Once started, the automobile ran but fitfully the seventy-five kilometres to Niort, the whole party, with fear and trembling, scarcely daring to turn sidewise to regard the landscape, or take an extra breath. There was no assistance to be had this side of Niort, and should the sparking arrangements go back on us again, and we were not able to start, there was no hope of being towed in at the back of a sturdy farm-horse; the distance was too great. Once we thought we had nearly lost it again, but before we had actually lost our momentum the thing recovered itself, and we ran fearingly down the broad avenue into Niort, and asked anxiously as to whether there might be a grand maison des automobiles in the town.
Indeed there was, and in the twinkling of an eye we had shunted our poor lame duck into the courtyard of a workshop which gave employment to something like seventy-five hands, all engaged in the manufacture of automobiles which were exported to the ends of the earth.
Here was help surely. Nothing could be too great or too small for an establishment like this to undertake, and so we left the machine with an easy heart and hunted out the excellent Hôtel de France—the best hotel of its class between Paris and Bordeaux. We dined sumptuously on all the good things of the north and the south, to say nothing of fresh sardines from La Rochelle, not far distant, and we gave not a thought to the automobile again that night, but strolled on the quay by the little river Sêvre-Niortaise, and watched the moon rise over the old château donjon, and heard the rooks caw, and saw them circle and swing around its battlement in a final night-call before they went to rest. It was all very idyllic and peaceful, although Niort is, as may be inferred, an important centre for many things.
We had planned to be on the road again by eight the next morning, but, on arrival at the garage, or more correctly stated, the usine, where we had left the automobile the night before, we found it the centre of a curious group who were speculating—and had been since six o'clock that morning—as to what might be the particular new variety of disease that had attacked its vital parts so seriously that it still refused to go.
It was twelve o'clock, high noon, before it was discovered—with the aid of the electrician from the electric light works—that two tiny ends of copper wire, inside the coil (which a Frenchman calls a bobine), had become unsoldered, and only when by chance they rattled into contact would the sparking arrangements work as they ought.
This was something new for all concerned. None of us will be likely to be caught that way again. The cost was most moderate. It was not the automobile owner who paid for the experience this time, a thing which absolutely could not have happened outside of France. Pretty much the whole establishment had had a hand in the job, and, if the service had been paid for according to the time spent, it might have cost anything the establishment might have chosen to charge.
Ten francs paid the bill, and we went on our way rejoicing, after having partaken of a lunch, as excellent as the dinner we had eaten the night before, at the Hôtel de France.
La Rochelle, the city of the Huguenots, and later of Richelieu, was reached just as the setting sun was slanting its red and gold over the picturesque old port and the Tour de Richelieu. If one really wants to know what it looked like, let him hunt up Petitjean's "Port de la Rochelle" in the Musée de Luxembourg at Paris. Words fail utterly to describe the beauty and magnifycence of this hitherto unoverworked artists' sketching-ground.
We threaded our way easily enough through the old sentinel gateway spanning the main street, lined with quaint old arcaded, Spanish-looking houses, and drew up abreast of the somewhat humble-looking Hôtel du Commerce, on the Place d'Armes, opposite the ugly little squat cathedral, once wedded to the haughty Richelieu himself.