A Motor-Flight Through France: Large Print

By: Wharton, Edith

Freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage to fixedhours and the beaten track, the approach to each town through the area of ugliness anddesolation created by the railway itself, it has given us back the wonder, the adventure andthe novelty which enlivened the way of our posting grand-parents. Above all theserecovered pleasures must be ranked the delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on itby back ways and unchronicled paths, and surprising in it some intimate aspect of pasttime, some silhouette hidden for half a century or more by the ugly mask of railwayembankments and the iron bulk of a huge station. Then the villages that we missed andyearned for from the windows of the train-the unseen villages have been given back tous -and nowhere could the importance of the recovery have been more delightfullyexemplified than on a May afternoon in the Pas-de-Calais, as we climbed the long ascentbeyond Boulogne on the road to Arras.It is a delightful country, broken into wide waves of hill and valley, with hedge-rowshigh and leafy enough to bear comparison with the Kentish hedges among which our motorhad left us a day or two before; and the villages, the frequent, smiling, happily-placedvillages, will also meet successfully the more serious challenge of their English rivals-meet it on other grounds and in other ways, with paved market-places and clippedcharmilles instead of gorse-fringed commons, with soaring belfries instead of squarechurch towers, with less of verdure, but more, perhaps, of outline-certainly of line.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08QZYF77V
• ISBN13: 9798583757084
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 76 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 8.5" x 11.0"