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Chapter XVIII
THE ROAD TO CHERBOURG

It is easy enough to get into almost any town or city, but it is different when you start to leave it. All roads lead to Rome, but there is only here and there one that leads out of it. With the best map in the world you can go wrong.

We worked our way out of Paris by the Bois de Boulogne, but we had to call on all sorts of persons for information before we were really in the open fields once more. A handsome young officer riding in the Bois gave us a good supply. He was one of the most polite persons I ever met; also, the most loquacious. The sum of what he told us was to take the first turn to the right, but he told it to us for fully five minutes, with all the variations and embroideries of a young and lively fancy that likes to hear itself in operation. He explained how the scenery would look when we had turned to the right; also how it would continue to look when there was no longer a necessity of turning in either direction and what the country would be in that open land beyond the Bois. On the slightest provocation I think he would have ridden with us, even into Cherbourg. He was a boon, nevertheless, and we were truly grateful.

Beyond the Bois de Boulogne lay the pave, miles of it, all as bad as it could be. Sometimes we could not really tell when we were in the road. Once I found myself on a sort of private terrace without knowing how I got there or how to get down. We went through St. Germain, but we did not stop. We wished to get far from Paris – back to the simple life and good roads. It was along the Seine, at last, that we found them and the quiet villages. Imagine the luxury of following a silent, tranquil road by that placid stream, through the sweetness of a May afternoon. Imagine the peace of it after the jar and jolt and clatter and dazzle of detestable, adorable Paris.

I am sorry not to be able to recommend the hotel at Rosny. For a time it looked as if it were going to be one of the best of our selections, but it did not turn out so. When we found a little toy garden at the back, our rooms a string of tiny one-story houses facing it, with roses blooming at every doorway, we were delighted. Each of us had a toy house to himself, and there was another for the car at the back. It was a real play place, and we said how nice it was and wished we might stay a good while. Then we went for a walk down to the river and in the sunset watched a curious ferryboat run back and forth on a wire, taking over homefaring teams, and some sheep and cattle, to the village on the farther bank of the little, but historic, river. In the early gloaming we walked back to our hotel.

The dinner was very good – all dinners in France are that – but alas for our pretty playhouse rooms! When candles were brought in we saw what I had begun to suspect from the feeling, the walls were damp – worse, they were soaked – almost dripping. It seems they were built against a hill and the recent rains had soaked them through. We could not risk it – the landlady must give us something in the main house. She was a good soul – full of regrets, even grief. She had not known about those walls, she said, and, alas! she had no rooms in the main house. When we insisted that she must find something, she admitted that there was, indeed, just one room, but so small, so humble – fine folk like us could never occupy it.

She was right about its being small, but she was wrong in thinking we could not occupy it. She brought in cots and bedding, and when we were all in place at last we just about filled it from side to side. Still, it was dry and ventilated; those other places had been neither. But it seemed to us amusing that our fine pretension of a house apiece opening on a garden had suddenly dwindled to one inconsiderable room for the four of us.

We were in Normandy, now, and enjoying it. Everything was quite different from the things of the south. The picturesque thatched-roof houses; the women in dainty caps, riding on donkeys, with great brass milk jugs fore and aft; the very ancient cross-timber architecture; those, to us, were new things in France.

The architecture and some of the costumes were not new to one who had visited England. William the Norman must have carried his thatched-roof and cross-timber architecture across the Channel; also, certain dresses and smocks and the pattern of the men's whiskers. In some of these towns one might almost believe himself in rural England.

Lisieux, especially, is of the type I mean. It has a street which might be in Shrewsbury, though I think the Shrewsbury houses would not be as old as those of Lisieux, one of which – "The House of the Salamander" – so called from the decoration on its carved façade – we were permitted to visit. Something about it gave me more the feeling of the ancient life than I have found in most of the castles. Perhaps because it is wood, and wood holds personality longer than stone.

There is an old church at Lisieux, and it has a chapel built by Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who hounded Joan of Arc to the stake. Cauchon earned the Beauvais appointment by convicting Joan, but later, especially after Joan had been rehabilitated, he became frightened of the entertainment which he suspected Satan was preparing for him and built this chapel in expiation, hoping to escape the fire. It is a beautiful chapel, but I think Cauchon wasted his money. If he didn't there is something wrong with justice.

The Normandy road to Cherbourg is as wonderful as any in France. All the way it is lined with trees, and it goes straight on, mile after mile, up hill and down – long, long hills that on the approach look as if they reached to the sky, but that flatten out when you get to them, and offer a grade so gradual and a surface so smooth that you need never shift your speed levers. Workmen are always raking and touching up those roads. We had something more than two days of them, and if the weather had not been rather windy and chilly out on that long peninsula the memory of that run would be about perfect.

Cherbourg is not the great city we had imagined it to be. It is simply a naval base, heavily fortified, and a steamer landing. Coming in on the Paris road you are in the center of activities almost as soon as you reach the suburbs and there is none of the crush of heavy traffic that one might expect. There is a pleasant beach, too, and if travelers were not always going somewhere else when they arrive at Cherbourg, the little city might become a real resort. We were there a week before our ship came in, then sailed out one quiet June evening on the harbor tender to meet the missing member and happily welcome her to France. Our hotel had a moving-picture show in the open air, and we could look down on it from our windows. The Joy especially liked this, and we might have stayed there permanently, but the long roads and still unvisited glories of France were calling.

Chapter XIX
BAYEUX, CAEN, AND ROUEN

We had barely hesitated at Bayeux on the way to Cherbourg, but now we stopped there for the night. Bayeux, which is about sixty miles from Cherbourg, was intimately associated with the life of William the Conqueror, and is to-day the home of the famous Bayeux tapestry, a piece of linen two hundred and thirty feet long and eighteen inches wide, on which is embroidered in colored wools the story of William's conquest of England.

William's queen, Matilda, is supposed to have designed this marvelous pictorial document, and even executed it, though probably with the assistance of her ladies. Completed in the eleventh century, it would seem to have been stored in the Bayeux cathedral, where it lay scarcely remembered for a period of more than six hundred years. Then attention was called to its artistic and historic value, and it became still more widely known when Napoleon brought it to Paris and exhibited it at the Louvre to stir the French to another conquest of England. Now it is back in Bayeux, and has a special room in the museum there, and a special glass case, so arranged that you can walk around it and see each of its fifty-eight tableaux.

It was the closing hour when we got to the Bayeux museum, but the guardian gave us plenty of time to walk around and look at all the marvelous procession of horses and men whose outlines have remained firm and whose colors have stayed fresh for more than eight hundred years.

Matilda was ahead of her time in art. She was a futurist – anybody can see that who has been to one of the later exhibitions. But she was exactly abreast in the matter of history. It is likely that she embroidered the events as they were reported to her, and her records are above price to-day. I suppose she sat in a beautiful room with her maids about her, all engaged at the great work, and I hope she looked as handsome as she looks in the fine painting of her which hangs above the case containing her masterpiece.

There is something fine and stirring about Matilda's tapestry. No matter if Harold does seem to be having an attack of pleurisy when he is only putting on his armor, or if the horses appear to have detachable legs. Matilda's horses and men can get up plenty of swift action on occasion, and the events certainly do move. Tradition has it that the untimely death of the queen left the tapestry unfinished, for which reason William's coronation does not appear. I am glad we stopped at Bayeux. I would rather have seen Matilda's faithfully embroidered conquest than a whole gallery full of old masters.

Next day at Caen we visited her grave. It stands in a church which she herself founded in expiation of some fancied sin connected with her marriage. Her remains have never been disturbed. We also visited the tomb of the Conqueror, on the other side of the city at the church of St. Étienne. But the Conqueror's bones are not there now; they were scattered by the Huguenots in 1562.

We enjoyed Caen. We wandered about among its ancient churches and still more ancient streets. At one church a wedding was going on, and Narcissa and I lingered a little to assist. One does not get invited to a Normandy wedding every day, especially in the old town where William I organized his rabble to invade England. No doubt this bride and groom were descendants of some of William's wild rascals, but they looked very mild and handsome and modern to us. Narcissa and I attended quite a variety of ceremonials in the course of our travels: christenings, catechisms, song services, high mass, funerals – there was nearly always something going on in those big churches, and the chantings and intonings, and the candles, and the incense, and the processions and genuflections, and the robes of the priests and the costumes of the assemblages all interested us.

Caen became an important city under William the Conqueror. Edward III of England captured and pillaged it about the middle of the fourteenth century, at which time it was larger than any city in England, except London. It was from Caen that Charlotte Corday set out to assassinate Marat. To-day Caen has less than fifty thousand inhabitants and is mainly interesting for its art treasures and its memories.

We left the Paris-Cherbourg road at Caen. Our program included Rouen, Amiens, and Beauvais, cathedral cities lying more to the northward. That night we lay at the little Norman village of Bourg-Achard, in an inn of the choicest sort, and next morning looked out of our windows on a busy cattle market, where men in clean blue smocks and women in neat black dresses and becoming headgear were tugging their beasts about, exhibiting them and discussing them – eating, meantime, large pieces of gingerbread and other convenient food. A near-by orchard was filled with these busy traders. At one place our street was lined with agricultural implements which on closer inspection proved to be of American manufacture. From Bourg-Achard to Rouen the distance seemed all too short – the road was so beautiful.

It was at Rouen that we started to trace backward the sacred footprints of Joan of Arc, saint and savior of France. For it is at Rouen that the pathway ends. When we had visited the great cathedral, whose fairy-like façade is one of the most beautiful in the world, we drove to a corner of the old Market Place, and stopped before a bronze tablet which tells that on this spot on a certain day in May, 1431 (it was the 29th), the only spotless soul in France, a young girl who had saved her country from an invading and conquering enemy, was burned at the stake. That was five hundred years ago, but time has not dulled the misery of the event, its memory of torture, its humiliation. All those centuries since, the nation that Joan saved has been trying to atone for her death. Streets have been named for her; statues have been set up for her in every church and in public squares, but as we read that sorrowful tablet I could not help thinking that all of those honors together are not worth a single instant of her fiendish torture when the flames had found her tender flesh. Cauchon, later Bishop of Beauvais, her persecutor, taunted his victim to the last. If the chapel of expiation he built later at Lisieux saved him, then chapels must indeed be held in high esteem by those who confer grace.

Nothing is there to-day that was there then, but one may imagine an open market place thronged with people, and the horrid structure of death on which stood Joan while they preached to her of her sins. Her sins! when she was the only one among them that was not pitch black, steeped to the hair in villainy. Cauchon himself finished the sermon by excommunicating her, cutting off the church's promise of salvation. On her head she wore a cap on which was printed: Heretic, Relapsed, Apostate, Idolater. Cauchon had spared nothing to make her anguish complete. It is curious that he allowed her to pray, but he did, and when she prayed – not for herself, but for the king who had deserted her – for his glory and triumph, Cauchon himself summoned the executioners, and they bound her to the stake with chains and lighted the fire.

There is little more to see of Joan in Rouen. The cathedral was there in her time, but she was never permitted to enter it. There is a wall which was a part of the chapel where she had her final hearing before her judges; there are some houses which she must have passed, and there is a tower which belonged to the castle in which she was confined, though it is not certain that it is Joan's tower. There is a small museum in it, and among its treasures we saw the manuscript article St. Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain, who, in his Personal Recollections, has left to the world the loveliest picture of that lovely life.

Chapter XX
WE COME TO GRIEF

It was our purpose to leave Rouen by the Amiens road, but when we got to it and looked up a hill that about halfway to the zenith arrived at the sky, we decided to take a road that led off toward Beauvais. We could have climbed that hill well enough, and I wished later we had done so. As it was, we ran along quite pleasantly during the afternoon, and attended evening services in an old church at Grandvilliers, a place that we had never heard of before, but where we found an inn as good as any in Normandy.

It is curious with what exactness Fate times its conclusions. If we had left Grandvilliers a few seconds earlier or later it would have made all the difference, or if I had not pulled up a moment to look at a lovely bit of brookside planted with poplars, or if I had driven the least bit slower or the least bit faster, during the first five miles, or —

Oh, never mind – what happened was this: We had just mounted a long steep hill on high speed and I had been bragging on the car, always a dangerous thing to do, when I saw ahead of us a big two-wheeled cart going in the same direction as ourselves, and beyond it a large car approaching. I could have speeded up and cut in ahead of the cart, but I was feeling well, and I thought I should do the courteous thing, the safe thing, so I fell in behind it. Not far enough behind him, however, for as the big car came opposite, the sleepy driver of the cart pulled up his horse short, and we were not far enough behind for me to get the brakes down hard and suddenly enough to stop before we touched him. It was not a smash. It was just a push, but it pushed a big hole in our radiator, mashed up one of our lamps, and crinkled up our left mudguard. The radiator was the worst. The water poured out; our car looked as if it had burst into tears.

We were really stupefied at the extent of our disaster. The big car pulled up to investigate and console us. The occupants were Americans, too, from Washington – kindly people who wanted to shoulder some of the blame. Their chauffeur, a Frenchman, bargained with the cart driver who had wrecked us to tow us to the next town, where there were garages. Certainly pride goes before a fall. Five minutes before we were sailing along in glory, exulting over the prowess of our vehicle. Now all in the wink of an eye our precious conveyance, stricken and helpless, was being towed to the hospital, its owners trudging mournfully behind.

The village was Poix, and if one had to be wrecked anywhere, I cannot think of a lovelier spot for disaster than Poix de la Somme. It is just across in Picardy, and the Somme there is a little brook that ripples and winds through poplar-shaded pastures, sweet meadows, and deep groves. In every direction were the loveliest walks, with landscape pictures at every turn. The village itself was drowsy, kindly, simple-hearted. The landlady at our inn was a motherly soul that during the week of our stay the Joy and I learned to love.

For the others did not linger. Paris was not far away and had a good deal in the way of shopping to recommend it. The new radiator ordered from London might be delayed. So early next morning they were off for Paris by way of Amiens and Beauvais, and the Joy and I settled down to such employments and amusements as we could find, while waiting for repairs.

We got acquainted with the garageman's family, for one thing. They lived in the same little court with the shop, and we exchanged Swiss French for their Picardese, and were bosom friends in no time. We spruced up the car, too, and every day took long walks, and every afternoon took some luncheon and our little stove and followed down the Somme to a tiny bridge, and there made our tea. Then sometimes we read, and once when I was reading aloud from Mark Twain's Joan of Arc, and had finished the great battle of Patay, we suddenly remembered that it had happened on the very day on which we were reading, the 18th of June. How little we guessed that in such a short time our peaceful little river would give its name to a battle a thousand times greater than any that Joan ever fought!

Once when we were resting by the roadside a little old lady with a basket stopped and sat with us while she told us her history – how her husband had been a great physician and invented cures that to-day are used in all the hospitals of France. Now she was poor, she said, and lived alone in a little house, but if we would visit her she would give us some good Picardese cooking. I wish we might have gone. One day I hired a bicycle for the Joy and entertained the village by pushing her around the public square until she learned to ride alone. Then I hired one for myself and we went out on the road together. About the end of the third day we began to look for our radiator, and visited the express office with considerable regularity. Presently the village knew us, why we were there and what we were expecting. They became as anxious about it as ourselves.

Chapter XXI
THE DAMAGE REPAIRED – BEAUVAIS AND COMPIÈGNE

One morning as we started toward the express office a man in a wagon passed and called out something. We did not catch it, but presently another met us and with a glad look told us that our goods had arrived and were now in the delivery wagon on the way to the garage. We did not recognize either of those good souls, but they were interested in our welfare. Our box was at the garage when we arrived there, and in a little more it was opened and the new radiator in place. The other repairs had been made, and once more we were complete. We decided to start next morning to join the others in Paris.

Morning comes early on the longest days of the year, and we had eaten our breakfast, had our belongings put into the car, and were ready to be off by seven o'clock. What a delicious morning it was! Calm, glistening, the dew on everything. As long as I live I shall remember that golden morning when the Joy, aged eleven, and I went gypsying together, following the winding roads and byways that led us through pleasant woods, under sparkling banks, and along the poplar-planted streams of Picardy. We did not keep to highways at all. We were in no hurry and we took any lane that seemed to lead in the right direction, so that much of the time we appeared to be crossing fields – fields of flowers, many of them, scarlet poppies, often mingled with blue cornflowers and yellow mustard – fancy the vividness of that color.

Traveling in that wandering fashion, it was noon before we got down to Beauvais, where we stopped for luncheon supplies and to see what is perhaps the most remarkable cathedral in the world. It is one of the most beautiful, and, though it consists only of choir and transepts, it is one of the largest. Its inner height, from floor to vaulting, is one hundred and fifty-eight feet. The average ten-story building could sit inside of it. There was once a steeple that towered to the giddy heights of five hundred feet, but in 1573, when it had been standing three hundred years, it fell down, from having insufficient support. The inner work is of white stone, marble, and the whole place seems filled with light. It was in this cool, heavenly sanctuary that Cauchon, who hounded Joan to the stake, officiated as bishop. I never saw a place so unsuited to a man. I should think that spire would have tumbled off then instead of waiting until he had been dead a hundred years. There is a clock in this church – a modern clock – that records everything, even the age of the world, which at the moment of our visit was 5,914 years. It is a very large affair, but we did not find it very exciting. In the public square of Beauvais there is a bronze statue of Jeanne Laine, called "Jeanne Hachette," because, armed with a hatchet, she led others of her sex against Charles the Bold in 1472 and captured a banner with her own hands.

Beauvais has many interesting things, but the day had become very warm and we did not linger. We found some of the most satisfactory pastries I have ever seen in France, fresh and dripping with richness; also a few other delicacies, and, by and by, under a cool apple tree on the road to Compiègne, the Joy and I spread out our feast and ate it and listened to some little French birds singing, "Vite! Vite! Vite!" meaning that we must be "Quick! Quick! Quick!" so they could have the crumbs.

It was at Compiègne that Joan of Arc was captured by her enemies, just a year before that last fearful day at Rouen. She had relieved Orléans, she had fought Patay, she had crowned the king at Rheims; she would have had her army safely in Paris if she had not been withheld by a weakling, influenced by his shuffling, time-serving counselors. She had delivered Compiègne the year before, but now again it was in trouble, besieged by the Duke of Burgundy. Joan had been kept in partial inactivity in the Loire district below Paris during the winter, but with the news from Compiègne she could no longer be restrained.

"I will go to my good friends of Compiègne," she said, and, taking such force as she could muster, in number about six hundred cavalry, she went to their relief.

From a green hill commanding the valley of the Oise we looked down upon the bright river and pretty city which Joan had seen on that long-ago afternoon of her final battle for France. Somewhere on that plain the battle had taken place, and Joan's little force for the first time had failed. There had been a panic; Joan, still fighting and trying to rally her men, had been surrounded, dragged from her horse, and made a prisoner. She had led her last charge.

We crossed a bridge and entered the city and stopped in the big public square facing Leroux's beautiful statue of Joan, which the later "friends of Compiègne" have raised to her memory. It is Joan in semi-armor, holding aloft her banner, and on the base in old French is inscribed "Je Yray voir mes bons amys de Compiègne" ("I will go to see my good friends of Compiègne").

Many things in Compiègne are beautiful, but not many of them are very old. Joan's statue looks toward the handsome and richly ornamented Hôtel de Ville, but Joan could not have seen it in life, for it dates a hundred years after death. There are two handsome churches, in one or both of which she doubtless worshiped when she had first delivered the city; possibly a few houses of that ancient time still survive.

We looked into the churches, but they seemed better on the outside. Then I discovered that one of our back tires was down, and we drew up in a secluded nook at the rear of St. Jacques for repairs. It was dusk by the time we had finished, the end of that long June day, and we had no time to hunt for a cozy inn. So we went to a hotel which stands opposite the great palace which the architect Gabriel built for Louis XV, and looked across to it while we ate our dinner, and talked of our day's wanderings, and of palaces in general and especially queens; also of Joan, and of the beautiful roads and fields of flowers, and of the little birds that tried to hurry us along, and so were very happy and very tired indeed.

Next morning we visited the palace. It has been much occupied by royalty, for Compiègne was always a favorite residence of the rulers of France. Napoleon came there with the Empress Marie Louise, and Louis Philippe and Napoleon III both found retirement there.

I think it could not have been a very inviting or restful home. There are long halls and picture galleries, all with shiny floors and stiffly placed properties, and the royal suites are just a series of square, prettily decorated and upholstered boxes, strung together, with doors between. One might as well set up a series of screens in a long hall. Even with the doors shut there could not have been much sense of privacy, certainly none of snugness. But then palaces were not meant to be cozy. We saw the bedrooms and dressing rooms and what not of the various queens, and we looked from an upper window down a long forest avenue that was finer than anything inside. Then we went back to the car and drove into the big forest for ten miles or more, to an old feudal castle – such a magnificent old castle, all towers and turrets and battlements – the château of Pierrefonds, one of the finest in France.

It stands upon a rocky height overlooking a lake, and it does not seem so old, though it had been there forty years when Joan of Arc came, and it looks as if it might be there about as long as the hill it stands on. It was built by Louis of Orléans, brother of Charles VI, and the storm of battle has raged often about its base. Here and there it still shows the mark of bombardment, and two cannon balls stick fast in the wall of one of its solid towers. Pierrefonds was in bad repair, had become well-nigh a ruin, in fact, when Napoleon III, at his own expense, engaged Viollet le Duc to restore it, in order that France might have a perfect type of the feudal castle in its original form. It stands to-day as complete in its structure and decoration as it was when Louis of Orléans moved in, more than five hundred years ago, and it conveys exactly the solid home surroundings of the mediæval lord. It is just a show place now, and its vast court, its chapel and its halls of state are all splendid enough, though nothing inside can be quite so magnificent as its mighty assemblage of towers and turrets rising above the trees and reflecting in the blue waters of a placid lake.

It began raining before we got to Paris, so we did not stop at Crépy-en-Valois, or Senlis, or Chantilly, or St. Denis, though all that land has been famous for kings and castles and bloodshed from a time farther back than the days of Cæsar. We were interested in all those things, but we agreed we could not see everything. Some things we saw as we went by; great gray walls and crumbling church towers, and then we were at the gates of Paris and presently threading our way through a tangle of streets, barred, many of them, because the top of the subway had been tumbling in a few days before and travel was dangerous. It was Sunday, too, and the streets were especially full of automobiles and pedestrians. It was almost impossible to keep from injuring something. I do not care for Paris, not from the driving seat of a car.