Motor-Flight Through France

A Flight to the North-East

PART III A FLIGHT TO THE NORTH-EAST THERE are several ways of leaving Paris by motor without touching even the fringe of what, were it like other cities, would be called its slums. Going, for instance, southward or south-westward, one may emerge from the alleys of the Bois near the Pont de Suresnes and, crossing the river, pass through the park of Saint Cloud to Versailles, or through the suburbs of Rueil and Le Vesinet to the forest of Saint Germain. These miraculous escapes from the toils of a great city give one a clearer impression of the breadth with which it is planned, and of the civic order and elegance pervading its whole system; yet for that very reason there is perhaps more interest in a slow progress through one of [172 ] A FLIGHT TO THE NORTH-EAST the great industrial quarters such as must be crossed to reach the country lying to the northeast of Paris. To start on a bright spring morning from the Place du Palais Bourbon, and follow the tide of traffic along the quays of the left bank, passing the splendid masses of the Louvre and Notre Dame, the Conciergerie and the Sainte Chapelle ; to skirt the blossoming borders of the Jardin des Plantes, and cross the Seine at the Pont d'Austerlitz, getting a long glimpse down its silver reaches till they divide to envelope the Cite; and then to enter by the Boulevard Diderot on the long stretch of the Avenue Daumesnil, which leads straight to the Porte Doree of Vincennes -to follow this route at the leisurely pace necessitated by the dense flow of traffic, is to get a memorable idea of the large way in which Paris deals with some of her municipal problems. The Avenue Daumesnil, in particular, with its interminable warehouses and cheap shops and guinguettes, would anywhere else be the prey of grime and sordidness, Instead, it is spacious, clean, and prosaic onlybycontrast to the elegance of thethoroughfarespreceding it; and at the Porte (178] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE Doree it gives one over to the charming alleys of a park as well-tended and far more beautiful than the Bois de Boulogne--a park offering the luxury of its romantic lawns and lakes for the sole delectation of the packed industrial quarters that surround it. The woods of this wonderful Bois de Vincennes are real woods, full of blue-bells and lilies of the valley; and as one Hies through them in th,e freshness of the May morning, Paris seems already far behind, a mere fading streak of factory-smoke on the horizon. One loses all thought of it when, beyond Vincennes, the road crosses the Marne at Joinville-sur-Pont. Thence it passes through a succession of bright semi-suburban villages, with glimpses, here and there, of low white chateaux or of little grey churches behind rows of clipped hom-beam; climbing at length into an open hilly country, through which it follows the windings of the Marne to Meaux. Bossuet's diocesan seat is a town of somewhat dull exterior, with a Gothic cathedral which has suffered cruelly at the hands of the reformers; for, by an odd tum of fate, before becoming the [174] A FLIGHT TO THE NORTH-EAST eyrie of the" Eagle," it was one of the principal centres of Huguenot activity-an activity deplorably commemorated in the ravaged exterior of the church. From Meaux to Rheims the country grows in charm, with a slightly English quality in its rolling spaces and rounded clumps of trees; but nothing could be more un-English than the grey-white villages, than the ston.y squares bordered by clipped horn-beams, the granite marketcrosses , the round-apsed churches with their pointed bell-towers. One of these villages, Braisne, stands out in memory by virtue of its very unusual church. This tall narrow structure, with its curious western front, so oddly buttressed and tapering, and rising alone and fragmentary among the orchards and kitchen-gardens of a silent shrunken hamlet, is the pathetic survival of a powerful abbey, once dominating its surroundings, but now existing only as the parish church of the knot of sleepy houses about it. A stranger and less explicable vestige of the past is found not far off in the curious walled village of Bazoches, which, though lying in the t 175] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH...