000
ОтложитьЧитал
Chapter V
By Seine And Oise – A Cruise In A Canot-Automobile
If automobiling on land in France is a pleasure, a voyage up a picturesque and historic French river in a canot-automobile is a dream, so at least we thought, four of us – and a boy to clean the engine, run errands, and to climb overboard and push us off when we got stuck in the mud.
Our "home port" was Les Andelys on the Seine, and we meet in the courtyard of the Hôtel Bellevue at five o'clock one misty, gray September morning for a fortnight's voyage up the Oise, which joins the Seine midway between Les Andelys and Paris.
There is nothing mysterious about an automobile boat any more than there is about the land automobile. It has its moods and vagaries, its good points and some bad ones. It is not as speedy as an automobile on shore, but it is more comfortable, a great deal more fun to steer, and less dangerous, and there is an utter absence of those chief causes of trouble to the automobile, punctures and what not happening to your tires. Then again there is, generally speaking, no crowd of traffic to run you into danger, and there is an absence of dust, to make up for which, when you are lying by waiting to go through a lock, you have mosquitoes of a fierce bloodthirsty kind which even the smoke from the vile tobacco of French cigarettes will not keep at a distance.
Our facile little automobile boat was called the "Cà et Là." Rightly enough named it was, too. The French give singularly pert and appropriate names to their boats. "Va t'on," "Quand même," and "Cà et Là" certainly tell the stories of their missions in their very names.
The boat itself, and its motor, too, was purely a French production, and, though of modest force and dimensions, would do its dozen miles an hour all day long.
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.
It was très bourgeois, but that was what we wanted, and, after a couple of hours eating and lolling about and playing with the cats and talking to the parrot, – a Martinique parrot who knew some English, – we took to the river again, and, after passing the locks at Bonnières, arrived at Mantes at five o'clock.
The nights draw in quickly, even in the early days of September, and we were bound to push on, if we were to reach Triel that night. We could have reached it, but were delayed at a lock, while it emptied itself and half a score of downriver barges, and, spying a gem of a riverside restaurant at Meulan, overhanging the very water itself, and hung with great golden orange globes of light (so-called Japanese lanterns, and nothing more), we were sentimentally enough inclined to want to dine with such Claude Melnotte accessories. This we did, and hunted up lodgings in the town for the night, vowing to get an extra early start in the morning to make up for lost time.
The Seine at Meulan takes on a certain luxuryous aspect so far as river-boating goes. There is even a "Cercle à la Voile," with yachts which, in the narrow confines of the river, look like the real thing, but which after all are very diminutive members of the family.
From this point the course of the Seine is a complicated winding among iles and ilots, which gives it that elongation which makes necessary hours of journeying by boat as against a quarter of the time by the road – as the crow flies – to the lower fortifications of Paris.
On either side, however, are chemins vicinales, which continually produce unthought-of vistas which automobilists who are making a record from Trouville to Paris know nothing of.
Triel possesses an imposing thirteenth-century Gothic church and an abominably ugly suspension-bridge of wire rope. It is a good place to buy a boat or a cargo of gypsum, which we know as "plaster of Paris;" otherwise the town is not remarkable, though charmingly situated.
The Oise is the first really great commercial tributary of the Seine. There is a mighty flow of commerce which ascends and descends the bosom of the Oise, extending even to the Low Countries and the German Ocean, through the Sambre to Antwerp and the Scheldt.
The Oise is classed as flottable from Beautor to Chauny, a distance of twenty kilometres, and navigable from Chauny to the Seine. Mostly it runs through the great plain of Picardie and forms the natural northern boundary to the ancient Ile de France. The navigable portion forms two sections. One, of fifty-five kilometres, extends between Chauny and Janville, and has been generally abandoned by water-craft because of the opening of the Canal Lateral à la Oise; the other section, of one hundred and four kilometres, is canalized in that it has been straightened here and there at sharp corners, dredged and endowed with seven locks.
The barge traffic of the Oise is mostly towed in convoys of six, but there is a chemin de halage, a tow-path, throughout the river's length. In general, the boats are of moderate size, the péniches being perhaps a hundred and twenty feet in length, the bateaux picards somewhat longer, and the chalands approximating one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy-five feet.
While, as stated above, the traction is generally by steam towboat, the more picturesque, if slower and more humble, tow-horse is more largely in evidence here than elsewhere in France.
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.
More distant, and more pleasing to many, is that variety of landscape made famous, and even popular, by Dupré and Daubigny. So, on the whole, Pontoise, and the country round about, should properly be classed among the things to which few have ever given more than a passing glance, but which have a vast reserve fund of attractions hidden behind them, needing only to be sought out to be admired.
St. Ouen l'Aumône, a tiny little town of a couple of thousand souls, opposite Pontoise, has two remarkable attractions which even a bird of passage might well take the time to view. One is the very celebrated Abbaye de Maubisson, indeed it might be called notorious, if one believed the chronicles relating to the proceedings which took place there under Angelique d'Estrees, sister of the none too saintly Gabrielle.
It was founded in 1236 by Blanche of Castile, for the former religieuses of Citeaux, and was justly celebrated in the middle ages for the luxuriousness of its appointments and the excellence of its design.
The other feature of St. Ouen l'Aumône, which got its name, by the way, from a former Archbishop of Rouen, is a remarkable example of one of those great walled farmyards in which the north of France, Normandy in particular, formerly abounded. It is all attached to what was known as the Parc de Maubisson, which itself is closed by a high, ancient wall with two turrets at the corners. This wall is supposed to date from the fourteenth century, and within are the remains of a vast storehouse or grange of the same century. The only building at all approaching this great storehouse is the Halle au Blé at Rouen, which it greatly resembles as to size. It is now in the hands of a grain merchant who must deal on a large scale, as he claims to have one hundred thousand gerbes (sheaves) in storage at one time. The interior is divided into three naves by two files of monocylindrical columns, though the eastern aisle has practically been demolished.
At Auvers, just above Pontoise, which is bound to Méry by an ugly iron bridge across the Oise, is a fine church of the best of twelfth and thirteenth century Gothic, with a series of Romanesque windows in the apse. Here, too, the country immediately environing Auvers and Méry is of the order made familiar by Daubigny and his school. French farmyards, stubble-thatched cottages, and all the rusticity which is so charming in nature draws continually group after group of artists from Paris to this particular spot at all seasons of the year. The homely side of country life has ever had a charm for city dwellers. Auvers is somewhat doubtfully stated as being the birthplace of François Villon – that prince of vagabonds. Usually Paris has been given this distinction.
Mêry is an elevated little place of something less than fifteen hundred souls. It has a church of the thirteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries, and a château which was constructed at the end of the fourteenth century by the Seigneur de Méry, Pierre d'Orgemont, grand chancellor of France. The domain was created a marquisat in 1665. The famous banker, Samuel Bernard, it seems, became the occupant, of the château in the reign of Louis XIV., and there received king and court.
On a certain occasion, as the season had advanced toward the chill of winter, the opulent seigneur made great fires of acacia wood. The king, who was present, said courteously to his host: "Know you well, Samuel, it is not possible for me to do this in my palace;" from which we may infer that it was a luxury which even kings appreciated.
There were no river obstructions to the free passage of our little craft between Pontoise and L'Isle-Adam, above Auvers. We were going by easy stages now, even the long tows of grain and coal-laden barges were gaining on us, for we were straggling disgracefully and stopping at almost every kilometre stone.
We tied up at Auvers, "Daubigny's Country," as we called it, and stayed for the night at the Hostellerie du Nord, a not very splendid establishment, but one with a character all its own. Auvers, and its neighbour Méry, together form one of the most delightful settlements in which to pass a summer, near to Paris, that could be possibly imagined, but with this proviso, that on Sunday one could take a day in town, for then tout le monde, the proprietor of the Hostellerie du Nord tells you, comes out to breathe the artistic atmosphere of Daubigny. How much they really care for Daubigny or his artistic atmosphere is a question.
At such times the tiny garden and the dining-room of the Hostellerie attempt to expand themselves to accommodate a hundred and fifty guests, whereas their capacity is perhaps forty. Something very akin to pandemonium takes place; it is amusing, no doubt, but it is not comfortable. Nothing ever goes particularly awry here, however; M. T – , the patron, is too good a manager for that, and a popular one, too, to judge from his Salon d'Exposition, which is hung about with a couple of hundred pictures presented by his admiring painter guests from time to time. The viands are bountiful and splendidly garnished and the consommations au premier choix. Then there are the occupants of "les petits ménages" to swoop down on your table for crumbs, – pigeons only, – and in cages a score or more of canary-birds, and, as a sort of contrast, dogs and cats and fowls of all varieties of breed.
It sounds rather uncomfortable, but we did not find it so at all, and, speaking from experience, it is one of the most enticing of the various "artists' resorts" known.
It is but a short six kilometres to L'Isle-Adam, and it was ten the next morning before we embarked. It is a small town mostly given over to suburban houses of Paris brokers and merchants. It is an attractive enough town as a place of residence, but of works of artistic worth it has practically none, if we except the not very splendid fifteenth-century church.
The largest of the islands here, just above the lock, was formerly occupied by the château of the Prince de Conti. It was destroyed at the Revolution but its place has been taken by a modern villa whose gardens are kept up with remarkable skill and care, albeit it is nothing but a villa coquette on a large scale. L'Isle-Adam received its name from the Connetable Adam who first built a château here in 1069.
The Forêt de l'Isle-Adam is one of those noble woods in which the north of France abounds. Like the Forêt de Ermenonville, Compiègne, and Chantilly it is beautifully kept, with great roads running straight and silent through avenues of oaks.
The Château de Cassan, but a short distance into the Forêt, has a wonderful formal garden, laid out after the English manner and ranking with the parks of the Trianon and Ermenonville.
After L'Isle-Adam we did not stop, except for the lock at Rougemont, till the smoke-stacks and factory-belchings of Creil loomed up before us thirty kilometres beyond.
Creil is commercial, very commercial, and is a railway junction like Clapham Junction or South Chicago, – no, not quite; nowhere else, on top of the green earth, are there quite such atrocious monuments to man's lack of artistic taste. It is a pity Creil is so banal on close acquaintance, for it is bejewelled with emerald hills and a tiny belt of silvery water which, in the savage days of long ago, must have given it preeminence among similar spots in the neighbourhood.
Just above is Pont St. Maxence, delightfully named and delightfully placed, with a picture church of the best of Renaissance architecture and an atmosphere which made one want to linger within the confines of the town long after his allotted time. We stayed nearly half a day; we ate lunch in a little restaurant in the shadow of the bridge; we bought and sent off picture postcards, and we took snap-shots and strolled about and gazed at the little gem of a place until all the gamins in town were following in our wake.
Compiègne was next in our itinerary. We knew Compiègne, from the shore, as one might say, having passed and repassed it many times, and we knew all its charms and attractions, or thought we did, but we were not prepared for the effect of the rays of the setting sun on the quaintly serrated sky-line of the roof-tops of the city, as we saw it from the river.
It was bloody red, and the willows along the river's bank were a dim purply mélange of all the refuse of an artist's palette. Compiègne has many sides, but its picturesque sunset side is the most theatrical grouping of houses and landscape we had seen for many a long day.
Here at Compiègne the vigour of the Oise ends. Above it is a weakly, purling stream, the greater part of the traffic going by the Canal Lateral, while below it broadens out into a workable, industrial sort of a waterway which is doing its best to contribute its share to the prosperity of France.
We learn here, as elsewhere, where it has been attempted, that the hand of man cannot irretrievably make or reclaim the course of a river. Deprived of its natural bed and windings, it will always form new ones of its own making in conformity to the law of nature. The attempt was made to straighten the course of the Oise, but in a very short time the latent energies of the stream, more forceful than were supposed, made fresh windings and turnings, the ultimate development of which was found to very nearly approximate those which had previously been done away with, and so the Canal Lateral, which commences at Compiègne, was built.
Compiègne's attractions are many, its generally well-kept and prosperous air, its most excellent hôtels (two of them, though we bestowed our august patronage on the Hôtel de France), its château of royal days of Louis XV., and its Hôtel de Ville.
Stevenson, in his "Inland Voyage," has said that what charmed him most at Compiègne was the Hôtel de Ville. Truly this will be so with any who have a soul above electric trams and the art nouveau; it is the most dainty and lovable of Renaissance Hôtels de Ville anywhere to be seen, with pignons, and gables, and niches with figures in them jutting out all over it.
Then there is the novel and energetic little jaquemart, the little bronze figures of which strike the hours and even the halves and quarters. There is not a detail of this charming building, inside or out, which will not be admired by all. It is far and away more interesting in its appeal than the château itself.
Our next day's journey was to Noyon. We were travelling by boat, to be sure, but a good part of the personnel of the hôtel, including the hostler, and the bus-driver, whose business was at the station, came down to see us off. Like a bird in a cage he gazed at us with longing eyes, and once let fall the remark that he wished he had nothing else to do but sit in the bow of a boat and "twiddle a few things" to make it go faster. He overlooked entirely the things that might happen, such as having to pull your boat up on shore and pull out the weeds and rubbish which were stopping your intake pipe, or climb overboard yourself and disentangle water-plants from your propeller, if indeed it had not lost a blade and you were forced to be ignominiously towed into the next large town.
It looks all very delightful travelling about in a dainty and facile little canot-automobile, and for our part we were immensely pleased with this, our first, experience of so long a voyage. Nothing had happened to disturb the tranquillity of our journey, not a single mishap had delayed us, and we had not a quarrel with a bargeman or an éclusier, we had been told we should have. We were in luck, and though we only averaged from fifty to sixty kilometres a day, we were all day doing it, and it seemed two hundred.
We lunched at Ribecourt and struck the most ponderously named hotel we had seen in all our travels, and it was good in spite of its weight. "Le Courrier des Pays et des Trois Jambons," or something very like it, was its name, and its patronne was glad to see us, and killed a fowl especially on our account, culled some fresh lettuce in the garden, and made a dream of a rum omelette, which she said was the national dish of America. It isn't, as most of us know, but it was a mighty good omelette, nevertheless, and the rum was sufficiently fiery to give it a zest.
We spent that night at Noyon of blessed memory. Noyon is not down in the itineraries of many guide-book tourists, which is a pity for them. It is altogether the most unspoiled old-world town between the Ile de France and the Channel ports of Boulogne and Calais through which so many Anglo-Saxon travellers enter. It is off the beaten track, though, and that accounts for it. Blessed be the tourist agencies which know nothing beyond their regular routes, and thus leave some forgotten and neglected tourist-points yet to be developed.
The majesty of Noyon's cathedral of Notre Dame is unequalled in all the world. The grim towers rise boldly without ornament or decoration of any kind, and are cowled by a peculiarly strange roofing. The triple porch is denuded of its decorative statues, and there is a rank Renaissance excrescence in the rear which is unseemly, but for all that, as a mediæval religious monument of rank, it appeals to all quite as forcibly as the brilliantly florid cathedral at Beauvais, or the richly proud Amiens, its nearest neighbours of episcopal rank.
We did not sit in front of the Hôtel du Nord at Noyon, as did Stevenson, and hear the "sweet groaning of the organ" from the cathedral doorway, but we experienced all the emotions of which he wrote in his "Inland Voyage," and we were glad we came.
The Hôtel de France and the Hôtel du Nord share the custom of the ever-shifting traffic of voyageurs at Noyon. The latter is the "automobile" hotel, and accordingly possesses many little accessories which the other establishment lacks. Otherwise they are of about the same value, and in either you will, unless you are a very heavy sleeper, think that the cathedral-bells were made to wake the dead, so reverberant are their tones and so frequent their ringing.
It was Stevenson's wish that, if he ever embraced Catholicism, he should be made Bishop of Noyon. Whether it was the simple magnitude of its quaint, straight-lined cathedral, or the generally charming and riant aspect of the town, one does not know, but the sentiment was worthy of both the man and the place.
"Les affaires sont les affaires," as the French say, and business called us to Paris; so, after a happy ten days on the Seine and Oise, we cut our voyage short with the avowed intention of some day continuing it.