It was easy going by Château Thierry and the episcopal city of Meaux, retracing almost the itinerary of the fleeing Louis XVI., and, as we entered Paris by the Porte de Vincennes,—always by villainous roadways, this getting in and out of Paris,—we red-inked another twelve hundred kilometre stretch of roadway on our record map of France.
Chapter V
By Seine And Oise—A Cruise In A Canot-Automobile
If automobiling on land in France is a pleasure, a voyage up a picturesque and historic French river in a canot-automobile is a dream, so at least we thought, four of us—and a boy to clean the engine, run errands, and to climb overboard and push us off when we got stuck in the mud.
Our "home port" was Les Andelys on the Seine, and we meet in the courtyard of the Hôtel Bellevue at five o'clock one misty, gray September morning for a fortnight's voyage up the Oise, which joins the Seine midway between Les Andelys and Paris.
There is nothing mysterious about an automobile boat any more than there is about the land automobile. It has its moods and vagaries, its good points and some bad ones. It is not as speedy as an automobile on shore, but it is more comfortable, a great deal more fun to steer, and less dangerous, and there is an utter absence of those chief causes of trouble to the automobile, punctures and what not happening to your tires. Then again there is, generally speaking, no crowd of traffic to run you into danger, and there is an absence of dust, to make up for which, when you are lying by waiting to go through a lock, you have mosquitoes of a fierce bloodthirsty kind which even the smoke from the vile tobacco of French cigarettes will not keep at a distance.
Our facile little automobile boat was called the "Cà et Là." Rightly enough named it was, too. The French give singularly pert and appropriate names to their boats. "Va t'on," "Quand même," and "Cà et Là" certainly tell the stories of their missions in their very names.
The boat itself, and its motor, too, was purely a French production, and, though of modest force and dimensions, would do its dozen miles an hour all day long.