By Seine And Oise--A Cruise In A Canot-Automobile
[Illustration: By Seine and Oise]
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.
[Illustration: Vernon]
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.
[Illustration: At a French Inn]
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.