Automobile travel; France -- Description and travel
Bourges was evidently a Court City, a home of the aristocracy; even
to-day with its air of seclusion it impresses the beholder as very
much the fine gentleman. Your automobile clothes worry you, you feel
an inclination to return to your hotel and don silks and velvets, a
plumed hat and sword and high-heeled shoes, as you may be summoned into
the presence of the King to be questioned as to your purpose in coming
here and also about that strange and devilish machine which in old
times would have brought you to the stake promptly, unless you could
have first induced His Majesty to take a ride through the sunny lands
stretching out on all sides of the ancient city. After which Louis
would probably have locked you up in one of his cages and kept the
machine.
In these days of flying, many pass this way to whom the stones of
Bourges are dumb, but such is often the case. At Monte Carlo I met
the owner of a great machine, who stared at me in dumb amazement when
I asked him what he thought of Carcassonne. Actually he had not even
seen it,--had sped by under the very walls of that vision on the hill
and not known it was there,--remembered nothing save that he did not
like the hotel in the modern town. Likewise later in Tours, when I
asked one of the ancient faith, from America, what he thought of the
châteaux which make Touraine an open book which he who runs may read,
he replied that he would not give two dollars for the whole lot. He had
"left Biarritz at eight o'clock in the morning" and "would reach Paris
on record breaking time." _His_ machine "was the best on the road"--a
swish, and a swirl, a cloud of dust, a starting, and a getting there,
that was his idea of what automobile life should be, causing one to
regret that so many at home through lack of means can never see these
places save in dreams, while unstinted gold is thrown away upon those
who cannot appreciate them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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