Many inns known to history, but fallen from their high estate in later years, are looking up again since the motor took the road. At any hour, a gay crowd of folk, masquerading in dust coats and goggles and hoods, may appear at the door demanding luncheon or dinner. They know a good wine and a good sauce, these travellers, and they scatter gold in a fashion that recalls stories of the days when the great men of old France and their retinues took their ease in this same inn. Mine host's heart warms to the devil wagon and its Parisian freight. He brings long hoarded bottles covered with cobwebs up from the cellars, he sacrifices his choicest chickens, he goes into the kitchen himself to prepare the fish and the sauces, he scolds his wife and bullies the cook and embraces the maid, all from pure excitement, and beams upon the world in general and the motorists in particular; for he sees the dawn of a new day and hears the clink of coin in his long empty tills.
He gives to the party of his best; and, when they whirl away, he stands at his door watching the cloud of dust that envelopes them. Then he draws a long breath, sniffs ecstatically at the gasoline-laden air.
"Que j'aime cette odeur là!" he says with fervour. The automobile has an ardent friend in mine host of the country inn.
With the restaurant keeper at Paris, the story is a different one. It is so easy to run away from the city for luncheon or dinner since the motor car is at one's service, and the wandering has an effect upon the receipts in the town restaurant. Moreover,—one smiles at this, but it is told in all seriousness and with lively grief by the proprietors of certain cafés, and echoed dolefully by women accustomed to late suppers and carousals in those rendezvous,—the automobile has been a reforming agent. It has interfered with the long established habits of the gilded youth and more heavily gilded age, wont to furnish the late suppers and the wherewithal for carousal.
"It makes a difference, the automobile, a great difference," confides the discreet waiter. "Monsieur now rises early. Before, he was up early, also, but with a difference. Now he is to make a day's run in his car. The programme requires that he shall start with the sunrise. It demands steady nerves, the automobiling. One needs sleep,—and Monsieur goes to bed early. Oui, c'est dommage. Ça dérange les choses, but he will not stay. No; he is devoted to the automobile. He will even sleep for it. It will pass, perhaps, this mania. They pass always, the manias. Then again we will have the old crowd, and in the meantime there are, fortunately, those who do not own the machines."
Of places furnishing the motive for short automobile trips from Paris there is no end, and the roads running out of the city swarm with cars. There are quiet-loving country folk who protest, futilely, but even the country horse and the excitable barnyard fowl of France have become accustomed to the snort of the motor and the onward rush of the demon, and are, like Pet Marjorie's turkey, "more than usual calm" as the great machine speeds past.
The First Sportswoman of France
One meets them everywhere, these automobiles. Out in the Forest of Fontainebleau the mosses are still green and gold where the sunshine filters to them through the interlacing branches of the great trees. The rocks are still covered with grey and green and faint purple lichens. Little wood creatures rustle among the ferns and heather. Bird-notes sound from the branches overhead and from the thicket depths. The forest is still the grey-green, gold-green, brown and violet forest beloved of French artists, but one cannot walk for ten minutes along the woodland paths without hearing the blast of a Gabriel horn and seeing a huge automobile plunge by, its occupants blind to the light and shadow and colour, deaf to the rustle in the brake and the music from the bough, absorbed simply and solely in the breathless speed of their pace and in the skill with which the chauffeur swings round corners, dodges boulders, and avoids climbing trees, for to the motor maniac, Fontainebleau means the Hôtel d'Angleterre and luncheon. To the impotent rage of the artist clan, the motor has invaded Barbizon as well, and is to be found by the dozen, puffing and panting outside the inn sacred to the Bohemians of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre. "C'est très gentil, Barbizon—très chic," says Madame with an approving nod of her hooded head, as she climbs into the auto, after her luncheon. Shades of Millet and Corot and Rousseau! Barbizon has lived to be called "très chic" by a Parisian Duchess in a blue silk hood.