By Rhône And Saône
[Illustration: Rhone & Saone]
It is the dream of the Marseillais that some day the turgid Rhône may
be made to empty itself at the foot of the famous Cannebière, and so
add to the already great prosperity of the most cosmopolitan and
picturesque of Mediterranean ports.
The idea has been thought of since Roman times, and Napoleon himself
nearly undertook the work. In later days radical and vehement
candidates for senatorships and deputyships have promised their
Marseilles and Bouches-du-Rhône constituencies much more, with regard
to the same thing, than the hand of man is ever likely to be able to
accomplish.
The Rhône still pushes its way through the Crau and the Camargue and
comes to the sea many kilometres west of the Planier light and
Château d'If, which guard the entrance to Marseilles's Old Port.
We had backed and filled many times between Martigues and Marseilles
during the interval which we so enjoyably spent _chez Chabas_, and we
had come to know this unknown little corner of old Provence
intimately, and to love it.
Marseilles was our great dissipation, its hotels, its cafés and
restaurants, its cosmopolitan life and movement, its gaiety and the
picturesqueness of its old streets and wharves. Marseilles is a
neglected tourist point; it should be better known; but it is no
place for automobilists, unless they are prepared for ten kilometres,
in any direction, of the most villainous suburban roadway in France.
The roadways themselves are good enough; it is the abnormal and the
peculiar nature of the traffic that makes them so disagreeable; great
hooting tramways, _charettes_ loaded with all the products of the
earth and the hands of man, and drawn by long tandem lines, three,
four, five, and even six horses to a single cart. Added to this, the
exits and entrances are all up and down hill, and, accordingly, the
roadways of suburban Marseilles are a terror to stranger
automobilists and an eternal regret to those who live near-by.
We went up the Rhône in a howling mistral, against it, mark you, for
it pleases the Ruler of the universe to have that cyclonic breeze of
the Rhône valley, one of the three plagues of Provence, blow always
from the north.
We left Martigues in an extraordinary and unusual fog, reminiscent of
London, except that it was not black and sooty. It was dense,
however; dense as if it were enshrouding the Grand Banks, and of the
same impenetrable, milky consistency. To be sure the morning sun had
not had an opportunity as yet to burn it off--automobilists on tour
are early birds, and the autumn sun rises late.
Up around the eastern shore of the Etang de Berre we went, and,
crossing the Tête Noire, passed Salon just as a pale yellow light
struggled through the rifts just topping the Maritime Alps off to the
eastward. We could not see the mountains, but we knew they were
there, for we still had lingering memories of a long pull we once
made off in that direction, with an old crock of an automobile of
primitive make in the early days of the sport, or the art, whichever
one chooses to call it, though it unquestionably was an art then to
keep an automobile going at all.
By the time Arles was reached the sun was burning with a midsummer
glare, as it does here for three hundred or more days in the year.
At Arles one is in the very cauldron of the atmosphere of things
Provençal, art, letters, history, and romance, all of which are kept
alive by the _Félibres_ and their fellows.
Mistral, the poet, is the master-singer of them all, and whether he
chants of his "Own glad Kingdom of Provence," at Maillane among the
olive-trees, far inland, or of:
"The peace which descends upon the troubled ocean
And he his wrath forgets,
Flock from Martigues the boats with wing-like motion,
And fishes fill their nets,"
it is all the same; the subtle, penetrating atmosphere and sentiment
of Provence is over all.
Arles is the head centre. It is a city of monumental and celebrated
art, and one may spend a day, a week, or a month, wandering in and
out and about its old Roman arena (still so well preserved that it
presents its occasional bull-fight for the delectation of the
bloodthirsty), its antique theatre, its museums, its cathedral and
its cloister, or among the tombs of the Aliscamps.
We did all these things, indeed we had done them before, but they
were ever marvellous just the same, and in the museum we were always
running on Mistral himself, who, in his waning years, finds his
greatest delight in arranging and rearranging the exhibits of his
newly founded Musée Arletan.
The hotels of Arles are a disappointment. The Hôtel du Nord, with a
portico of the old Forum built into its walls, and the Hôtel du
Forum, on the Place du Forum, are well enough in their way,--they are
certainly well conducted,--but they lack "atmosphere," and instead of
the _cuisine du pays_, you get ham and eggs and _bifteck_ served to
you. This is wrong and bad business, if the otherwise capable
proprietors only knew it.
One does better in the environs. At St. Rémy, at the Grand Hôtel de
Provence, you will get quite another sort of fare: _hors d'oeuvres_
of a peculiarly pungent variety, not forgetting the dark purple,
over-ripe olives, a _ragoût en casserole_, a _filet d'agneau_ with a
_sauce Provençale_, and a _poulet_ and a salad which will make one
dream of the all but lost art of Brillat-Savarin. They are good
cooks, the _chefs_ of Provence, of the small cities and large towns
like St. Rémy, Cavaillon, Salon, and Carpentras, but everybody will
not like their liberal douches of oil any more than they will the
penetrating garlic flavour in everything.
We took a turn backward on our route from Arles and went to Les Baux,
the now dismal ruin of a once proud feudal city whose seigneurs held
sway over some sixty cities of Provence.
To-day it is a Pompeii, except it is a hill town worthy to rank with
those picturesque peaks of Italy and Dalmatia. Its château walls have
crumbled, but its subterranean galleries, cut three stories down into
the rock itself, are much as they always were. Everywhere are grim,
doleful evidences of a glory that is past and a population that is
dead or moved away. The sixteen thousand souls of mediæval times have
shrunk to something like two hundred to-day--most of them shepherds,
apparently, and the others picture post-card sellers.
It is a very satisfactory little mountain climb from the surrounding
plain up to the little plateau just below the peak at Les Baux,
though the entire distance from Arles is scarcely more than fifteen
kilometres, and the actual climb hardly more than four. The
razor-back mountain chain, upon one peak of which Les Baux sits, is
known as the Alpilles.
All of the immediate neighbourhood (scarce a dozen kilometres from
where the beaten track passes through Arles) is a veritable museum of
relics of the glory of the heroic age. Caius Marius entrenched
himself within these walls of rock and two thousand years ago planted
the foundations of the Mausoleum and Arc de Triomphe which are the
pride of the inhabitant of St. Rémy and the marvel of what few
strangers ever come. They are veritable antiques--"Les Antiquités,"
as the people of St. Rémy familiarly call them, and rise to-day as
monuments of the past, gilded by the Southern sun and framed with all
the brilliancy of a Provençal landscape.
We slept at St. Rémy, and made the next morning for Tarascon, with
memories of Dumas and Daudet and Tartarin and the Tarasque pushing us
on.
Tarascon has a real appeal for the stranger; at every step he will
picture the _locale_ of Daudet's whimsical tale, and will well
understand how it was that the prisoners' view from the narrow-barred
window of the Château at Tarascon was so limited.
There is a fine group of Renaissance architectural monuments at
Tarascon, and a street of arcaded house-fronts which will make the
artist of the party want to settle down to work.
Across the river is Beaucaire, famous for its great fair of ages
past, the greatest trading fair of mediæval times, when merchants and
their goods came from Persia, India, and Turkey, and all corners of
the earth. The Château of Beaucaire is a fine ruin, but no more; it
is not worth the climbing of the height to examine it.
A little farther on is Bellegarde, where Dumas placed Caderousse's
little inn, the unworthy Caderousse and his still more unworthy wife,
who finished the career of Edmond Dantès while he was masquerading as
the Abbé. There is no inn here to-day which can be identified as that
of the romance, but Dumas's description of its sun-burnt
surroundings, the canal, the scanty herbage, and the white, parched
roadway, is much the same as what one sees today, and there is a tiny
_auberge_ beside the canal, which might satisfy the imaginative.
Avignon, the city of the seven French popes, who reigned seventy
years, was the next stopping-place on our itinerary.
We put up at the Hôtel Crillon and fared much as one fares in any
provincial large town. We were served with imitation Parisian
repasts, and were asked if we would like to read the London _Times_.
Why the London _Times_ no one knew: why not the New Orleans
_Picayune_ and be done with it?
We did not want to do anything of the sort, we merely wanted to "do"
the town, to see the tomb of Pope Jean XXII. in the cathedral, to
walk, if possible, upon the part left standing of St. Benezet's old
Pont d'Avignon, a memory which was burned into our minds since our
schooldays, when we played and sang the French version of "London
Bridge is falling down"--"_Sur le pont d'Avignon._"
The greatest monument of all is the magnificent Palais des Papes, its
crenelated walls and battlements vying with the city walls and
ramparts as a splendid example of mediæval architecture. We saw all
these things and the museum with its excellent collections, and the
library of thirty thousand volumes and four thousand manuscripts.
One thing we nearly missed was Villeneuve-les-Avignon, a ruined
wall-circled town on the opposite bank of the Rhône. Its machicolated
crests glistened in the brilliant Southern sunlight like an exotic of
the Saharan country. It is quite the most foreign and African-looking
jumble of architectural forms to be seen in France. It took us three
hours to cross the river and stroll about its debris-encumbered
streets and get back again and start on our way northward, but it was
worth the time and trouble.
From St. Rémy to Orange, perhaps sixty kilometres, was not a long
daily run by any means, and we would not have stopped at Orange for
the night except that it was imperative that we should see the fine
antique theatre, the most magnificent, the largest, and the best
preserved of all existing Roman theatres.
We saw it, and seeing it wondered, though, when one tries to project
the mind back into the past and picture the scenes which once went on
upon its boards, the task were seemingly impossible.
[Illustration: Avignon and Tournon]
The Roman Arc de Triomphe, too, at Orange, which spans the roadway to
the North--the same great natural road which all its length froth
Paris to Antibes is known as the Route d'Italie--is a monument more
splendid, as to its preservation, than anything of the kind outside
Italy itself.
There is ample and excellent accommodation for the automobilist at
Orange, at the Hôtel des Princes, which sounds good and is good. They
have even a writing-room in the hotel, a silly, stuffy little room
which no one with any sense ever enters. One simply follows a
well-fed _commis-voyageur_ to the nearest popular café and writes his
letters there, as a well-habituated traveller should do.
Once on the road again we passed Montelimar--"_le pays du nougât
et de M. l'ex-President Loubet,_" we were told by the _octroi_
official who held us up at the barrier of this self-sufficient,
dead-and-alive, pompous little town. We didn't know M. Loubet and we
didn't like _nougât_, so we did not stop, but pushed on for Tournon.
There, at the little Hôtel de la Poste, beneath the donjon tower of
the old _château_, we ate the most marvellously concocted _déjeuner_
we had struck for a long time. There's no use describing it; it won't
be the same the next time; though no doubt it will be as excellent.
It cost but two francs fifty centimes, including _vin du St. Peray_,
the rich red wine of the Rhône, a rival to the wines of Burgundy.
We might have done a good deal worse had we stopped at progressive,
up-to-date Valence, where automobile tourists usually do stop, but we
took the offering of the small town instead of the large one, and
found it, as usual, very good.
We had passed La Voute-sur-Rhône, that classic height which has been
pictured many times in old books of travel. It, and Tournon, and
Valence, and Viviers, and Pont St. Esprit were once riverside
stations for the _coches d'eau_ which did a sort of omnibus service
with passengers on the Rhône, between Lyons and Avignon. There is a
steamboat service to-day which also carries passengers, but it is not
to be recommended if one has the means of getting about by road.
This town, too, and Valence, were directly on the route of the
_malle-poste_ from Lyons to Marseilles. The different _postes_ or
relays were marked on the maps of the day by little twisted
hunting-horns. For the most part an old-time route map of the great
trunk lines of the _malle-poste_ and the _messageries_ would, serve
the automobilist of to-day equally as well as a modern road map.
The _malle-poste_, and the hiring out of post-horses, in France was
an institution more highly developed than elsewhere.
Post-horses were only delivered one in France upon the presentation
of a passport and payment, in advance, according to the following
tariff. The price was fixed by law, being the same throughout all
France.
1 Poste (about 15 miles) 1 franc 50 centimes
1/2 " 75 "
1/4 " 38 "
The postilion usually got one franc fifty per _poste_, but could only
demand seventy-five centimes.
Certain carriages (chaises and cabriolets) would carry only
portmanteaux (_vaches_), but _voitures fermées_, _calèches_, and the
like might carry also a trunk (_malle_).
As one goes north, sunburnt Provence, its olive groves and its oil
and garlic-seasoned viands are left behind, until little by little
one draws upon the Burgundian opulence of the Côte d'Or, a land where
the native's manner of eating and drinking makes a full life and a
merry one.
We were not there yet; we had many kilometres yet to go, always by
the banks of the Rhône until Lyons was reached.
Near Givors, at eight o'clock at night, within twenty kilometres of
Lyons, the motor gave a weak asthmatic gasp, and stopped short. Like
the foolish virgins, we had no oil in our lamps, and dusk had already
fallen, and no amount of coaxing after the habitual manner would
induce the thing to move a yard.
There was nothing for it but to get out the tow-ropes and wait--for a
_remorqueur_, as the French call any four-footed beast strong enough
to tow an automobile at the end of a line. (They also call a tug-boat
the same thing, but as an automobile is not an amphibious animal it
was a land _remorqueur_ that we awaited.)
We did not get to Lyons that night. There are always uncalled for
"possibilities" rising up in automobiling that will upset the best
thought-out schedule. This was one of them.
What had happened to the machine no one yet really knows, but we had
to be ignominiously towed, to the great amusement of the natives, at
the end of a long rope by the power of a diminutive donkey which
finally came along. The beast did not look as though he could draw a
perambulator, but he buckled down to it with a will, and brought us
safely through the half-kilometre or so of crooked streets which led
to the centre of Givors.
Finally, we, or the car rather, was pushed into an old wash-house,
once a part of an ancient château, the _remise_ of the hotel itself,
a dependance of the château of other days, having been preempted by
an itinerant magic-lantern exhibittion ("La Cinémetographe
Americaine," it was called on the bills), which proposed to show the
good people of Givors--"for one night only, and at ten sous
each"--moving pictures of Coney Island, Buffalo Bill's Wild West,
Niagara Falls, New York's "Flat Iron" building, and other exotics
from the New World.
We dined and slept well at Givors in spite of our accident, and were
"up bright and early," as Pepys might have said (Londoners to-day do
not get up bright and early, however!), to find out, if possible,
what was the matter with the digestive apparatus of the automobile.
Nothing was the matter! The human, obstinate thing started off at the
first trial, and probably would have done the same thing last night
had we given the starting-crank one more turn. Such is automobiling!
We made our entrance into Lyons _en pleine vitesse_, stopping not
until we got to the centre of the city. The _octroi_ regulations had
just been revised, and the gates were open to passing traffic without
the obligation of having to declare one's possessions. Progressive
Lyons!
Lyons is truly progressive. It is beautifully laid out and kept. It
is nothing like as filthy as a large city usually is, on the
outskirts, and its island faubourg, between the Saône and the Rhône,
is the ideal of a well-organized and planned centre of affairs.
Lyons has, moreover, two up-to-date hotels, the very latest things,
one might say, in the hotel line: the Terminus Hotel, which well
serves travelers by rail, and the Hôtel de l'Univers et de
l'Automobilisme--rather a clumsy name, but that of a good,
well-meaning hotel. Its progressiveness consists in having abolished
the _pourboire_. You have ten per cent. added on to your bill,
however. This looks large when it comes to figures,--paying something
for nothing,--but at least one knows where he stands, and he fears no
black looks from chambermaid or boots. The thing is announced, by a
little placard placed in every room, as an "innovation." It remains
to be seen if it will prove successful.
From Lyons to Dijon, 197 kilometres between breakfast and lunch, was
not bad. Now, at last, we were in that opulent land of good living
and good drinking, where the food and wine are alike both rich.
He's a contented, fat, sleek-looking type, the native son of the Côte
d'Or, and he looks with contempt on the cider-nourished Norman and
Breton, and does not for a moment think that cognac is to be compared
with the _eau de vie de marc_ of his own vineyards.
The Côte d'Or is the richest wine-growing region of all the world.
Every direction-post and sign-board is like a review of the names on
a wine card,--Beaune, Chambertin, St. Georges, Clos Vougeot,--and of
these the Clos Vougeot wines are the most renowned.
A line drawn across France, just north of the confines of ancient
Burgundy, divides the region of the _vins ordinaires_--the light
wines of the _tables d'hote_--and that of those vintages which have
no price. This, at least, is the way the native puts it, and to some
extent the simile is correct enough.
The Côte begins and the plain ends; the hillsides rise and the
river-bottoms dwindle away in the distance: such is the feeling that
one experiences as he climbs these vine-clad slopes from either the
Rhône, the Loire, or the Seine valleys, and here it is that the
imaginary line is drawn between the _vins ordinaires_ and the _vins
sans prix_.
Since there is no possibility of increasing the quantity of these
rich, red Burgundian wines, the highly cultured area being of but
small extent, and because their quality depends upon the peculiar
nature of the soil of this restricted tract, there is no question but
that the monopoly of Burgundian wines will remain for ever with the
gold coast of France, whatever Australian and Californian patriots
may claim for their own imitations.
The phylloxera here, as elsewhere in France, caused a setback to the
commerce in wines, as serious in money figures as the losses
sustained during the Franco-Prussian War, but the time has now passed
and the famous Côte d'Or has once more attained its time-honoured
opulence and prosperity.
"_Le vin de Bourgogne
Met la bonne humeur
Au coeur._"
Still northward, across the plateau of Langres, we set a roundabout
course for Paris. There is one great pleasure about automobiling that
is considerably curtailed if one sets out to follow precisely a
preconceived itinerary, and for that reason we were, in a measure,
going where fancy willed.
We might have turned westward, via Moulins, Nevers, and Montargis,
from Lyons, and followed the old coaching road into Paris, entering
by the same gateway through which we set out, but we had heard of the
charms of the valley of the Marne, and we wanted to see them for
ourselves.
Our first acquaintance with it was at Bar le Duc, which is not on the
Marne at all, but on a little confluent some twenty or thirty miles
from its junction.
For a day we had been riding over corkscrew roads with little peace
and comfort for the driver, and considerable hard work for the motor.
The hills were numerous, but the surface was good and the scenery
delightful, so, since most of us require variety as a component of
our daily lives, we were getting what we wanted and no one
complained.
It was easy going by Château Thierry and the episcopal city of Meaux,
retracing almost the itinerary of the fleeing Louis XVI., and, as we
entered Paris by the Porte de Vincennes,--always by villainous
roadways, this getting in and out of Paris,--we red-inked another
twelve hundred kilometre stretch of roadway on our record map of
France.