"I was scarcely two hundred yards from the château when a part of the ceiling of the chamber where I had lain fell in flames. The neighboring chambers, the apartments which were below them, the precious furniture with which they were adorned, all were consumed by the fire. The loss amounted to a hundred thousand livres and, without the help of the engines for which they sent to Paris, one of the most beautiful edifices of the kingdom would have been destroyed. They hid this strange news from me on my arrival; I knew it when I awoke; you cannot imagine how great was my despair; you know the generous care which M. de Maisons had taken of me; I had been treated like a brother in his house, and the reward of so much goodness was the burning of his chateau. I could not conceive how the fire had been able to catch so suddenly in my chamber, where I had left only an almost extinguished brand. I learned that the cause of this conflagration was a beam which passed exactly under the fireplace.... The beam of which I speak had charred little by little from the heat of the hearth....
"Madame and Monsieur de Maisons received the news more tranquilly than I did; their generosity was as great as their loss and as my grief. M. de Maisons crowned his bounty by giving me the news himself in letters which make very evident that he excels in heart as in mind; he occupied himself with the care of consoling me and it almost seemed as if it had been my chateau which was burned."
And it is not only the shade of Voltaire which haunts the apartments of Maisons! We may also be shown the chamber of Lafayette. In addition, decorations in Empire style recall to us that in 1804 the château was bought and inhabited by Lannes....
But what good is it to evoke these memories, since the admirable beauty of the architecture and of the decorations has not sufficed to arrest the enterprise of the housebreakers? [12]
VIII. THE VALLEY OF THE OISE
WHEN the first automobiles made their appearance upon the highways, some persons thought that, thanks to this new mode of locomotion, the French were finally going to discover the thousand beauties of France. They awoke from their dream when they heard the conversations of automobilists. The latter, when they returned from their excursions, told of the achievements of the engine, the misfortunes of the tires, the treacheries of the road. They computed distances, counted kilometers, passed judgment on macadam; but of the country traversed they had seen, it was manifest, only the wide ribbon of the road unrolling before their cars. If one talked to them of the picturesqueness of a region through which they had passed, they replied: "Too steep grades!"; and they cursed the rough cobbles when one praised to them the pretty church in a village through which they had passed. They were full of stories of autos, as hunters are of hunting yarns; but every one knows that the beauty of the forest is the last thing a hunter thinks of. The chauffeurs went into ecstasies at the memory of a straight, smooth, deserted highway, drawn like an arrow for leagues across an endless plain, far from the villages which are populated by hens, children and straying dogs. The most romantic celebrated the pleasure of speed, the intoxication of danger. In all of them one guessed, though none would consent to avow it, the wild pride of hurling themselves across the world, with a terrible uproar, in the midst of universal fright, like petty scourges of God.
Some protested, and swore that it is easy to avoid the contagion of this delirium, that they themselves had succeeded in using their machine as a commodious vehicle and not as a simple instrument of sport. I only half believed them. Some experiences had shown me that one feels himself becoming an automobilist an hour after one is seated in an automobile....
But recently one of my friends asserted: "Your experiences prove nothing. You chose your auto badly, or perhaps your chauffeur, or even your companions. Three conditions are indispensable for traveling, or rather for loitering, in an automobile: 1. A firm decision to see everything, which depends on you alone; 2. A docile chauffeur; 3. A comfortable auto of moderate speed. My chauffeur and my machine fulfil the two latter conditions. Arrange the itinerary yourself. We will stop as often as you please. Will an experience of three days consecrated to archaeology seem conclusive to you?"