Motor-Flight Through France

IV. The Loire and the Indre

IV THE LOIRE AND THE INDRE FONTAINEBLEAU is charming in May, and at no season do its glades more invitingly detain the wanderer; but it belonged to the familiar, the already-experienced part of our itinerary, and we had to press on to the unexplored . So after a day's roaming of the forest, and a short Hight to Moret, medirevally seated in its stout walls on the poplar-edged Loing, we started on our way to the Loire. Here, too, our wheels were still on beaten tracks; though the morning's Hight across country to Orleans was meant to give us a glimpse of a new region. But on that unhappy morning Boreas was up with all his pack, and hunted us savagely across the naked plain, now behind, now on our quarter, now dashing ahead to lie in ambush behind a huddled village, and leap on us as we rounded its last house. The plain stretched [ 84] THE LOIRE AND THE INDRE on interminably, and the farther it stretched the harder the wind raced us; so that Pithiviers, spite of dulcet associations, appeared to our shrinking eyes only as a wind-break, eagerly striven for and too soon gained and passed; and when, at luncheon-time, we beat our way, spent and wheezing, into Orleans, even the serried memories of that venerable city endeared it to us less than the fact that it had an inn where we might at last find shelter. The above wholly inadequate description of an interesting part of France will have convinced any rational being that motoring is no way to see the country. And that morning it certainly was .not; but then, what of the afternoon? When we rolled out of Orleans after luncheon, both the day and the scene had changed; and what other form of travel could have brought us into such communion with the spirit of the Loire as our smooth flight along its banks in the bland May air? For, after all, if the motorist sometimes misses details by going too fast, he sometimes has them stamped into his memory by an opportune puncture or a recalcitrant"magneto"; and if, on windy days, he has to rush through [85 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE nature blindfold, on golden afternoons such as this he can drain every drop of her precious essence. Certainly we got a great deal of the Loire as we followed its windings that day: a great sense of the steely breadth of its How, the amenity of its shores, the sweet Hatness of the richly gardened and vineyarded landscape, as of a highly cultivated but slightly insipid society; an impression of long white villages and of stout conical towns on little hills; of old brown Beaugency in its cup between two heights, and l\Iadame de Pompadour's l\Ienars on its bright terraces; of Blois, nobly bestriding the river at a noble bend; and farther south, of yellow cliffs honeycombed with strange dwellings; of Chaumont and Amboise crowning their heaped-up towns; of manoirs, walled gardens, rich pastures, willowed islands; and then, toward sunset, of another long bridge, a brace of fretted church-towers, and the widespread roofs of Tours. Had we visited by rail the principal places named in this itinerary, necessity would have detained us longer in each, and we should have had a fuller store of specific impressions; but we [36 ] THE LOIRE AND THE INDRE should have missed what is, in one way, the truest initiation of travel, the sense of continuity, of relation between different districts, of familiarity with the unnamed, unhistoried region stretching between successive centres of human history, and exerting, in deep unnoticed ways, so persistent an influence on the turn that history takes. And after all-though some people seem to doubt the fact-it is possible to stop a motor and get out of it; and if, on our way down the Loire, we exercised this privilege infrequently, it was because, here again, we were in a land of old acquaintance, of which the general topography was just the least familiar part. It was not till, two days later, we passed out of Tours-not, in fact, till we left to the northward the towered pile of Loches-that we found ourselves once more in a new country. It was a cold day of high clouds and flying sunlight: just the sky to...