Page:A Motor-Flight Through France.djvu/90

A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE in especial seems to have been a very pelican to the greed of her offspring.

We had meant to spend the night there, but there was a grimness about the inn—the special grimness of which the commercial travellers' hotel in the French manufacturing town holds the depressing secret—that forbade even a glance at the bedrooms; and though it was near sunset we pressed on for Vichy. We had, in consequence, but a cold twilight glimpse of the fine gorge of Montaigut, through which the road cuts its way to Gannat, the first town to the north of the Limagne; and night had set in when we traversed the plain of the Allier. On good French roads, however, a motor-journey by night is not without its compensations; and our dark flight through mysterious fields and woods terminated, effectively enough, with the long descent down a lamp-garlanded boulevard into the inanimate white watering-place.

Vichy, in fact, had barely opened the shutters of its fashionable hotels: the season does not begin till June, and in May only a few premature bathers—mostly English—shiver in corners of the marble halls, or disconsolately peruse last year's [ 50 ]