INTO THE JURAS
It was still drizzling next morning, so we were in no hurry to leave. We
plodded about the gray streets, picking up some things for the lunch
basket, and Narcissa and the Joy got a chance to try their nice new
French on real French people and were gratified to find that it worked
just the same as it did on Swiss people. Then the sky cleared and I
backed the car out of the big stable where it had spent the night, and
we packed on our bags and paid our bill--twenty-seven francs for all, or
about one dollar and thirty-five cents each for dinner, lodging, and
breakfast--tips, one franc each to waitress, chambermaid, and garageman.
If they were dissatisfied they did not look it, and presently we were
once more on the road, all the cylinders working and bankruptcy not yet
in sight. It was glorious and fresh along the lake-front--also
appetizing. We stopped by and by for a little mid-morning luncheon, and
a passing motorist, who probably could not believe we would stop merely
to eat at that hour, drew up to ask if anything was wrong with our car
and if he could help. They are kindly people, these French and Swiss.
Stop your car by the roadside and begin to hammer something, or to take
off a tire, and you will have offers of assistance from four out of
every five cars that pass.
There is another little patch of Switzerland again at the end of the
lake, and presently you run into Geneva, and trouble. Geneva is
certainly a curious place. The map of it looks as easy as nothing and
you go gliding into it full of confidence, and presently find yourself
in a perfect mess of streets that are not on the map at all, while all
the streets that _are_ on the map certainly have changed their names,
for you cannot find them where they should be, and no one has ever heard
of them. Besides, the wind is generally blowing--the _bise_--which does
not simplify matters. Narcissa inquired and I inquired, and then the
Joy, who, privately, I think, speaks the best French of any of us, also
inquired; but the combined result was just a big coalyard which a very
good-looking street led us straight into, making it necessary to back
out and apologize and feel ashamed. Then we heard somebody calling us,
and, looking around, saw the man in gray who had last directed us, and
who also felt ashamed, it seemed--of us, or himself, or something--and
had run after us to get us out of the mess. So he directed us again and
we started, but the labyrinth closed in once more--the dust and narrow
streets and blind alleys--and once again we heard a voice, and there was
the man in gray--he must have run a half a mile this time--waving and
calling and pointing the path out of the maze. It seemed that they were
fixing all the good streets and we must get through by circuitous bad
ones to the side of the city toward France. I asked him why they didn't
leave the good streets alone and fix the bad ones, but he only smiled
and explained some more, and once more we went astray, and yet once more
his voice came calling down the wind and he came up breathlessly, and
this time followed with us, refusing even standing room on the
running-board, until he got us out of the city proper and well headed
for France. We had grown fond of that man and grieved to see him go. We
had known him hardly ten minutes, I think, but friendships are not to be
measured by time.
On a pretty hill where a little stream of water trickled we ate our
first real luncheon--that is to say, we used our new stove. We cooked
eggs and made coffee, and when there came a sprinkle we stood under our
umbrellas or sat in the car and felt that this was really a kind of
gypsying, and worth while.
There was a waving meadow just above the bank and I went up there to
look about a little. No house was in sight, but this meadow was a part
of some man's farm. It was familiar in every corner to him--he had known
it always. Perhaps he had played in it as a child--his children had
played in it after him--it was inseparable from the life and happiness
of a home. Yet to us it was merely the field above our luncheon place--a
locality hardly noticed or thought of--barely to be remembered at all.
Crossing another lonely but fertile land, we entered the hills. We
skirted mountainsides--sometimes in sun, sometimes in shower--descended
a steep road, and passed under a great arched battlement that was part
of a frowning fortress guarding the frontier of France. Not far beyond,
at the foot of a long decline, lay a beautiful city, just where the
mountains notched to form a passage for the Rhone. It was Bellegarde,
and as we drew nearer some of the illusions of beauty disappeared.
French cities generally show best from a distance. Their streets are not
very clean and they are seldom in repair. The French have the best roads
and the poorest streets in the world.
We drew up in front of the custom house, and exhibited our French
_triptyque_. It was all right, and after it was indorsed I thought we
were through. This was not true. A long, excited individual appeared
from somewhere and began nervously to inspect our baggage. Suddenly he
came upon a small empty cigar box which I had put in, thinking it might
be useful. Cigars are forbidden, and at sight of the empty box our
wild-eyed attenuation had a fit. He turned the box upside down and shook
it; he turned it sidewise and looked into it; shook it again and knocked
on it as if bound to make the cigars appear. He seemed to decide that I
had hidden the cigars, for he made a raid on things in general. He
looked into the gasoline tank, he went through the pockets of the
catch-all and scattered our guidebooks and maps; then he had up the
cushion of the back seat and went into the compartment where this time
was our assortment of hats. You never saw millinery fly as it did in
that man's hands, with the head of the family and Narcissa and the Joy
grabbing at their flowers and feathers, and saying things in English
that would have hurt that man if he could have understood them. As for
him, he was repeating, steadily, "_Pas derange_"--"_Pas derange_," when
all the time he was deranging ruthlessly and even permanently. He got
through at last, smiled, bowed, and retired--pleased, evidently, with
the thoroughness of his investigation. But for some reason he entirely
overlooked our bags strapped on the footboard. We did not remind him.
The Pert of the Rhone is at Bellegarde. The pert is a place where in dry
weather the Rhone disappears entirely from sight for the space of
seventy yards, to come boiling up again from some unknown mystery.
Articles have been thrown in on one side--even live animals, it is
said--but they have never reappeared on the other. What becomes of them
is a matter of speculation. Perhaps some fearful underground maelstrom
holds them. There was no pert when we were there--there had been too
much rain. The Rhone went tearing through a gorge where we judged the
pert should be located in less watery seasons.
During the rest of the afternoon we had rather a damp time--showery and
sloppy, for many of the roads of these Jura foothills were in the
process of repair, and the rain had stopped the repairs halfway. It was
getting toward dusk when we came to Nantua--a lost and forgotten town
among the Jura cliffs. We stopped in front of the showier hotel there,
everything looked so rain-beaten and discouraging, but the woman who ran
it was even showier than her hotel and insisted on our taking a parlor
suite at some fabulous price. So we drove away and drew up rather sadly
at the Hotel du Lac, which on that dull evening was far from
fascinating. Yet the rooms they showed us were good, and the dinner--a
surprise of fresh trout just caught, served sizzling hot, fine baked
potatoes and steak, with good red wine aplenty--was such as to make us
forswear forevermore the showy hotels for the humbler inns of France.
But I am moving too fast. Before dinner we walked for a little in the
gray evening and came to an old church--one of the oldest in France, it
is said, built in the ninth century and called St. Michels. It is over a
thousand years old and looks it. It has not been much rebuilt, I think,
for invasion and revolution appear seldom to have surmounted the natural
ramparts of Nantua, and only the stormbeat and the corrosion of the
centuries have written the story of decay. Very likely it is as little
changed as any church of its time. The hand of restoration has troubled
it little. We slipped in through the gathering dusk, and tiptoed about,
for there were a few lights flickering near the altar and the outlines
of bowed heads. Presently a priest was silhouetted against the altar
lights as he crossed and passed out by a side door. He was one of a long
line that stretched back through more than half of the Christian era and
most of the history of France. When the first priest passed in front of
that altar France was still under the Carlovingian dynasty--under
Charles the Fat, perhaps; and William of Normandy would not conquer
England for two hundred years. Then nearly four hundred years more would
creep by--dim mediaeval years--before Joan of Arc should unfurl her
banner of victory and martyrdom. You see how far back into the mists we
are stepping here. And all those evenings the altar lights have been lit
and the ministration of priests has not failed.
There is a fine picture by Eugene Delacroix in the old church, and we
came back next morning to look at it. It is a St. Sebastian, and not the
conventional, ridiculous St. Sebastian of some of the old masters--a
mere human pincushion--but a beautiful youth, prostrate and dying,
pierced by two arrows, one of which a pitying male figure is drawing
from his shoulder. It must be a priceless picture. How can they afford
to keep it here?
The weather seemed to have cleared, and the roads, though wet, were
neither soft nor slippery. French roads, in fact, are seldom either--and
the fresh going along the lake-front was delightful enough. But we were
in the real Juras now, and one does not go through that range on a water
grade. We were presently among the hills, the road ahead of us rising to
the sky. Then it began to rain again, but the road was a good firm one
and the car never pulled better.
It was magnificent climbing. On the steepest grades and elbow turns we
dropped back to second, but never to low, and there was no lagging. On
the high levels we stopped to let the engine cool and to add water from
the wayside hollows. We were in the clouds soon, and sometimes it was
raining, sometimes not. It seemed for the most part an uninhabited
land--no houses and few fields--the ground covered with a short bushy
growth, grass and flowers. A good deal of it was rocky and barren.
On the very highest point of the Jura range, where we had stopped to
cool the motor, a woman came along, leading three little children. She
came up and said a few words in what sounded like an attempt at English.
We tried our French on her, but it did not seem to get inside. I said
she must speak some mountain patois, for we had used those same words
lower down with good results. But then she began her English again--it
was surely English this time, and, listening closely, we got the fringes
and tag ends of a curious story. She was Italian, and had been in New
York City. There, it seemed, she had married a Frenchman from the Juras,
who, in time, when his homeland had called him, had brought her back to
the hills. There he had died, leaving her with six children. She had a
little hut up the side lane, where they were trying to scratch a living
from the stony soil. Yes, she had chickens, and could let us have some
eggs. She also brought a pail with water for the radiator.
A little farther along we cooked the eggs and laid out all our nice
lunch things on natural stone tables and looked far down the Jura slope
on an ancient village and an old castle, the beginning of the world
across the range.
It was not raining now, and the air was soft and pleasant and the spot
as clean and sweet as could be. Presently the water was boiling and the
coffee made--instantaneous coffee, the George Washington kind. And
nothing could be fresher than those eggs, nothing unless it was the
butter--unsalted butter, which with jam and rolls is about the best
thing in the world to finish on.
[Illustration: DESCENDING THE JURAS]
We descended the Jura grades on the engine brake--that is, I let in the
clutch, cut off the gasoline supply and descended on first or second
speed, according to the grade. That saves the wheel brake and does no
damage to the motor. I suppose everybody knows the trick, but I did not
learn it right away, and there may be others who know as little. It was
a long way to the lower levels, and some of the grades were steep. Then
they became gradual, and we coasted--then the way flattened and we were
looking across a level valley, threaded by perfectly ordered roads to a
distant town whose roofs and spires gleamed in the sunlight of the May
afternoon. It was Bourg, and one of the spires belonged to the church of
Brou.