The Car That Went Abroad: Motoring Through the Golden Age

by Albert Bigelow Paine

INTO THE JURAS

It was still drizzling next morning, so we were in no hurry to leave. We plodded about the gray streets, picking up some things for the lunch basket, and Narcissa and the Joy got a chance to try their nice new French on real French people and were gratified to find that it worked just the same as it did on Swiss people. Then the sky cleared and I backed the car out of the big stable where it had spent the night, and we packed on our bags and paid our bill—twenty-seven francs for all, or about one dollar and thirty-five cents each for dinner, lodging, and breakfast—tips, one franc each to waitress, chambermaid, and garageman. If they were dissatisfied they did not look it, and presently we were once more on the road, all the cylinders working and bankruptcy not yet in sight. It was glorious and fresh along the lake-front—also appetizing. We stopped by and by for a little mid-morning luncheon, and a passing motorist, who probably could not believe we would stop merely to eat at that hour, drew up to ask if anything was wrong with our car and if he could help. They are kindly people, these French and Swiss. Stop your car by the roadside and begin to hammer something, or to take off a tire, and you will have offers of assistance from four out of every five cars that pass.

There is another little patch of Switzerland again at the end of the lake, and presently you run into Geneva, and trouble. Geneva is certainly a curious place. The map of it looks as easy as nothing and you go gliding into it full of confidence, and presently find yourself in a perfect mess of streets that are not on the map at all, while all the streets that are on the map certainly have changed their names, for you cannot find them where they should be, and no one has ever heard of them. Besides, the wind is generally blowing—the bise—which does not simplify matters. Narcissa inquired and I inquired, and then the Joy, who, privately, I think, speaks the best French of any of us, also inquired; but the combined result was just a big coalyard which a very good-looking street led us straight into, making it necessary to back out and apologize and feel ashamed. Then we heard somebody calling us, and, looking around, saw the man in gray who had last directed us, and who also felt ashamed, it seemed—of us, or himself, or something—and had run after us to get us out of the mess. So he directed us again and we started, but the labyrinth closed in once more—the dust and narrow streets and blind alleys—and once again we heard a voice, and there was the man in gray—he must have run a half a mile this time—waving and calling and pointing the path out of the maze. It seemed that they were fixing all the good streets and we must get through by circuitous bad ones to the side of the city toward France. I asked him why they didn't leave the good streets alone and fix the bad ones, but he only smiled and explained some more, and once more we went astray, and yet once more his voice came calling down the wind and he came up breathlessly, and this time followed with us, refusing even standing room on the running-board, until he got us out of the city proper and well headed for France. We had grown fond of that man and grieved to see him go. We had known him hardly ten minutes, I think, but friendships are not to be measured by time.

On a pretty hill where a little stream of water trickled we ate our first real luncheon—that is to say, we used our new stove. We cooked eggs and made coffee, and when there came a sprinkle we stood under our umbrellas or sat in the car and felt that this was really a kind of gypsying, and worth while.

There was a waving meadow just above the bank and I went up there to look about a little. No house was in sight, but this meadow was a part of some man's farm. It was familiar in every corner to him—he had known it always. Perhaps he had played in it as a child—his children had played in it after him—it was inseparable from the life and happiness of a home. Yet to us it was merely the field above our luncheon place—a locality hardly noticed or thought of—barely to be remembered at all.

Crossing another lonely but fertile land, we entered the hills. We skirted mountainsides—sometimes in sun, sometimes in shower—descended a steep road, and passed under a great arched battlement that was part of a frowning fortress guarding the frontier of France. Not far beyond, at the foot of a long decline, lay a beautiful city, just where the mountains notched to form a passage for the Rhone. It was Bellegarde, and as we drew nearer some of the illusions of beauty disappeared. French cities generally show best from a distance. Their streets are not very clean and they are seldom in repair. The French have the best roads and the poorest streets in the world.

We drew up in front of the custom house, and exhibited our French triptyque. It was all right, and after it was indorsed I thought we were through. This was not true. A long, excited individual appeared from somewhere and began nervously to inspect our baggage. Suddenly he came upon a small empty cigar box which I had put in, thinking it might be useful. Cigars are forbidden, and at sight of the empty box our wild-eyed attenuation had a fit. He turned the box upside down and shook it; he turned it sidewise and looked into it; shook it again and knocked on it as if bound to make the cigars appear. He seemed to decide that I had hidden the cigars, for he made a raid on things in general. He looked into the gasoline tank, he went through the pockets of the catch-all and scattered our guidebooks and maps; then he had up the cushion of the back seat and went into the compartment where this time was our assortment of hats. You never saw millinery fly as it did in that man's hands, with the head of the family and Narcissa and the Joy grabbing at their flowers and feathers, and saying things in English that would have hurt that man if he could have understood them. As for him, he was repeating, steadily, "Pas dérange"—"Pas dérange," when all the time he was deranging ruthlessly and even permanently. He got through at last, smiled, bowed, and retired—pleased, evidently, with the thoroughness of his investigation. But for some reason he entirely overlooked our bags strapped on the footboard. We did not remind him.

The Pert of the Rhone is at Bellegarde. The pert is a place where in dry weather the Rhone disappears entirely from sight for the space of seventy yards, to come boiling up again from some unknown mystery. Articles have been thrown in on one side—even live animals, it is said—but they have never reappeared on the other. What becomes of them is a matter of speculation. Perhaps some fearful underground maelstrom holds them. There was no pert when we were there—there had been too much rain. The Rhone went tearing through a gorge where we judged the pert should be located in less watery seasons.

During the rest of the afternoon we had rather a damp time—showery and sloppy, for many of the roads of these Jura foothills were in the process of repair, and the rain had stopped the repairs halfway. It was getting toward dusk when we came to Nantua—a lost and forgotten town among the Jura cliffs. We stopped in front of the showier hotel there, everything looked so rain-beaten and discouraging, but the woman who ran it was even showier than her hotel and insisted on our taking a parlor suite at some fabulous price. So we drove away and drew up rather sadly at the Hôtel du Lac, which on that dull evening was far from fascinating. Yet the rooms they showed us were good, and the dinner—a surprise of fresh trout just caught, served sizzling hot, fine baked potatoes and steak, with good red wine aplenty—was such as to make us forswear forevermore the showy hotels for the humbler inns of France.

But I am moving too fast. Before dinner we walked for a little in the gray evening and came to an old church—one of the oldest in France, it is said, built in the ninth century and called St. Michels. It is over a thousand years old and looks it. It has not been much rebuilt, I think, for invasion and revolution appear seldom to have surmounted the natural ramparts of Nantua, and only the stormbeat and the corrosion of the centuries have written the story of decay. Very likely it is as little changed as any church of its time. The hand of restoration has troubled it little. We slipped in through the gathering dusk, and tiptoed about, for there were a few lights flickering near the altar and the outlines of bowed heads. Presently a priest was silhouetted against the altar lights as he crossed and passed out by a side door. He was one of a long line that stretched back through more than half of the Christian era and most of the history of France. When the first priest passed in front of that altar France was still under the Carlovingian dynasty—under Charles the Fat, perhaps; and William of Normandy would not conquer England for two hundred years. Then nearly four hundred years more would creep by—dim mediæval years—before Joan of Arc should unfurl her banner of victory and martyrdom. You see how far back into the mists we are stepping here. And all those evenings the altar lights have been lit and the ministration of priests has not failed.