We left Paris by the ghastly route leading out through the plain of Gennevilliers, where Paris empties her sewage and grows asparagus, passing St. Denis and its royal catacombs of the ancient abbey, and so on to Pontoise, all over as vile a stretch of road as one will find in the north of France, always excepting the suburbs of St. Germain.
Pontoise is all very well in its way, and is by no means a dull, uninteresting town, but we had no thoughts for it at the moment; indeed, we had no thoughts of anything but to put the horrible suburban Paris pavé as far behind us as we could before we settled down to enjoyment.
At Pontoise we suddenly discovered that we were on the wrong road. So much for not knowing our way out of town—twenty-five kilometres of axle-breaking cobblestones!
We had some consolation in knowing that it was equally as bad by any northern road out of Paris, so we only had the trouble of making a twenty-kilometre detour through the valley of the Oise, by our old haunts of Auvers and L'Isle-Adam to Chantilly and Senlis.
We got our clue to the itinerary of the road to the north from a view of an old poster issued by the "Messageries Royales" just previous to the Revolution (a copy of which is given elsewhere in this book).
Many were the times we, and all well-habituated travellers in France, had swung from Calais to Paris by train, with little thought indeed as to what lay between. True, we had, more than once, "stopped off" at Amiens and Abbeville to see their magnificent churches, and we had spent a long summer at Etaples and Montreuil-sur-Mer, two "artists' haunts" but little known to the general traveller; but we never really knew the lay of the land north of Paris, except as we had got it from the reading of Dumas, Stevenson's "Inland Voyage," and the sentimental journeyings of the always delightful Sterne.
We made Chantilly our stop for lunch, en route to Senlis. We ought not to have done this, for what with the loafing horse-jockeys in the cafés, and the trainers and "cheap sports" hanging about the hotels, Chantilly does not impress one as the historical shrine that it really is.
Chantilly is sporty, très sportive, as the French call it, as is inevitable of France's most popular race-track, and there is an odour of America, Ireland, and England over all. How many jockeys of these nationalities one really finds at Chantilly the writer does not know, but, judging from the alacrity with which the hotels serve you ham and eggs and the café waiters respond to a demand for whiskey (Scotch, Irish, or American), it may be assumed that the alien population is very large.
We had our lunch at the Hôtel du Grand Condé, which is marked with three stars in the automobile route-books. This means that it is expensive,—and so we found it. It was a good enough hotel of its kind, but there was nothing of local colour about it. It might have been at Paris, Biarritz, or Monte Carlo.
The great attractions of Chantilly are the château and park and the collections of the Duc d'Aumale, famed alike in the annals of history and art. We were properly appreciative, and only barely escaped being carried off by our guide to see the stables—as if we had not suffered enough from the horse craze ever since we had struck the town.