The Car That Went Abroad: Motoring Through the Golden Age

by Albert Bigelow Paine

Beyond the Bois de Boulogne lay the pave, miles of 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 had begun 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 she must find something, 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 the men'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 more than 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.