Explore "A Motor-Flight Through France" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The Seine, two days later, by the sweetest curves, drew us on from Rouen to Les Andelys, past such bright gardens terraced above its banks, such moist poplar-fringed islands, such low green promontories deflecting its silver flow, that we continually checked the flight of the motor, pausing here, and here, and here again, to note how France understands and enjoys and lives with her rivers.
With her great past, it seems, she has partly ceased to live; for, ask as we would, we could not, that morning, learn the way to King Richard's Château Gaillard on the cliff above Les Andelys. Every turn from the route de Paris seemed to lead straight into the unknown; "_mais c'est tout droit pour_ Paris" was the invariable answer when we asked our way. Yet a few miles off were two of the quaintest towns of France -- the Little and Great Andely -- surmounted by a fortress marking an epoch in military architecture, and associated with the fortunes of one of the most romantic figures in history; and we knew that if we clung to the windings of the Seine they must lead us, within a few miles, to the place we sought.