The Automobilist Abroad — Text and Context

it was done with a little six horse-power car, which suffered no accidents save those that one is likely to meet with in an afternoon's promenade. The automobile itself weighed, with its baggage and accessories, practically six hundred kilos, and with its two passengers 760 kilos. The distance covered was 4,496 kilometres.

Part II Touring In France

Chapter I Down Through Touraine: Paris To Bordeaux

As old residents of Paris we, like other automobilists, had come to dread the twenty-five or thirty kilometres which lead from town out through Choisy-le-Roi and Villeneuve St. Georges, at which point the road begins to improve, and the execrable suburban Paris pavement, second to nothing for real vileness, except that of Belgium, is practically left behind, all but occasional bits through the towns.

At any rate, since our automobile horse was eating his head off in the garage at St. Germain, we decided on one bright May morning to conduct him forthwith by as comfortable a road as might be found from St. Germain around to Choisy-le-Roi.

Getting across Paris is one of the dreaded things of life. For the traveller by train who, fleeing from the fogs of London, as he periodically does in droves from November to February of each year, desires to make the south-bound connection at the Gare de Lyon, it is something of a problem. He may board the "_Ceinture_" with a distrust the whole while that his train may not make it in time, or he may go by cab, provided he will run the risk of some of his numerous impedimenta being left behind, for--speak it lightly--the Englishman is still found who travels with his bath-tub, though, if he is at all progressive, it may be a collapsible india-rubber affair which you blow up like the tires of an automobile.

For the automobilist there is the same dread and fear. To avoid this one has simply to make his way carefully from St. Germain, via Port Marly, or Marly-Bailly, to St. Cyr (where is the great military school), to Versailles, thence to Choisy-le-Roi via the _Route Nationale_ which passes to the south of Sceaux. The route is not, perhaps, the shortest, and it takes something of the skill of the old pathfinders to worry it out, but it absolutely avoids the pavements between St. Germain and Versailles and equally avoids the drive through Paris with its attendant responsibilities.

The automobilist, once clear of Paris, has only to think of the open road. There will be little to bother him now, save care in negotiating the oft-times narrow, awkward turnings of an occasional small town where, if it is market-day, untold disaster may await him if he does not look sharp.

On the occasion of our flight south, nothing on the whole journey happened to give us any concern, save at Pithiviers, where a market-wagon with a staid old farm-horse--who did not mean any harm--charged us and lifted off the right mud-guard, necessitating an hour's work or more at the blacksmith's to straighten it out again.

At any rate, we had covered a trifle over a hundred kilometres from Paris, and that was something. We lunched well at the Hôtel de la Poste, and sent off to city-bound friends in the capital samples of the lark patties for which the town is famous.

Nearly every town in France has its specialty; Pithiviers its _pâté des allouettes;_ Montélimar its _nougat_; Axat its _mousserons_; Perigueux its _truffes_, and Tours its _rillettes_. When one buys them away from the land of their birth he often buys dross, hence it is a real kindness to send back eatable souvenirs of one's round, much more kind than would be the tawdry jugs and plates emblazoned in lurid colours, or white wood napkin-rings and card-cases, usually gathered in as souvenirs.

It is forty-two kilometres to Orleans, one of the most historic and, at the same time, one of the most uninteresting cities in France, a place wholly without local dignity and distinction. Its hotels, cafés, and shops are only second-rate for a place of its rank, and the manners and customs of its people but weak imitations of those of Paris. You can get anything you may need in the automobile line most capably attended to, and you can be housed and fed comfortably enough in either of the two leading hotels, but there is nothing inspiring or even satisfying about it, as we knew from a half-dozen previous occasions.

We slept that night beneath the frowning donjon walls of Beaugency's L'Ecu de Bretagne, for something less than six francs apiece for dinner, lodging, and morning coffee, and did not regret in the least the twenty-five kilometres we had put between us and Orleans.