.

One does better in the environs. At St. Remy, at the Grand Hotel de Provence, you will get quite another sort of fare: hors d'oeuvres of a peculiarly pungent variety, not forgetting the dark purple, over-ripe olives, a ragout en casserole, a filet d'agneau with a sauce Provencale, and a poulet and a salad which will make one dream of the all but lost art of Brillat-Savarin. They are good cooks, the chefs of Provence, of the small cities and large towns like St. Remy, Cavaillon, Salon, and Carpentras, but everybody will not like their liberal douches of oil any more than they will the penetrating garlic flavour in everything.

We took a turn backward on our route from Arles and went to Les Baux, the now dismal ruin of a once proud feudal city whose seigneurs held sway over some sixty cities of Provence.

To-day it is a Pompeii, except it is a hill town worthy to rank with those picturesque peaks of Italy and Dalmatia. Its chateau walls have crumbled, but its subterranean galleries, cut three stories down into the rock itself, are much as they always were. Everywhere are grim, doleful evidences of a glory that is past and a population that is dead or moved away. The sixteen thousand souls of mediaeval times have shrunk to something like two hundred to-day—most of them shepherds, apparently, and the others picture post-card sellers.

It is a very satisfactory little mountain climb from the surrounding plain up to the little plateau just below the peak at Les Baux, though the entire distance from Arles is scarcely more than fifteen kilometres, and the actual climb hardly more than four. The razor-back mountain chain, upon one peak of which Les Baux sits, is known as the Alpilles.

All of the immediate neighbourhood (scarce a dozen kilometres from where the beaten track passes through Arles) is a veritable museum of relics of the glory of the heroic age. Caius Marius entrenched himself within these walls of rock and two thousand years ago planted the foundations of the Mausoleum and Arc de Triomphe which are the pride of the inhabitant of St. Remy and the marvel of what few strangers ever come. They are veritable antiques—"Les Antiquites," as the people of St. Remy familiarly call them, and rise to-day as monuments of the past, gilded by the Southern sun and framed with all the brilliancy of a Provencal landscape.

We slept at St. Remy, and made the next morning for Tarascon, with memories of Dumas and Daudet and Tartarin and the Tarasque pushing us on.

Tarascon has a real appeal for the stranger; at every step he will picture the locale of Daudet's whimsical tale, and will well understand how it was that the prisoners' view from the narrow-barred window of the Chateau at Tarascon was so limited.

There is a fine group of Renaissance architectural monuments at Tarascon, and a street of arcaded house-fronts which will make the artist of the party want to settle down to work.

Across the river is Beaucaire, famous for its great fair of ages past, the greatest trading fair of mediaeval times, when merchants and their goods came from Persia, India, and Turkey, and all corners of the earth. The Chateau of Beaucaire is a fine ruin, but no more; it is not worth the climbing of the height to examine it.

A little farther on is Bellegarde, where Dumas placed Caderousse's little inn, the unworthy Caderousse and his still more unworthy wife, who finished the career of Edmond Dantes while he was masquerading as the Abbe. There is no inn here to-day which can be identified as that of the romance, but Dumas's description of its sun-burnt surroundings, the canal, the scanty herbage, and the white, parched roadway, is much the same as what one sees today, and there is a tiny auberge beside the canal, which might satisfy the imaginative.

Avignon, the city of the seven French popes, who reigned seventy years, was the next stopping-place on our itinerary.

We put up at the Hotel Crillon and fared much as one fares in any provincial large town. We were served with imitation Parisian repasts, and were asked if we would like to read the London Times. Why the London Times no one knew: why not the New Orleans Picayune and be done with it?

We did not want to do anything of the sort, we merely wanted to "do" the town, to see the tomb of Pope Jean XXII. in the cathedral, to walk, if possible, upon the part left standing of St. Benezet's old Pont d'Avignon, a memory which was burned into our minds since our schooldays, when we played and sang the French version of "London Bridge is falling down"—"Sur le pont d'Avignon."

The greatest monument of all is the magnificent Palais des Papes, its crenelated walls and battlements vying with the city walls and ramparts as a splendid example of mediaeval architecture. We saw all these things and the museum with its excellent collections, and the library of thirty thousand volumes and four thousand manuscripts.

One thing we nearly missed was Villeneuve-les-Avignon, a ruined wall-circled town on the opposite bank of the Rhone. Its machicolated crests glistened in the brilliant Southern sunlight like an exotic of the Saharan country. It is quite the most foreign and African-looking jumble of architectural forms to be seen in France. It took us three hours to cross the river and stroll about its debris-encumbered streets and get back again and start on our way northward, but it was worth the time and trouble.

From St. Remy to Orange, perhaps sixty kilometres, was not a long daily run by any means, and we would not have stopped at Orange for the night except that it was imperative that we should see the fine antique theatre, the most magnificent, the largest, and the best preserved of all existing Roman theatres.

We saw it, and seeing it wondered, though, when one tries to project the mind back into the past and picture the scenes which once went on upon its boards, the task were seemingly impossible.



The Roman Arc de Triomphe, too, at Orange, which spans the roadway to the North—the same great natural road which all its length froth Paris to Antibes is known as the Route d'Italie—is a monument more splendid, as to its preservation, than anything of the kind outside Italy itself.

There is ample and excellent accommodation for the automobilist at Orange, at the Hotel des Princes, which sounds good and is good. They have even a writing-room in the hotel, a silly, stuffy little room which no one with any sense ever enters. One simply follows a well-fed commis-voyageur to the nearest popular cafe and writes his letters there, as a well-habituated traveller should do.

Once on the road again we passed Montelimar—"le pays du nougat et de M. l'ex-President Loubet," we were told by the octroi official who held us up at the barrier of this self-sufficient, dead-and-alive, pompous little town. We didn't know M. Loubet and we didn't like nougat, so we did not stop, but pushed on for Tournon. There, at the little Hotel de la Poste, beneath the donjon tower of the old chateau, we ate the most marvellously concocted dejeuner we had struck for a long time. There's no use describing it; it won't be the same the next time; though no doubt it will be as excellent. It cost but two francs fifty centimes, including vin du St. Peray, the rich red wine of the Rhone, a rival to the wines of Burgundy.

We might have done a good deal worse had we stopped at progressive, up-to-date Valence, where automobile tourists usually do stop, but we took the offering of the small town instead of the large one, and found it, as usual, very good.

We had passed La Voute-sur-Rhone, that classic height which has been pictured many times in old books of travel. It, and Tournon, and Valence, and Viviers, and Pont St. Esprit were once riverside stations for the coches d'eau which did a sort of omnibus service with passengers on the Rhone, between Lyons and Avignon. There is a steamboat service to-day which also carries passengers, but it is not to be recommended if one has the means of getting about by road.

This town, too, and Valence, were directly on the route of the malle-poste from Lyons to Marseilles. The different postes or relays were marked on the maps of the day by little twisted hunting-horns. For the most part an old-time route map of the great trunk lines of the malle-poste and the messageries would, serve the automobilist of to-day equally as well as a modern road map.

The malle-poste, and the hiring out of post-horses, in France was an institution more highly developed than elsewhere.

Post-horses were only delivered one in France upon the presentation of a passport and payment, in advance, according to the following tariff. The price was fixed by law, being the same throughout all France.

1 Poste (about 15 miles) 1 franc 50 centimes 1/2 " 75 " 1/4 " 38 "

The postilion usually got one franc fifty per poste, but could only demand seventy-five centimes.

Certain carriages (chaises and cabriolets) would carry only portmanteaux (vaches), but voitures fermees, caleches, and the like might carry also a trunk (malle).

As one goes north, sunburnt Provence, its olive groves and its oil and garlic-seasoned viands are left behind, until little by little one draws upon the Burgundian opulence of the Cote d'Or, a land where the native's manner of eating and drinking makes a full life and a merry one.

We were not there yet; we had many kilometres yet to go, always by the banks of the Rhone until Lyons was reached.

Near Givors, at eight o'clock at night, within twenty kilometres of Lyons, the motor gave a weak asthmatic gasp, and stopped short. Like the foolish virgins, we had no oil in our lamps, and dusk had already fallen, and no amount of coaxing after the habitual manner would induce the thing to move a yard.

There was nothing for it but to get out the tow-ropes and wait—for a remorqueur, as the French call any four-footed beast strong enough to tow an automobile at the end of a line. (They also call a tug-boat the same thing, but as an automobile is not an amphibious animal it was a land remorqueur that we awaited.)

We did not get to Lyons that night. There are always uncalled for "possibilities" rising up in automobiling that will upset the best thought-out schedule. This was one of them.

What had happened to the machine no one yet really knows, but we had to be ignominiously towed, to the great amusement of the natives, at the end of a long rope by the power of a diminutive donkey which finally came along. The beast did not look as though he could draw a perambulator, but he buckled down to it with a will, and brought us safely through the half-kilometre or so of crooked streets which led to the centre of Givors.

Finally, we, or the car rather, was pushed into an old wash-house, once a part of an ancient chateau, the remise of the hotel itself, a dependance of the chateau of other days, having been preempted by an itinerant magic-lantern exhibittion ("La Cinemetographe Americaine," it was called on the bills), which proposed to show the good people of Givors—"for one night only, and at ten sous each"—moving pictures of Coney Island, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, Niagara Falls, New York's "Flat Iron" building, and other exotics from the New World.

We dined and slept well at Givors in spite of our accident, and were "up bright and early," as Pepys might have said (Londoners to-day do not get up bright and early, however!), to find out, if possible, what was the matter with the digestive apparatus of the automobile. Nothing was the matter! The human, obstinate thing started off at the first trial, and probably would have done the same thing last night had we given the starting-crank one more turn. Such is automobiling!

We made our entrance into Lyons en pleine vitesse, stopping not until we got to the centre of the city. The octroi regulations had just been revised, and the gates were open to passing traffic without the obligation of having to declare one's possessions. Progressive Lyons!

Lyons is truly progressive. It is beautifully laid out and kept. It is nothing like as filthy as a large city usually is, on the outskirts, and its island faubourg, between the Saone and the Rhone, is the ideal of a well-organized and planned centre of affairs.

Lyons has, moreover, two up-to-date hotels, the very latest things, one might say, in the hotel line: the Terminus Hotel, which well serves travelers by rail, and the Hotel de l'Univers et de l'Automobilisme—rather a clumsy name, but that of a good, well-meaning hotel. Its progressiveness consists in having abolished the pourboire. You have ten per cent. added on to your bill, however. This looks large when it comes to figures,—paying something for nothing,—but at least one knows where he stands, and he fears no black looks from chambermaid or boots. The thing is announced, by a little placard placed in every room, as an "innovation." It remains to be seen if it will prove successful.

From Lyons to Dijon, 197 kilometres between breakfast and lunch, was not bad. Now, at last, we were in that opulent land of good living and good drinking, where the food and wine are alike both rich.

He's a contented, fat, sleek-looking type, the native son of the Cote d'Or, and he looks with contempt on the cider-nourished Norman and Breton, and does not for a moment think that cognac is to be compared with the eau de vie de marc of his own vineyards.

The Cote d'Or is the richest wine-growing region of all the world. Every direction-post and sign-board is like a review of the names on a wine card,—Beaune, Chambertin, St. Georges, Clos Vougeot,—and of these the Clos Vougeot wines are the most renowned.

A line drawn across France, just north of the confines of ancient Burgundy, divides the region of the vins ordinaires—the light wines of the tables d'hote—and that of those vintages which have no price. This, at least, is the way the native puts it, and to some extent the simile is correct enough.

The Cote begins and the plain ends; the hillsides rise and the river-bottoms dwindle away in the distance: such is the feeling that one experiences as he climbs these vine-clad slopes from either the Rhone, the Loire, or the Seine valleys, and here it is that the imaginary line is drawn between the vins ordinaires and the vins sans prix.

Since there is no possibility of increasing the quantity of these rich, red Burgundian wines, the highly cultured area being of but small extent, and because their quality depends upon the peculiar nature of the soil of this restricted tract, there is no question but that the monopoly of Burgundian wines will remain for ever with the gold coast of France, whatever Australian and Californian patriots may claim for their own imitations.

The phylloxera here, as elsewhere in France, caused a setback to the commerce in wines, as serious in money figures as the losses sustained during the Franco-Prussian War, but the time has now passed and the famous Cote d'Or has once more attained its time-honoured opulence and prosperity.

"Le vin de Bourgogne Met la bonne humeur Au coeur."

Still northward, across the plateau of Langres, we set a roundabout course for Paris. There is one great pleasure about automobiling that is considerably curtailed if one sets out to follow precisely a preconceived itinerary, and for that reason we were, in a measure, going where fancy willed.

We might have turned westward, via Moulins, Nevers, and Montargis, from Lyons, and followed the old coaching road into Paris, entering by the same gateway through which we set out, but we had heard of the charms of the valley of the Marne, and we wanted to see them for ourselves.

Our first acquaintance with it was at Bar le Duc, which is not on the Marne at all, but on a little confluent some twenty or thirty miles from its junction.

For a day we had been riding over corkscrew roads with little peace and comfort for the driver, and considerable hard work for the motor. The hills were numerous, but the surface was good and the scenery delightful, so, since most of us require variety as a component of our daily lives, we were getting what we wanted and no one complained.

It was easy going by Chateau Thierry and the episcopal city of Meaux, retracing almost the itinerary of the fleeing Louis XVI., and, as we entered Paris by the Porte de Vincennes,—always by villainous roadways, this getting in and out of Paris,—we red-inked another twelve hundred kilometre stretch of roadway on our record map of France.

Chapter V By Seine And Oise—A Cruise In A Canot-Automobile



If automobiling on land in France is a pleasure, a voyage up a picturesque and historic French river in a canot-automobile is a dream, so at least we thought, four of us—and a boy to clean the engine, run errands, and to climb overboard and push us off when we got stuck in the mud.

Our "home port" was Les Andelys on the Seine, and we meet in the courtyard of the Hotel Bellevue at five o'clock one misty, gray September morning for a fortnight's voyage up the Oise, which joins the Seine midway between Les Andelys and Paris.

There is nothing mysterious about an automobile boat any more than there is about the land automobile. It has its moods and vagaries, its good points and some bad ones. It is not as speedy as an automobile on shore, but it is more comfortable, a great deal more fun to steer, and less dangerous, and there is an utter absence of those chief causes of trouble to the automobile, punctures and what not happening to your tires. Then again there is, generally speaking, no crowd of traffic to run you into danger, and there is an absence of dust, to make up for which, when you are lying by waiting to go through a lock, you have mosquitoes of a fierce bloodthirsty kind which even the smoke from the vile tobacco of French cigarettes will not keep at a distance.

Our facile little automobile boat was called the "Ca et La." Rightly enough named it was, too. The French give singularly pert and appropriate names to their boats. "Va t'on," "Quand meme," and "Ca et La" certainly tell the stories of their missions in their very names.

The boat itself, and its motor, too, was purely a French production, and, though of modest force and dimensions, would do its dozen miles an hour all day long.

We got away from the landing-stage of the Touring Club de France at Les Andelys in good time, our provisions, our gasoline and oil, our river charts, our wraps and ourselves all stowed comfortably away in the eight metres of length of our little boat. Our siren gave a hoot which startled the rooks circling about the donjon walls of Chateau Gaillard over our heads, and we passed under the brick arches of the bridge for a twelve-mile run to the first lock at Courcelles.

The process of going through a river lock in France is not far different from the same process elsewhere, except that the all-powerful Touring Club de France has secured precedence for all pleasure boats over any other waiting craft. It really costs nothing, but you give a franc to the eclusier, and the way is thereby made the easier for the next arrival. The objection to river-locks is their frequency in some parts. There is one stretch of thirty or forty kilometres on the Marne with thirty-three locks. That costs something, truly.

We knew the Seine valley intimately, by road along both its banks, at any rate, and we were hopeful of reaching Triel that night, near the junction of the Seine and Oise.

We passed our first lock at Courcelles, just before seven o'clock, and had a good stretch of straight water ahead of us before Vernon was reached.

You cannot miss your way, of course, when travelling by river, but you can be at a considerable loss to know how far you have come since your last stopping-place, or rather you would be if the French government had not placed little white kilometre stones all along the banks of the "navigable" and "flottable" rivers, as they have along the great national roads on land. Blessed be the paternal French government; the traveller in la belle France has much for which to be grateful to it: its excellent roadways, its sign-boards, and its kilometre stones most of all. The motor-boat is highly developed in France from the simple fact that you can tour on it. You can go all over France by a magnificent system of inland waterways; from the Seine to the Marne; from the Oise to the Sambre—and so to Antwerp and Ghent; from the Loire to the Rhone; and even from the Marne to the Rhine; and from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. France is the touring-ground par excellence for the automobile boat.

Here's a new project of travel for those who want to do what others have not done to any great extent. Africa and the Antartic continent have been explored, and the North Pole bids fair to be discovered by means of a flying-machine ere long, so, with no new worlds to conquer, one might do worse in the way of pleasurable travel than to explore the waterways of France.

Maistre wrote his "Voyage Autour de Ma Chambre" and Karr his "Voyage Autour de Mon Jardin," hence any one who really wants to do something similar might well make the tour of the Ile de France by water. It can be done, and would be a revelation of novelty, if one would do it and write it down.

For the moment we were bound up the Oise; we had passed Vernon and Giverny, sitting snug on the hillside by the mouth of the Ept, where we knew there were countless Americans, artists and others, sitting in Gaston's garden or playing tennis on a sunburnt field beside the road. Foolish business that, with a river like the Seine so near at hand, and because it was the custom at Giverny, a custom grown to be a habit, which is worse, we liked not the place, in spite of its other undeniable charms.

We put in for lunch at La Roche-Guyon, a trim little town lying close beneath the Renaissance chateau of the La Rochefoucauld's. There are two waterside hotels at La Roche-Guyon, beside the ugly wire-rope bridge, but we knew them of old, and knew they were likely to be full of an unspeakable class of Parisian merrymakers. There may be others who patronize these delightfully situated riverside inns, but the former predominate in the season. Out of season it may be quite different.

We hunted out a little cafe in the town, whose patron we knew, and prevailed upon his good wife to give us our lunch en famille, which she did and did well.

It was tres bourgeois, but that was what we wanted, and, after a couple of hours eating and lolling about and playing with the cats and talking to the parrot,—a Martinique parrot who knew some English,—we took to the river again, and, after passing the locks at Bonnieres, arrived at Mantes at five o'clock.

The nights draw in quickly, even in the early days of September, and we were bound to push on, if we were to reach Triel that night. We could have reached it, but were delayed at a lock, while it emptied itself and half a score of downriver barges, and, spying a gem of a riverside restaurant at Meulan, overhanging the very water itself, and hung with great golden orange globes of light (so-called Japanese lanterns, and nothing more), we were sentimentally enough inclined to want to dine with such Claude Melnotte accessories. This we did, and hunted up lodgings in the town for the night, vowing to get an extra early start in the morning to make up for lost time.

The Seine at Meulan takes on a certain luxuryous aspect so far as river-boating goes. There is even a "Cercle a la Voile," with yachts which, in the narrow confines of the river, look like the real thing, but which after all are very diminutive members of the family.

From this point the course of the Seine is a complicated winding among iles and ilots, which gives it that elongation which makes necessary hours of journeying by boat as against a quarter of the time by the road—as the crow flies—to the lower fortifications of Paris.

On either side, however, are chemins vicinales, which continually produce unthought-of vistas which automobilists who are making a record from Trouville to Paris know nothing of.

Triel possesses an imposing thirteenth-century Gothic church and an abominably ugly suspension-bridge of wire rope. It is a good place to buy a boat or a cargo of gypsum, which we know as "plaster of Paris;" otherwise the town is not remarkable, though charmingly situated.

The Oise is the first really great commercial tributary of the Seine. There is a mighty flow of commerce which ascends and descends the bosom of the Oise, extending even to the Low Countries and the German Ocean, through the Sambre to Antwerp and the Scheldt.

The Oise is classed as flottable from Beautor to Chauny, a distance of twenty kilometres, and navigable from Chauny to the Seine. Mostly it runs through the great plain of Picardie and forms the natural northern boundary to the ancient Ile de France. The navigable portion forms two sections. One, of fifty-five kilometres, extends between Chauny and Janville, and has been generally abandoned by water-craft because of the opening of the Canal Lateral a la Oise; the other section, of one hundred and four kilometres, is canalized in that it has been straightened here and there at sharp corners, dredged and endowed with seven locks.

The barge traffic of the Oise is mostly towed in convoys of six, but there is a chemin de halage, a tow-path, throughout the river's length. In general, the boats are of moderate size, the peniches being perhaps a hundred and twenty feet in length, the bateaux picards somewhat longer, and the chalands approximating one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy-five feet.

While, as stated above, the traction is generally by steam towboat, the more picturesque, if slower and more humble, tow-horse is more largely in evidence here than elsewhere in France.

The environs of Conflans-fin-d'Oise are of a marvellous charm, but the immediate surroundings, great garages of coal boats and barges, coal-yards where towboats are filling up, and all the grime of an enormous water-borne traffic which here divides, part to go Parisward and part down-river, make it unlovely enough.

Three kilometres up-river is a little riverside inn called the "Goujon de l'Oise." It is a pleasant place to lunch, but otherwise "fishy," as might be supposed.

Back toward Meulan and on the heights above Triel are nestled a half-dozen picturesque little red-roofed villages which are not known at all to travellers from Paris by road or rail. It is curious how many sylvan spots one can find almost within plain sight of Paris. There are wheat-fields within sight of Montmartre and haystacks almost under the shadow of Mont Valerian.

At Evequemont, just back of Conflans, some eight hundred souls eke out an existence on their small farms and live the lives of their grandfathers before them, with never so much as a thought as to what may be happening at the capital twenty kilometres away.

Boisemont is another tiny village, with an eighteenth-century chateau which would form an idyllic retreat from the cares of city ways. Courdimanche, a few miles farther on, is unknown and unspoiled. It crowns a hilltop, with its diminutive and unusual red-roofed church overtopping all and visible from the river, or from the rolling country round about, for many miles. Here the Oise makes a long parallelogram-like turn from Maurecourt around to Eragny, perhaps two miles in a bee-line, but seemingly twenty by the river's course.

The land automobile has a distinct advantage here in speed over the canot, but one's point of view is not so lovely. It is only twelve kilometres to Pontoise, where one passes the barrage just below the town and saunters on shore for a spell, just to get acquainted with the place that Parisians know so well by name, and yet so little in reality.

Pontoise is the metropolis of the Oise, though it, too, is a veritable French country town, such as one would hardly expect to find within twenty kilometres of Paris. The islands of the river are dotted with trees and petit maisons de campagne, and the right bank is bordered with great chalky cliffs, as is the Seine in Normandy.

The general appearance of Pontoise is most pleasing. At first glance it looks like a mediaeval Gothic city, and again even Oriental. At any rate, it is an exceedingly unworldly sort of a place, with here and there remains of its bold ramparts and its zigzag and tortuous streets, but with no very great grandeur anywhere to be remarked, except in the Eglise St. Maclou.

The history of Pontoise is long and lurid, beginning with the times of the Gauls when it was known as Briva Isaroe. It is a long time since the ramparts protected the old Chateau of the Counts of Vexin—literally the land dedicated to Vulcan (pagus Vulcanis) —where many French kings often resided. Many religious establishments flourished here, too, all more or less under royal patronage, including the Abbeys of St. Mellon and St. Martin, and the Couvent des Cordeliers, in whose splendid refectory the exiled Parlement held its sessions in 1652, 1720, and 1753. Out of this circumstance grew the proverb or popular saying, "Avoir l'air de revenir de Pontoise." The domain of Pontoise belonged in turn to many seigneurs, but up to the Revolution it was still practically une ville monastique.

As one comes to the lower streets of the town, near the station, and between it and the river, the resemblance to a little corner of the Pays Bas is remarkable, and therein lies its picturesqueness, if not grandeur. Artists would love the narrow Rue des Attanets, with its curious flanking houses of wood and stone, and the Rue de Rouen, which partakes of much the same characteristics. Along the river are great flour-mills, with wash-houses and red-armed, blue-bloused women eternally washing and rinsing. All this would furnish studies innumerable to those who are able to fabricate mouldy walls and tumble-down picturesqueness out of little tubes of colour and gray canvas. Here, too, at Pontoise, in its little port, none too cleanly because of the refuse and grime of ashes and coal soot, one sees the first of the heavy chalands loaded with iron ore from the Ardennes, or coal from Belgium, making their way to the wharves of Paris via the Canal St. Denis.

More distant, and more pleasing to many, is that variety of landscape made famous, and even popular, by Dupre and Daubigny. So, on the whole, Pontoise, and the country round about, should properly be classed among the things to which few have ever given more than a passing glance, but which have a vast reserve fund of attractions hidden behind them, needing only to be sought out to be admired.

St. Ouen l'Aumone, a tiny little town of a couple of thousand souls, opposite Pontoise, has two remarkable attractions which even a bird of passage might well take the time to view. One is the very celebrated Abbaye de Maubisson, indeed it might be called notorious, if one believed the chronicles relating to the proceedings which took place there under Angelique d'Estrees, sister of the none too saintly Gabrielle.

It was founded in 1236 by Blanche of Castile, for the former religieuses of Citeaux, and was justly celebrated in the middle ages for the luxuriousness of its appointments and the excellence of its design.

The other feature of St. Ouen l'Aumone, which got its name, by the way, from a former Archbishop of Rouen, is a remarkable example of one of those great walled farmyards in which the north of France, Normandy in particular, formerly abounded. It is all attached to what was known as the Parc de Maubisson, which itself is closed by a high, ancient wall with two turrets at the corners. This wall is supposed to date from the fourteenth century, and within are the remains of a vast storehouse or grange of the same century. The only building at all approaching this great storehouse is the Halle au Ble at Rouen, which it greatly resembles as to size. It is now in the hands of a grain merchant who must deal on a large scale, as he claims to have one hundred thousand gerbes (sheaves) in storage at one time. The interior is divided into three naves by two files of monocylindrical columns, though the eastern aisle has practically been demolished.

At Auvers, just above Pontoise, which is bound to Mery by an ugly iron bridge across the Oise, is a fine church of the best of twelfth and thirteenth century Gothic, with a series of Romanesque windows in the apse. Here, too, the country immediately environing Auvers and Mery is of the order made familiar by Daubigny and his school. French farmyards, stubble-thatched cottages, and all the rusticity which is so charming in nature draws continually group after group of artists from Paris to this particular spot at all seasons of the year. The homely side of country life has ever had a charm for city dwellers. Auvers is somewhat doubtfully stated as being the birthplace of Francois Villon—that prince of vagabonds. Usually Paris has been given this distinction.



Mery is an elevated little place of something less than fifteen hundred souls. It has a church of the thirteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries, and a chateau which was constructed at the end of the fourteenth century by the Seigneur de Mery, Pierre d'Orgemont, grand chancellor of France. The domain was created a marquisat in 1665. The famous banker, Samuel Bernard, it seems, became the occupant, of the chateau in the reign of Louis XIV., and there received king and court.

On a certain occasion, as the season had advanced toward the chill of winter, the opulent seigneur made great fires of acacia wood. The king, who was present, said courteously to his host: "Know you well, Samuel, it is not possible for me to do this in my palace;" from which we may infer that it was a luxury which even kings appreciated.

There were no river obstructions to the free passage of our little craft between Pontoise and L'Isle-Adam, above Auvers. We were going by easy stages now, even the long tows of grain and coal-laden barges were gaining on us, for we were straggling disgracefully and stopping at almost every kilometre stone.

We tied up at Auvers, "Daubigny's Country," as we called it, and stayed for the night at the Hostellerie du Nord, a not very splendid establishment, but one with a character all its own. Auvers, and its neighbour Mery, together form one of the most delightful settlements in which to pass a summer, near to Paris, that could be possibly imagined, but with this proviso, that on Sunday one could take a day in town, for then tout le monde, the proprietor of the Hostellerie du Nord tells you, comes out to breathe the artistic atmosphere of Daubigny. How much they really care for Daubigny or his artistic atmosphere is a question.

At such times the tiny garden and the dining-room of the Hostellerie attempt to expand themselves to accommodate a hundred and fifty guests, whereas their capacity is perhaps forty. Something very akin to pandemonium takes place; it is amusing, no doubt, but it is not comfortable. Nothing ever goes particularly awry here, however; M. T—, the patron, is too good a manager for that, and a popular one, too, to judge from his Salon d'Exposition, which is hung about with a couple of hundred pictures presented by his admiring painter guests from time to time. The viands are bountiful and splendidly garnished and the consommations au premier choix. Then there are the occupants of "les petits menages" to swoop down on your table for crumbs,—pigeons only,—and in cages a score or more of canary-birds, and, as a sort of contrast, dogs and cats and fowls of all varieties of breed.

It sounds rather uncomfortable, but we did not find it so at all, and, speaking from experience, it is one of the most enticing of the various "artists' resorts" known.



It is but a short six kilometres to L'Isle-Adam, and it was ten the next morning before we embarked. It is a small town mostly given over to suburban houses of Paris brokers and merchants. It is an attractive enough town as a place of residence, but of works of artistic worth it has practically none, if we except the not very splendid fifteenth-century church.

The largest of the islands here, just above the lock, was formerly occupied by the chateau of the Prince de Conti. It was destroyed at the Revolution but its place has been taken by a modern villa whose gardens are kept up with remarkable skill and care, albeit it is nothing but a villa coquette on a large scale. L'Isle-Adam received its name from the Connetable Adam who first built a chateau here in 1069.

The Foret de l'Isle-Adam is one of those noble woods in which the north of France abounds. Like the Foret de Ermenonville, Compiegne, and Chantilly it is beautifully kept, with great roads running straight and silent through avenues of oaks.

The Chateau de Cassan, but a short distance into the Foret, has a wonderful formal garden, laid out after the English manner and ranking with the parks of the Trianon and Ermenonville.

After L'Isle-Adam we did not stop, except for the lock at Rougemont, till the smoke-stacks and factory-belchings of Creil loomed up before us thirty kilometres beyond.

Creil is commercial, very commercial, and is a railway junction like Clapham Junction or South Chicago,—no, not quite; nowhere else, on top of the green earth, are there quite such atrocious monuments to man's lack of artistic taste. It is a pity Creil is so banal on close acquaintance, for it is bejewelled with emerald hills and a tiny belt of silvery water which, in the savage days of long ago, must have given it preeminence among similar spots in the neighbourhood.

Just above is Pont St. Maxence, delightfully named and delightfully placed, with a picture church of the best of Renaissance architecture and an atmosphere which made one want to linger within the confines of the town long after his allotted time. We stayed nearly half a day; we ate lunch in a little restaurant in the shadow of the bridge; we bought and sent off picture postcards, and we took snap-shots and strolled about and gazed at the little gem of a place until all the gamins in town were following in our wake.

Compiegne was next in our itinerary. We knew Compiegne, from the shore, as one might say, having passed and repassed it many times, and we knew all its charms and attractions, or thought we did, but we were not prepared for the effect of the rays of the setting sun on the quaintly serrated sky-line of the roof-tops of the city, as we saw it from the river.

It was bloody red, and the willows along the river's bank were a dim purply melange of all the refuse of an artist's palette. Compiegne has many sides, but its picturesque sunset side is the most theatrical grouping of houses and landscape we had seen for many a long day.

Here at Compiegne the vigour of the Oise ends. Above it is a weakly, purling stream, the greater part of the traffic going by the Canal Lateral, while below it broadens out into a workable, industrial sort of a waterway which is doing its best to contribute its share to the prosperity of France.

We learn here, as elsewhere, where it has been attempted, that the hand of man cannot irretrievably make or reclaim the course of a river. Deprived of its natural bed and windings, it will always form new ones of its own making in conformity to the law of nature. The attempt was made to straighten the course of the Oise, but in a very short time the latent energies of the stream, more forceful than were supposed, made fresh windings and turnings, the ultimate development of which was found to very nearly approximate those which had previously been done away with, and so the Canal Lateral, which commences at Compiegne, was built.

Compiegne's attractions are many, its generally well-kept and prosperous air, its most excellent hotels (two of them, though we bestowed our august patronage on the Hotel de France), its chateau of royal days of Louis XV., and its Hotel de Ville.

Stevenson, in his "Inland Voyage," has said that what charmed him most at Compiegne was the Hotel de Ville. Truly this will be so with any who have a soul above electric trams and the art nouveau; it is the most dainty and lovable of Renaissance Hotels de Ville anywhere to be seen, with pignons, and gables, and niches with figures in them jutting out all over it.

Then there is the novel and energetic little jaquemart, the little bronze figures of which strike the hours and even the halves and quarters. There is not a detail of this charming building, inside or out, which will not be admired by all. It is far and away more interesting in its appeal than the chateau itself.

Our next day's journey was to Noyon. We were travelling by boat, to be sure, but a good part of the personnel of the hotel, including the hostler, and the bus-driver, whose business was at the station, came down to see us off. Like a bird in a cage he gazed at us with longing eyes, and once let fall the remark that he wished he had nothing else to do but sit in the bow of a boat and "twiddle a few things" to make it go faster. He overlooked entirely the things that might happen, such as having to pull your boat up on shore and pull out the weeds and rubbish which were stopping your intake pipe, or climb overboard yourself and disentangle water-plants from your propeller, if indeed it had not lost a blade and you were forced to be ignominiously towed into the next large town.

It looks all very delightful travelling about in a dainty and facile little canot-automobile, and for our part we were immensely pleased with this, our first, experience of so long a voyage. Nothing had happened to disturb the tranquillity of our journey, not a single mishap had delayed us, and we had not a quarrel with a bargeman or an eclusier, we had been told we should have. We were in luck, and though we only averaged from fifty to sixty kilometres a day, we were all day doing it, and it seemed two hundred.

We lunched at Ribecourt and struck the most ponderously named hotel we had seen in all our travels, and it was good in spite of its weight. "Le Courrier des Pays et des Trois Jambons," or something very like it, was its name, and its patronne was glad to see us, and killed a fowl especially on our account, culled some fresh lettuce in the garden, and made a dream of a rum omelette, which she said was the national dish of America. It isn't, as most of us know, but it was a mighty good omelette, nevertheless, and the rum was sufficiently fiery to give it a zest.

We spent that night at Noyon of blessed memory. Noyon is not down in the itineraries of many guide-book tourists, which is a pity for them. It is altogether the most unspoiled old-world town between the Ile de France and the Channel ports of Boulogne and Calais through which so many Anglo-Saxon travellers enter. It is off the beaten track, though, and that accounts for it. Blessed be the tourist agencies which know nothing beyond their regular routes, and thus leave some forgotten and neglected tourist-points yet to be developed.

The majesty of Noyon's cathedral of Notre Dame is unequalled in all the world. The grim towers rise boldly without ornament or decoration of any kind, and are cowled by a peculiarly strange roofing. The triple porch is denuded of its decorative statues, and there is a rank Renaissance excrescence in the rear which is unseemly, but for all that, as a mediaeval religious monument of rank, it appeals to all quite as forcibly as the brilliantly florid cathedral at Beauvais, or the richly proud Amiens, its nearest neighbours of episcopal rank.

We did not sit in front of the Hotel du Nord at Noyon, as did Stevenson, and hear the "sweet groaning of the organ" from the cathedral doorway, but we experienced all the emotions of which he wrote in his "Inland Voyage," and we were glad we came.

The Hotel de France and the Hotel du Nord share the custom of the ever-shifting traffic of voyageurs at Noyon. The latter is the "automobile" hotel, and accordingly possesses many little accessories which the other establishment lacks. Otherwise they are of about the same value, and in either you will, unless you are a very heavy sleeper, think that the cathedral-bells were made to wake the dead, so reverberant are their tones and so frequent their ringing.

It was Stevenson's wish that, if he ever embraced Catholicism, he should be made Bishop of Noyon. Whether it was the simple magnitude of its quaint, straight-lined cathedral, or the generally charming and riant aspect of the town, one does not know, but the sentiment was worthy of both the man and the place.

"Les affaires sont les affaires," as the French say, and business called us to Paris; so, after a happy ten days on the Seine and Oise, we cut our voyage short with the avowed intention of some day continuing it.

Chapter VI The Road To The North



We left Paris by the ghastly route leading out through the plain of Gennevilliers, where Paris empties her sewage and grows asparagus, passing St. Denis and its royal catacombs of the ancient abbey, and so on to Pontoise, all over as vile a stretch of road as one will find in the north of France, always excepting the suburbs of St. Germain.

Pontoise is all very well in its way, and is by no means a dull, uninteresting town, but we had no thoughts for it at the moment; indeed, we had no thoughts of anything but to put the horrible suburban Paris pave as far behind us as we could before we settled down to enjoyment.

At Pontoise we suddenly discovered that we were on the wrong road. So much for not knowing our way out of town—twenty-five kilometres of axle-breaking cobblestones!

We had some consolation in knowing that it was equally as bad by any northern road out of Paris, so we only had the trouble of making a twenty-kilometre detour through the valley of the Oise, by our old haunts of Auvers and L'Isle-Adam to Chantilly and Senlis.

We got our clue to the itinerary of the road to the north from a view of an old poster issued by the "Messageries Royales" just previous to the Revolution (a copy of which is given elsewhere in this book).

Many were the times we, and all well-habituated travellers in France, had swung from Calais to Paris by train, with little thought indeed as to what lay between. True, we had, more than once, "stopped off" at Amiens and Abbeville to see their magnificent churches, and we had spent a long summer at Etaples and Montreuil-sur-Mer, two "artists' haunts" but little known to the general traveller; but we never really knew the lay of the land north of Paris, except as we had got it from the reading of Dumas, Stevenson's "Inland Voyage," and the sentimental journeyings of the always delightful Sterne.

We made Chantilly our stop for lunch, en route to Senlis. We ought not to have done this, for what with the loafing horse-jockeys in the cafes, and the trainers and "cheap sports" hanging about the hotels, Chantilly does not impress one as the historical shrine that it really is.

Chantilly is sporty, tres sportive, as the French call it, as is inevitable of France's most popular race-track, and there is an odour of America, Ireland, and England over all. How many jockeys of these nationalities one really finds at Chantilly the writer does not know, but, judging from the alacrity with which the hotels serve you ham and eggs and the cafe waiters respond to a demand for whiskey (Scotch, Irish, or American), it may be assumed that the alien population is very large.

We had our lunch at the Hotel du Grand Conde, which is marked with three stars in the automobile route-books. This means that it is expensive,—and so we found it. It was a good enough hotel of its kind, but there was nothing of local colour about it. It might have been at Paris, Biarritz, or Monte Carlo.

The great attractions of Chantilly are the chateau and park and the collections of the Duc d'Aumale, famed alike in the annals of history and art. We were properly appreciative, and only barely escaped being carried off by our guide to see the stables—as if we had not suffered enough from the horse craze ever since we had struck the town.

The most we would do was to admire the park and the ramifications of its paths and alleys which dwindled imperceptibly into the great Foret de Chantilly itself. The forest is one of those vast tracts of wildwood which are so plentifully besprinkled all over France. Their equals are not known elsewhere, for they are crossed and recrossed in all directions by well-kept carriage roads where automobilists will be troubled neither by dust nor glaring sunlight. They are the very ideals of roads, the forest roads of France, and their length is many thousands of kilometres.

Senlis is but eight kilometres from Chantilly. We had no reason for going there at all, except to have a look at its little-known, but very beautiful, cathedral, and to get on the real road to the north.

We spent the night at Senlis, for we had become fatigued with the horrible pave of the early morning, the sightseeing of the tourist order which we had done at Chantilly, and the eternal dodging of race-horses being exercised all through the streets of the town and the roads of the forest.

"Monsieur descend-il a l'Hotel du Grand Monarque?" asked a butcher's boy of us, as we stopped the automobile beneath the cathedral tower to get our bearings. He was probably looking for a little commission on our hotel-bill for showing us the way; but, after all, this is a legitimate enough proposition. We told him frankly no; that we were looking for the Hotel des Arenes; but that he knew nothing of. Another, more enterprising, did, and we drove our automobile into the court of a tiny little commercial-looking hotel, and were soon strolling about the town free from further care for the day. The hotel was ordinary enough, neither good nor bad, comme 'ci, comme ca, the French would call it,—but they made no objection to getting up at six o'clock the next morning and making us fresh coffee which was a dream of excellence. This is a good deal in its favour, for the coffee of the ordinary French country hotel—in the north, in particular—is fearfully and wonderfully made, principally of chicory.

Sentiment would be served, and from Senlis we struck across forty kilometres to what may be called the Dumas Country, Crepy-en-Valois and Villers-Cotterets. Here was a little-trodden haunt which all lovers of romance and history would naturally fall in love with.

Crepy is a snug, conservative little town where life goes on in much the same way that it did in the days when Alexandre Dumas was a clerk here in a notary's office, before he descended upon the Parisian world of letters. His "Memoires" tell the story of his early experiences here in his beloved Valois country. It is a charming biographical work, Dumas's "Memoires," and it is a pity it is not better known to English readers. Dumas tells of his journey by road, from the town of his birth, Villers-Cotterets, to Crepy, with his world's belongings done up in a handkerchief on a stick, "in bulk not more grand than the luggage of a Savoyard when he leaves his native mountain home."

Crepy has a delightfully named and equally excellent hotel in the "Trois Pigeons," and one may eat of real country fare and be happy and forget all about the ham and eggs and bad whiskey of Chantilly in the contemplation of omelettes and chickens and fresh, green salads, such as only the country innkeeper in France knows how to serve. Crepy has a chateau, too, a relic of the days when the town was the capital of a petit gouvernement belonging to a younger branch of the royal family of France in the fourteenth century. The chateau is not quite one's ideal of what a great mediaeval chateau should be, but it is sufficiently imposing to give a distinction to the landscape and is in every way a very representative example of the construction of the time.

The great Route Nationale to the north runs through Crepy to-day, as did the Route Royale of the days of the Valois. It is eighteen kilometres from Crepy to Villers-Cotterets, Dumas's birthplace. The great romancer describes it with much charm and correctness in the early pages of "The Taking of the Bastile." He calls it "a little city buried in the shade of a vast park planted by Francois I. and Henri II." It is a place ever associated with romance and history, and, to add further to its reputation, it is but a few kilometres away from La Ferte-Milon, where Racine was born, and only eight leagues from Chateau-Thierry, the birthplace of La Fontaine.

We had made up our minds to breathe as much of the spirit and atmosphere of Villers-Cotterets as was possible in a short time, and accordingly we settled down for the night at the Hotel Alexandre Dumas. The name of the hotel is unusual. There may be others similar, but the writer does not recall them at this moment. It was not bad, and, though entitled to be called a grand establishment, it was not given to pomposity or pretence, and we parted with regret, for we had been treated most genially by the proprietor and his wife, and served by a charming young maid, who, we learned, was the daughter of the house. It was all in the family, and because of that everything was excellently done.

There are fragments of a royal chateau here, begun by Francois I. in one of his building manias. His salamanders and the three crescents of Diane de Poitiers still decorate its walls, and accordingly it is a historical shrine of the first rank, though descended in these later days to use as a poorhouse.

The chateau and forest of Villers-Cotterets were settled upon Monsieur le Grand by Louis XIV., after they had sheltered many previous royal loves, but in the days of the later monarchy, that of Philippe Egalite, the place was used merely as a hunting rendezvous.

The Dumas birthplace is an ordinary enough and dismal-looking building from the street. As usual in France, there is another structure in the rear, the real birthplace, no doubt, but one gets only a glimpse through the open door or gate. Carrier-Belleus's fine statue of Dumas, erected here in 1885, is all that a monument of its class should be, and is the pride of the local inhabitant, who, when passing, never tires of stopping and gazing at its outlines. This may be a little exaggeration, but there is a remarkable amount of veneration bestowed upon it by all dwellers in the town.

We went from Villers-Cotterets direct to Soissons, the home of the beans of that name. We do not know these medium-sized flat beans as soissons in America and England; to us they are merely beans; but to soissons they are known all over France, and in the mind and taste of the epicure there is no other bean just like them. This may be so or not, but there is no possible doubt whatever but that "soissons au beurre" is a ravishing dish which one meets with too infrequently, even in France, and this in spite of the millions of kilos of them which reach the markets through the gateway of the town of Soissons.

Soissons undoubtedly has a good hotel. How could it be otherwise in such a food-producing centre? We were directed, however, by a commis-voyageur whom we had met at Villers-Cotterets, not to think of a hotel at Soissons, if we were only to stop for lunch, but to go to the railway restaurant. Of all things this would be the most strange for an automobilist, but we took his advice, for he said he knew what he was talking about.

The "Buffet" at the railway station at Soissons is not the only example of a good railway eating-house in France, but truly it is one of the best. It is a marvellously conducted establishment, and you eat your meals in a beautifully designed, well-kept apartment, with the viands of the country of the best and of great variety. Soissons au beurre was the piece de resistance, and there was poulet au casserole, an omelette au rhum, a crisp, cold lettuce salad, and fruits and "biscuits" galore to top off, with wine and bread a discretion and good coffee and cognac for ten sous additional, the whole totalling three francs fifty centimes. We were probably the first automobilists on tour who had taken lunch at the railway restaurant at Soissons. Perhaps we may not be the last.

It was but a short detour of a dozen or fifteen kilometres to visit the romantic Chateau de Coucy, one of the few relics of mediaevalism which still look warlike. It is more or less of a ruin, but it has been restored in part, and, taken all in all, is the most formidable thing of its kind in existence. It rises above the old walled town of Coucy-le-Chateau in quite the fashion that one expects, and, from the platform of the donjon, there spreads out a wonderful view over two deep and smiling valleys which, as much as the thickness of the chateau walls, effectually protected the occupants from a surprise attack.

The thirteenth century saw the birth of this, perhaps the finest example still remaining of France's feudal chateaux, and, barring the effects of an earthquake in 1692, and an attempt by Richelieu to blow it up, the symmetrical outlines of its walls and roofs are much as they always were.

Its founder was Enguerrand III. de Coucy, who took for his motto these boastful words—which, however, he and his descendants justified whenever occasion offered:

"Roi je ne suis, Prince, ni Comte aussi, Je suis le Sire de Coucy."

We left Coucy rejoicing, happy and content, expecting to reach Laon that night. We had double-starred Laon in our itinerary, because it was one of those neglected tourist-points that we always made a point of visiting when in the neighbourhood.

Laon possesses one of the most remarkable cathedrals of Northern France, but its hotels are bad. We tried two and regretted we ever came, except for the opportunity of marvelling at the commanding site of the town and its cathedral. The long zigzag road winding up the hill offers little inducement to one to run his automobile up to the plateau upon which sits the town proper. It were wiser not to attempt to negotiate it if there were any way to avoid it. We solved the problem by putting up at a little hotel opposite the railway station (its name is a blank, being utterly forgotten) where the commis-voyageur goes when he wants a meal while waiting for the next train. He seems to like it, and you do certainly get a good dinner, but, not being commis-voyageurs, merely automobilists, we were charged three prices for everything, and accordingly every one is advised to risk the dangerous and precipitous road to the upper town rather than be blackmailed in this way.

Laon's cathedral, had it ever been carried out according to the original plans, would have been the most stupendously imposing ecclesiastical monument in Northern France. Possibly the task was too great for accomplishment, for its stones and timbers were laboriously carried up the same zigzag that one sees to-day, and it never grew beyond its present half-finished condition. The year 1200 probably saw its commencement, and it is as thoroughly representative of the transition from Romanesque to Gothic as any other existing example of church building.

On the great massive towers of Laon's cathedral is to be seen a most curious and unchurchly symbolism in the shape of great stone effigies of oxen, pointing north, east, south, and west. There is no religious significance, we are told, but they are a tribute to the faithful services of the oxen who drew the heavy loads of building material from the plain to the hilltop.

We had taken a roundabout road to the north, via Laon, merely to see the oxen of the cathedral and to get swindled for our lunch at that unspeakable little hotel. The one was worth the time and trouble, the other was not. We left town the same night headed north, in the direction of Arras, via St. Quentin, anciently one of the famous walled towns of France, but now a queer, if picturesque, conglomeration of relics of a historical past and modern business affairs.

It was Sunday, and well into the afternoon, when we got away from Laon, but the peasant, profiting by the fair harvest days, was working in the fields as if he never had or would have a holiday. Unquestionably the peasant and labouring class in France is hard-working at his daily task and at his play, for when he plays he also plays hard. This, the eternal activity of the peasant or labourer, whatever his trade, and the worked-over little farm-holdings, with their varied crops, all planted in little bedquilt patches, are the chief characteristics of the French countryside for the observant stranger.

We crossed the Oise at La Fere, La Fere of wicked memory, as readers of Stevenson will recall. Nothing went very badly with us, but all the same the memory of Stevenson's misadventure at his hotel made us glad we were not stopping there.

We passed now innumerable little towns and villages clinging to red, brown, and green hillsides, with here and there a thatched cottage of other days, for, in the agglomerations, as the French government knows the hamlets and towns, it is now forbidden to thatch or rethatch a roof; you must renew it with tiles or slates when the original thatch wears out.

Soon after passing La Fere one sees three hilltop forts, for we are now in more or less strategic ground, and militarism is rampant.

St. Quentin has been the very centre of a warlike maelstrom for ages, and the memory of blood and fire lies over all its history, though to-day, as we entered its encumbered, crooked streets, things looked far from warlike.

We had our choice of the Hotel du Cygne or the Hotel du Commerce at St. Quentin, and chose the latter as being nearer the soil, whereas the former establishment is blessed with electric lights, a calorifere, and a "bar"—importing the word and the institution from England or America.

We found nothing remarkable in the catering of the Hotel du Commerce. It was good enough of its kind, but not distinctive, and we got beer served with our dinner, instead of wine or cider. If you want either of the latter you must pay extra. We were in the beer region, not the cider country or the wine belt. It was the custom, and was not being "sprung" on us because we were automobilists. This we were glad to know after our experience at Laon.

St. Quentin possesses a famous Gothic church, known to all students of Continental architecture, and there is a monument of the siege of 1557, which is counted another "sight," though strictly a modern work.

At St. Quentin one remarks the Canal de St. Quentin, another of those inland waterways of France which are the marvel of the stranger and the profit of the inhabitant. This particular canal connects France with the extraterritorial commerce of the Pays Bas, and runs from the Somme to the Scheldt, burrowing through hillsides with tunnels, and bridging gaps and valleys with viaducts. One of these canal-tunnels, at Riqueval, has a length of nearly four miles.

We worried our way out through the crooked streets of St. Quentin at an early hour the next morning, en route for Arras, via Cambrai. Forty-two kilometres of "ond. dure.," but otherwise excellent roadway, brought us to Cambrai. (For those who do not read readily the French route-book directions the above expression is translated as "rolling and difficult.")

It matters little whether the roadways of France are marked rolling and serpentine, or hilly and winding, the surfaces are almost invariably excellent, and there is nothing met with which will annoy the modern automobile or its driver in the least, always excepting foolish people, dogs, and children. For the last we sometimes feel sorry and take extra precautions, but the others are too intolerant to command much sympathy.

Cambrai was burned into our memories by the recollection that Fenelon was one-time bishop of the episcopal see, and because it was the city of the birth and manufacture of cambric, most of which, since its discovery, has gone into the making of bargain-store handkerchiefs.

Cambrai possessed twelve churches previous to the Revolution, but only two remain at the present day, and they are unlovely enough to belong to Liverpool or Sioux City.

We had some difficulty in finding a hotel at Cambrai. Our excellent "Guide-Michelin" had for the moment gone astray in the tool-box, and there was nothing else we could trust. We left the automobile at the shop of a mecanicien for a trifling repair while we hunted up lunch. (Cost fifteen sous, with no charge for housing the machine. Happy, happy automobilists of France; how much you have to be thankful for!)

The Mouton Blanc, opposite the railway station at Cambrai, gave us a very good lunch, in a strictly bourgeois fashion, including the sticky, bitter biere du Nord. We paid two francs fifty centimes for our repast and went away with a good opinion of Cambrai, though its offerings for the tourist in the way of remarkable sights are few.

Cambrai to Arras was a short thirty kilometres. We covered them in an hour and found Arras all that Cambrai was not, though both places are printed in the same size type in the railway timetables and guide-books.