The natives speak French—of a sort—here and there in Belgium, but they also speak Flemish and Walloon.
We left Paris by the Route de Belgique, crossed the frontier at Givet, and made our first stop at Rethel, 193 kilometres away, where we passed the night, at the Hôtel de France. For a town of less than six thousand people Bethel is quite a metropolis. It has a grand establishment known as the Société d'Automobiles Bauchet, which will cater for any and every want of the automobilist, and has a half-dozen sights of first rank, from the old Hôtel Dieu to the bizarre doubled-up Eglise St. Nicolas and the seventeenth-century, wood-roofed market-house.
Sorbon, four kilometres away, is the birthplace of Robert Sorbon, the founder of the Sorbonne at Paris, and is a classic excursion which is never omitted by true pilgrims who come to Rethel.
Fifty-three kilometres from Rethel is Rocroi, a name which means little to most strangers in France. It is near the Belgian frontier and saw bloody doings in the Franco-Prussian war.
Rocroi is a pompous little fortified place reached only by one road and a narrow-gauge railway—literally two streaks of iron rust—which penetrate up to the very doors of a pretentious Hôtel de Ville with a Doric façade, and not much else that is remarkable.
The town has a population of but two thousand, is surrounded by fortifications, contains a Caserne, a Sous-Préfecture, a Prison, and a Palais de Justice. All this officialdom weights things down considerably, and, what with the prospect of the custom-house arrangements at Givet, and the necessity of demonstrating to an over-zealous gendarme at Rocroi that we really had a "Certificat de Capacité," and that the photograph which it bore (which didn't look the least like us) was really ours, we were considerably angered and delayed on our departure the next morning, particularly as we had already been three days en route and the frontier was still thirty odd kilometres away.
As one passes Rocroi, Belgium and France blend themselves into an indistinguishable unit so far as characteristics go. Manners and customs here change but slowly, and the highroad must be followed many kilometres backward toward Paris before one gets out of the influence of Flemish characteristics.
We finally got across the Belgium frontier at Givet, at least we got our passavant here, though the Belgian customs formalities took place at Heer-Agimont, formalities which are delightfully simple, though evolving the payment of a fee of twelve per cent. of the declared value of your automobile. You get your receipt for money paid, which you present at the frontier station by which you leave and get it back again—if you have not lost your papers. If you have you might as well prepare to live in Belgium the rest of your life, as a friend of ours told us he had done, when we met him unexpectedly on a café terrace at Ostende a week later.
There be those who are content to grovel in dark alleys, among a sordid picturesqueness, surrounded by a throng of garlic-sodden natives, rather than while their time away on the open mountainside or wide-spread lake or plain. All such are advised to keep away from Southern Belgium, the Ardennes, and the valley of the Meuse at Dinant and Namur.
We lunched at the Hôtel des Postes at Dinant on the Meuse, and so lovely was the town and its environs, and the twenty-eight kilometres of valley road to Namur (no pavé here), that it took us eight hours of a long summer's day to get away from Dinant and get settled down again for the night in the Hôtel d'Harscamp at Namur.