Part 4
The next day, thirty miles on the road to Autun, we experience our first break-down in eighteen thousand miles of motoring in Europe--that is, a break-down that means we must abandon the car for the time. Near the little village of Tamnay-Chatillon an axle-rod breaks and a new one must be made before we can proceed. Our objective point, Dijon, is the nearest place where we will be likely to find facilities for repair and we resolve to go thither by train. We have been so delayed that train-time is past and we shall have to pass the night at the village inn. It is extremely annoying at the time, though in retrospect we are glad of our experience with at least one very small country road-house in France. The inn people spare no effort to make us as comfortable as possible and we have had many worse meals in good-sized cities than is served to us this evening. Our beds, though apparently clean, are not very restful, but we are too weary to be excessively critical. The next morning, leaving the crippled car in the stable-yard, we take the train for Dijon. The Captain carries the broken axle-rod as a pattern and soon after our arrival a workman is shaping a new one from a steel bar. And in this connection I might remark that we found the average French mechanic quick and intelligent, with almost an intuitive understanding of a piece of machinery. Our job proves slower than we anticipated; the work can be done by only one man at a time and it is not completed before midnight of the following day.
In the meanwhile we have established ourselves at the Grand Hotel de la Cloche, a pretentious--and, as it proves, a very expensive stopping-place. We have large, well-furnished rooms which afford an outlook upon a small park fronting the hotel. Our enforced leisure allows us considerably more time to look about Dijon than we have been giving to such towns and we endeavor to make the most of it. The town is one of the military centers of France, being defended by no fewer than eight detached forts, and we see numerous companies of soldiers on the streets.
The museum, we are assured, is the greatest "object of interest" in the city and, indeed, it comes up to the claims made for it. The municipal art gallery contains possibly the best provincial collection of paintings in France--an endless array of pictures of priceless value, representing the greatest names of French art. There is also a splendid showing of sculpture, occupying five separate rooms. The marble tombs of Philip the Brave and John the Fearless, old-time dukes of Burgundy, are wonderful creations. They were originally in the Church of Chartreuse, destroyed in 1793, when the tombs were removed to the cathedral in a somewhat damaged condition. They were later placed in the museum and restored as nearly as possible to their original state. Both have a multitude of marble statuettes, every one a distinct artistic study--some representing mourners for the deceased--and each little face has some peculiar and characteristic expression of grief. The strong contrast of white and black marbles is relieved by judicious gilding and, altogether, we count these the most elaborate and artistic mediaeval tombs we have seen, if we except the Percy monument at Beverly in England. The museum also has an important archaeological collection, including a number of historical relics found in the vicinity, for the city dates back to Roman times. The showing of coins, gems, vases, ivory, cabinets and jewelry would do credit to any metropolitan museum. And all this in a town of but seventy-five thousand people--which shows how far the French municipalities have advanced in such matters. Dijon is no exception in this regard, though other cities of the class may not quite equal this collection, which I have described in merest outline.
Dijon has several churches of the first order, though none of them has any notable distinguishing feature. The Cathedral of St. Benigne is the oldest, dating in its present form from about 1280, though there are portions which go back still farther. It was originally built as an abbey church, but the remainder of the abbatial buildings have disappeared. St. Michael's Church is some four hundred years later than the cathedral, and has, according to the guide-books, a Renaissance facade, though it seems to us to be better described as a Moorish adaptation of the Gothic style. At any rate, it is an inartistic and unattractive structure and illustrates the poor results often attained in too great an effort after the unusual. Notre Dame is about the same date as the cathedral, though it has been so extensively restored as to have quite a new appearance. Its most remarkable feature is its queer statuettes--nearly a hundred little figures contorted into endless expressions and attitudes--which serve as gargoyles. The churches of Dijon are not particularly noteworthy for their interiors and none has especially good windows. Our extended sojourn in the city enables us to visit a number of shops, for which we have heretofore found little time. These are well-stocked and attractive and quite in keeping with a city of the size of Dijon. According to Herr Baedeker, the town is famous "for wine and corn, and its mustard and gingerbread enjoy a wide reputation."
The Captain and myself take an early train for Tamnay-Chatillon and have the satisfaction of finding the new axle-rod a perfect fit. We enjoy the open car and the fine road more than ever after our enforced experience with the railway train. The country between Tamnay and Dijon is rolling and the road often winds up or down a great hill for two or three miles at a stretch, always with even and well-engineered gradients that insure an easy climb or a long exhilarating coast. There are many glorious panoramas from the hill-crests--wide reaches of hill and valley, with groves and vineyards and red-tiled villages nestling in wooded vales or lying on the sunny slopes. Most of the towns remain unknown to us by name, but the Captain points out Chateau Chinon clinging to a rather steep hillside and overshadowed by the vast ruined castle which once defended it. A portion of the old wall with three watch-towers still stands--the whole effect being very grim and ancient. Near the town of Pommard the hills are literally "vine-clad,"--vineyards everywhere running up to the very edge of the town.
The Hotel St. Louis et de la Poste at Autun does not present a very attractive exterior, but it proves a pleasant surprise and we are hungry enough to do justice to an excellent luncheon, having breakfasted in Dijon at five o'clock. Autun has an unusual cathedral--"a curious building of the transition period"--some parts of which go back as far as the tenth century. The beautiful Gothic spire--the first object to greet our eyes when approaching the town--was built about 1470. Portions of the old fortifications still remain. St. Andrew's Gate, partly a restoration, is an imposing portal pierced by four archways and forms one of the main entrances. There is also the usual museum and Hotel de Ville to be found in all enterprising provincial towns of France.
Beyond Autun the character of the country changes again; we come into a less prosperous section, intersected by stone fences which cut the rocky hillsides into small irregular fields. We pass an occasional bare-looking village and one or two ruined chateaus and we remark on the scarcity of ruins in France, so far as we have seen it, as compared with England. A more fertile and thriving country surrounds Dijon, which we reach in the late afternoon.
We have had quite enough of Dijon, but we shall remain until morning; an early start should carry us well toward the German frontier before night. We find some terribly rough roads to Gray and Vesoul--macadam which has begun to disintegrate. The country grows quite hilly and while, in the words of the old hymn, "every prospect pleases," we are indeed tempted to add that "only man is vile." For the filthiness of some of the villages and people can only be designated as unspeakable; if I should describe in plain language the conditions we behold, my book might be excluded from the mails! The houses of these miserable little hamlets stretch in single file along both sides of the broad highway. In one end of the house lives the family and in the other the domestic animals--pigs, cows and donkeys. Along the road on each side the muck-piles are almost continuous and reach to the windows of the cottages. Recent rains have flooded the streets with seepage, which covers the road to a depth of two or three inches, and the odors may be imagined--if one feels adequate to such a task. The muck is drained into pools and cisterns from which huge wooden or iron pumps tower above the street. By means of these the malodorous liquid is elevated into wagon-tanks to be hauled away to the fields. And this work is usually done by the women! In fact, women are accorded equal privileges with a vengeance in this part of rural France--they outnumber the men in the fields and no occupation appears too heavy or degraded for them to engage in. We see many of the older ones herding domestic animals--or even geese and ducks--by the roadside. Sometimes it is only a single animal--a cow, donkey, goat or pig--that engages the old crone, who is usually knitting as well. The pigs, no doubt because of their headstrong proclivities, are usually confined by a cord held by their keepers, and with one of these we have an amusing adventure. The pig becomes unruly, heading straight for our car, and only a vigorous application of the brakes prevents disaster to the obstreperous brute. But the guardian of his hogship--who has been hauled around pretty roughly while hanging to the cord--is in a towering rage and screams no end of scathing language at us. "You, too, are pigs," is one of her compliments which the Captain translates, and he says it is just as well to let some of her remarks stand in the original!
As we approach Remiremont, where we propose to stop for the night, we enter the great range of hills which form the boundary between France and Germany and which afford many fine vistas. Endless pine forests clothe the hillsides and deep narrow valleys slope away from the road which winds upward along the edges of the hills. Remiremont is a pleasant old frontier town lying along the Moselle River at the base of a fortified hill two thousand feet in height. It is cleaner than the average French town of ten thousand and clear streams of mountain water run alongside many of its streets. The Hotel du Cheval de Bronze seems a solid, comfortable old inn and we turn into the courtyard for our nightly stop. The courtyard immediately adjoins the hotel apartments on the rear and is not entirely free from objectionable odors--our only complaint against the Cheval de Bronze. Our rooms front on the street, the noise being decidedly preferable to the assortment of smells in the rear. The town has nothing to detain one, and is rather unattractive, despite its pleasing appearance from a distance. On the main street near our hotel are the arcades, which have a considerable resemblance to the famous rows of Chester.
We are awakened early in the morning by the tramp of a large company of soldiers along the street, for Remiremont, being so near the frontier, is heavily garrisoned. These French soldiers we have seen everywhere, in the towns and on the roads, enough of them to remind us that the country is really a vast military camp. They are rather undersized, as a rule, and their attire is often slouchy and worse for wear. Their bearing seems to us anything but soldierly as they shuffle along the streets. Perhaps we remember this the more because of the contrast we see in Germany a little later. A good authority, however, tells us that the French army is in a fine state of preparedness and would give a good account of itself if called into action.
We are early away from Remiremont on a fine road winding among the pine-clad hills. Some sixteen miles out of the town we find a splendid hotel at Gerardmer on a beautiful little lake of the same name in the Vosges Forest, where we should no doubt have had quite different service from the Cheval de Bronze. We have no regrets, however, since Remiremont is worth seeing as a typical small frontier town. At Gerardmer we begin the long climb over the mountain pass which crosses the German border; there are several miles of the ascent and in some places the grades are steep enough to seriously heat the motor. We stop many times on the way and there is a clear little stream by the roadside from which we replenish the water in the heated engine. The air grows cooler and more bracing as we ascend and though it is a fine June day, we see banks of snow along the road. On either side are great pine trees, through which we catch occasional glimpses of wooded hills and verdant valleys lying far beneath us. Despite the cool air, flowers bloom along the road and the ascent, though rather strenuous, is a delightful one.
At the summit we come to the customs offices of the two countries, a few yards apart. Here we bid farewell to France and slip across the border into the Fatherland, as its natives so love to call it. A wonderful old official, who seems to embody all the dignity and power of the empire he serves, comes out of the customs house. His flowing gray beard is a full yard long and the stem of his mighty porcelain pipe is still longer. He is clad in a faultless uniform and wears a military cap bespangled with appropriate emblems--altogether, a marvel of that official glory in which the Germans so delight. His functions, however, do not correspond with his personal splendor, for he only officially countersigns our Royal Automobile Club passport, delivers us a pair of number plates and, lastly, collects a fee of some fifteen marks. He gives us a certificate showing that we are now entitled to travel the highways of the empire for two weeks, and should we remain longer we shall have to pay an additional fee on leaving the country. The Captain waves an approved military adieu, to which the official solemnly responds and we set out in search of adventure in the land of the Kaiser.
IV
COLMAR TO OBERAMMERGAU
Had we crossed a sea instead of an imaginary dividing line we could hardly have found a more abrupt change in the characteristics of people and country than we discover when we descend into the broad green valley of the Rhine. We have a series of fine views as we glide down the easy grades and around the sweeping curves of the splendid road that leads from the crest to the wide plain along the river--glimpses of towns and villages lying far beneath, beyond long stretches of wooded hills. On our way we meet peasants driving teams of huge horses hitched to heavy logging wagons. The horses go into a panic at the sight of the car and the drivers seem even more panicky than the brutes; it is quite apparent that the motor is not so common in Germany as in England and France.
The province of Alsace, by which we enter Germany, was held by France from the time of Napoleon until 1871, but it never entirely lost its German peculiarities during the French occupation. Its villages and farmhouses are distinctly Teutonic, though the larger towns show more traces of French influence. Colmar, some twenty miles from the border, is the first city--a place of about forty thousand people and interesting to Americans as the birthplace of the sculptor, Bartholdi, who designed the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. It is a substantially built town with an enormous Gothic church and its museum has a famous collection of pictures by early German masters.
A few miles from Colmar we come to the Rhine, so famed in German song and story, a green, rushing flood that seems momentarily to threaten the destruction of the pontoon bridge which bears us across. Beyond the river the level but poorly surfaced road leads to Freiburg, a handsome city of about seventy-five thousand people. It is a noted manufacturing town and has an ancient university with about two thousand students. Its cathedral is one of the finest Gothic structures in Germany, the great tower, three hundred and eighty feet in height, being the earliest and most perfect of its kind. The windows of fourteenth-century glass are particularly fine and there are many remarkable paintings of a little later date. The city has other important churches and many beautiful public buildings and monuments. Indeed, Freiburg is a good example of the neatness, cleanliness and civic pride that prevails in most of the larger German cities. It has many excellent hotels and we have a well-served luncheon at the Victoria. We should stop for the day at Freiburg were it not for our unexpected delay at Dijon; we must hasten if we are to reach Oberammergau in time for our reservations. In the three remaining daylight hours we make a swift run to Tuttlingen, some sixty miles eastward, passing several small villages and two good-sized towns, Neustadt and Donaueschingen, on the way. The latter is near the head waters of the Danube, and from here we follow the river to Tuttlingen. We pass through a beautifully wooded country and several inns along the way indicate that this section is a frequented pleasure resort. There are many charming panoramas from the road, which in places swings around the hillsides some distance above the river.
Had we known the fate in store for us at Tuttlingen, we should surely have stopped at one of the hotels which we hastily passed in our dash for that town. But we reach it just at dusk--a place of about fifteen thousand people--and turn in rather dubiously at the unattractive Post Hotel. If the Post is a fair sample of the country inns of Germany, the tourist should keep clear of country inns when possible. On entering we meet an assortment of odors not especially conducive to good appetite for the evening meal, and this proves of the kind that requires a good appetite. We are hungry, but not hungry enough to eat the Post's fare with anything like relish and we are haunted by considerable misgivings about the little we do consume. The Post, however, does not lack patronage, though it seems to come mainly from German commercial men who are seeking trade in the thriving town.
We are away early in the morning, following a rough, neglected road some dozen miles to Ludwigshaven at the head of Lake Constance, or the Boden See, as the Germans style it. A new highway leading down to the lake shore is not yet open, though nearly ready, and we descend over a temporary road which winds among tree stumps and drops down twenty per cent grades for a couple of miles. We are thankful that we have only the descent to make; I doubt whether our forty-horse engine would ever have pulled us up the "bank," as a Yorkshire man would describe it.
But having reached the level of the lake, we find a splendid road closely following the shore for forty miles and affording views of some of the finest and most famous scenery in Europe. In all our journeyings we have had few more glorious runs. The clear balmy June day floods everything with light and color. The lake lies still and blue as the heavens above, and beyond its shining expanse rise the snow-capped forms of the Swiss Alps, their rugged ranks standing sharply against the silvery horizon. At their feet stretches the green line of the shore and above it the dense shadows of the pines that cover the slopes to the snow line. It is a scene of inspiring beauty that one sees to best advantage from the open road. Near at hand green fields stretch to the hills, no great distance away, and the belated fruit-tree blossoms load the air with perfume. Hay-making is in progress in the little fields--women swing the scythes or handle the rakes and pitchforks while staid old cows draw the heavy, awkward carts. There are several pleasant little towns along the shore, rather neater and cleaner than the average German village, though even these are not free from occasional touches of filthiness. Near the center of the lake is Friedrichshafen, a popular resort with numerous hotels. There is a beautiful drive along the lake, bordered with shrubs and trees, and fronting on this is the comfortable-looking Deutsches Haus, surrounded by gardens which extend to the shore. We remember the Deutsches Haus particularly, since on its glass-enclosed veranda we are served with an excellent luncheon. As we resume our journey, feeling at peace with the world, and open up a little on the smooth lakeside road, the Captain exclaims:
"If I had all the money I could possibly want, do you know what I'd do? I'd just buy a motor, don't you know, and do nothing on earth but tour about Europe!"
And we all agree that under such conditions and on such a day his proposed vocation seems an ideal one.
Friedrichshafen, I should have said, was the home of Count Zeppelin of airship fame, and as we passed through the town his immense craft was being made ready for an experimental trip. It was then attracting much attention in Germany and was the precourser of the only line of commercial airships now in existence.
Lindau, a small resort built on an island about three hundred yards from the shore, marks the point of our departure from Lake Constance. We enter the town over a narrow causeway which connects it with the main road, but find little to detain us. We climb the steep winding road leading out of the valley and for the remainder of the day our course wends among the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. It proves a delightful run; we witness constantly changing displays of color and glorious effects of light and shadow. Thunder storms are raging in the mountains and at intervals they sweep down and envelop our road in a dash of summer rain. Above us tower the majestic Alps; in places the dazzling whiteness of the snow still lies against the barren rocks or amidst the dense green of the pines, while above the summits roll blue-gray cumulus clouds glowing with vivid lightning or brilliant with occasional bursts of sunshine. Near at hand stretch green meadows of the foothills, variegated with great splashes of blue or yellow flowers as though some giant painter had swept his brush across the landscape. The effect is shown with striking fidelity in the picture by the late John MacWhirter R. A. which I have reproduced, though it is quite impossible on so small a scale to give an adequate idea of the original canvas--much less of the enchanting scene itself.
Among the foothills and often well up the mountainsides are the characteristic chalets of Tyrol and an occasional ruined castle crowns some seemingly inaccessible rock. We pass several quaint little towns and many isolated houses, all very different from any we have seen elsewhere. The houses are mostly of plaster and often ornamented with queer designs and pictures in brilliant colors. The people are picturesque, too; the women and girls dress in the peculiar costume of the country; the men wear knitted jackets and knee pants with silver buckles and their peaked hats are often decorated with a feather or two.