y been quitted.

[Illustration: How Not To Travel]

This was probably the most remarkable "grand tour" which had been
made up to that time, and it was done with a little six horse-power
car, which suffered no accidents save those that one is likely to
meet with in an afternoon's promenade. The automobile itself weighed,
with its baggage and accessories, practically six hundred kilos, and
with its two passengers 760 kilos. The distance covered was 4,496
kilometres.

Part II
Touring In France

[Illustration: Touring France]

Chapter I
Down Through Touraine: Paris To Bordeaux

As old residents of Paris we, like other automobilists, had come to
dread the twenty-five or thirty kilometres which lead from town out
through Choisy-le-Roi and Villeneuve St. Georges, at which point the
road begins to improve, and the execrable suburban Paris pavement,
second to nothing for real vileness, except that of Belgium, is
practically left behind, all but occasional bits through the towns.

At any rate, since our automobile horse was eating his head off in
the garage at St. Germain, we decided on one bright May morning to
conduct him forthwith by as comfortable a road as might be found from
St. Germain around to Choisy-le-Roi.

Getting across Paris is one of the dreaded things of life. For the
traveller by train who, fleeing from the fogs of London, as he
periodically does in droves from November to February of each year,
desires to make the south-bound connection at the Gare de Lyon, it is
something of a problem. He may board the "_Ceinture_" with a distrust
the whole while that his train may not make it in time, or he may go
by cab, provided he will run the risk of some of his numerous
impedimenta being left behind, for--speak it lightly--the Englishman
is still found who travels with his bath-tub, though, if he is at all
progressive, it may be a collapsible india-rubber affair which you
blow up like the tires of an automobile.

For the automobilist there is the same dread and fear. To avoid this
one has simply to make his way carefully from St. Germain, via Port
Marly, or Marly-Bailly, to St. Cyr (where is the great military
school), to Versailles, thence to Choisy-le-Roi via the _Route
Nationale_ which passes to the south of Sceaux. The route is not,
perhaps, the shortest, and it takes something of the skill of the old
pathfinders to worry it out, but it absolutely avoids the pavements
between St. Germain and Versaill