Page:A Motor-Flight Through France.djvu/120

A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE page to one illuminated. And every day now would turn a brighter page for us.

Goethe has a charming verse, descriptive, it is supposed, of his first meeting with Christiane Vulpius: "Aimlessly I strayed through the wood, having it in my mind to seek nothing."

Such, precisely, was our state of mind on that first day's run. We were simply pushing south toward the Berry, through a more or less familiar country, and the real journey was to begin for us on the morrow, with the run from Châteauroux to Poitiers. But we reckoned without our France! It is easy enough, glancing down the long page of the Guide Continental, to slip by such names as Versailles, Rambouillet, Chartres and Valençay, in one's dash for the objective point; but there is no slipping by them in the motor, they lurk there in one's path, throwing out great loops of persuasion, arresting one's flight, complicating one's impressions, oppressing, bewildering one with the renewed, half-forgotten sense of the hoarded richness of France.

Versailles first, unfolding the pillared expanse of its north façade to vast empty perspectives of radiating avenues; then Rambouillet, low in a [ 74 ]