The Automobilist Abroad

by M. F. Mansfield

We got away from the landing-stage of the Touring Club de France at Les Andelys in good time, our provisions, our gasoline and oil, our river charts, our wraps and ourselves all stowed comfortably away in the eight metres of length of our little boat. Our siren gave a hoot which startled the rooks circling about the donjon walls of Château Gaillard over our heads, and we passed under the brick arches of the bridge for a twelve-mile run to the first lock at Courcelles.

The process of going through a river lock in France is not far different from the same process elsewhere, except that the all-powerful Touring Club de France has secured precedence for all pleasure boats over any other waiting craft. It really costs nothing, but you give a franc to the éclusier, and the way is thereby made the easier for the next arrival. The objection to river-locks is their frequency in some parts. There is one stretch of thirty or forty kilometres on the Marne with thirty-three locks. That costs something, truly.

We knew the Seine valley intimately, by road along both its banks, at any rate, and we were hopeful of reaching Triel that night, near the junction of the Seine and Oise.

We passed our first lock at Courcelles, just before seven o'clock, and had a good stretch of straight water ahead of us before Vernon was reached.

You cannot miss your way, of course, when travelling by river, but you can be at a considerable loss to know how far you have come since your last stopping-place, or rather you would be if the French government had not placed little white kilometre stones all along the banks of the "navigable" and "flottable" rivers, as they have along the great national roads on land. Blessed be the paternal French government; the traveller in la belle France has much for which to be grateful to it: its excellent roadways, its sign-boards, and its kilometre stones most of all. The motor-boat is highly developed in France from the simple fact that you can tour on it. You can go all over France by a magnificent system of inland waterways; from the Seine to the Marne; from the Oise to the Sambre—and so to Antwerp and Ghent; from the Loire to the Rhône; and even from the Marne to the Rhine; and from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. France is the touring-ground par excellence for the automobile boat.

Here's a new project of travel for those who want to do what others have not done to any great extent. Africa and the Antartic continent have been explored, and the North Pole bids fair to be discovered by means of a flying-machine ere long, so, with no new worlds to conquer, one might do worse in the way of pleasurable travel than to explore the waterways of France.

Maistre wrote his "Voyage Autour de Ma Chambre" and Karr his "Voyage Autour de Mon Jardin," hence any one who really wants to do something similar might well make the tour of the Ile de France by water. It can be done, and would be a revelation of novelty, if one would do it and write it down.

For the moment we were bound up the Oise; we had passed Vernon and Giverny, sitting snug on the hillside by the mouth of the Ept, where we knew there were countless Americans, artists and others, sitting in Gaston's garden or playing tennis on a sunburnt field beside the road. Foolish business that, with a river like the Seine so near at hand, and because it was the custom at Giverny, a custom grown to be a habit, which is worse, we liked not the place, in spite of its other undeniable charms.

We put in for lunch at La Roche-Guyon, a trim little town lying close beneath the Renaissance château of the La Rochefoucauld's. There are two waterside hotels at La Roche-Guyon, beside the ugly wire-rope bridge, but we knew them of old, and knew they were likely to be full of an unspeakable class of Parisian merrymakers. There may be others who patronize these delightfully situated riverside inns, but the former predominate in the season. Out of season it may be quite different.

We hunted out a little café in the town, whose patron we knew, and prevailed upon his good wife to give us our lunch en famille, which she did and did well.