The environs of Conflans-fin-d'Oise are of a marvellous charm, but the immediate surroundings, great garages of coal boats and barges, coal-yards where towboats are filling up, and all the grime of an enormous water-borne traffic which here divides, part to go Parisward and part down-river, make it unlovely enough.
Three kilometres up-river is a little riverside inn called the "Goujon de l'Oise." It is a pleasant place to lunch, but otherwise "fishy," as might be supposed.
Back toward Meulan and on the heights above Triel are nestled a half-dozen picturesque little red-roofed villages which are not known at all to travellers from Paris by road or rail. It is curious how many sylvan spots one can find almost within plain sight of Paris. There are wheat-fields within sight of Montmartre and haystacks almost under the shadow of Mont Valerian.
At Evequemont, just back of Conflans, some eight hundred souls eke out an existence on their small farms and live the lives of their grandfathers before them, with never so much as a thought as to what may be happening at the capital twenty kilometres away.
Boisemont is another tiny village, with an eighteenth-century château which would form an idyllic retreat from the cares of city ways. Courdimanche, a few miles farther on, is unknown and unspoiled. It crowns a hilltop, with its diminutive and unusual red-roofed church overtopping all and visible from the river, or from the rolling country round about, for many miles. Here the Oise makes a long parallelogram-like turn from Maurecourt around to Eragny, perhaps two miles in a bee-line, but seemingly twenty by the river's course.
The land automobile has a distinct advantage here in speed over the canot, but one's point of view is not so lovely. It is only twelve kilometres to Pontoise, where one passes the barrage just below the town and saunters on shore for a spell, just to get acquainted with the place that Parisians know so well by name, and yet so little in reality.
Pontoise is the metropolis of the Oise, though it, too, is a veritable French country town, such as one would hardly expect to find within twenty kilometres of Paris. The islands of the river are dotted with trees and petit maisons de campagne, and the right bank is bordered with great chalky cliffs, as is the Seine in Normandy.
The general appearance of Pontoise is most pleasing. At first glance it looks like a mediæval Gothic city, and again even Oriental. At any rate, it is an exceedingly unworldly sort of a place, with here and there remains of its bold ramparts and its zigzag and tortuous streets, but with no very great grandeur anywhere to be remarked, except in the Eglise St. Maclou.
The history of Pontoise is long and lurid, beginning with the times of the Gauls when it was known as Briva Isaroe. It is a long time since the ramparts protected the old Château of the Counts of Vexin—literally the land dedicated to Vulcan (pagus Vulcanis)—where many French kings often resided. Many religious establishments flourished here, too, all more or less under royal patronage, including the Abbeys of St. Mellon and St. Martin, and the Couvent des Cordeliers, in whose splendid refectory the exiled Parlement held its sessions in 1652, 1720, and 1753. Out of this circumstance grew the proverb or popular saying, "Avoir l'air de revenir de Pontoise." The domain of Pontoise belonged in turn to many seigneurs, but up to the Revolution it was still practically une ville monastique.
As one comes to the lower streets of the town, near the station, and between it and the river, the resemblance to a little corner of the Pays Bas is remarkable, and therein lies its picturesqueness, if not grandeur. Artists would love the narrow Rue des Attanets, with its curious flanking houses of wood and stone, and the Rue de Rouen, which partakes of much the same characteristics. Along the river are great flour-mills, with wash-houses and red-armed, blue-bloused women eternally washing and rinsing. All this would furnish studies innumerable to those who are able to fabricate mouldy walls and tumble-down picturesqueness out of little tubes of colour and gray canvas. Here, too, at Pontoise, in its little port, none too cleanly because of the refuse and grime of ashes and coal soot, one sees the first of the heavy chalands loaded with iron ore from the Ardennes, or coal from Belgium, making their way to the wharves of Paris via the Canal St. Denis.