oo cringingly servile, nor too familiar, though
always keen and agile, and possessed of a foresight and initiative
which anticipates your every want, or at any rate meets it promptly,
even if you ask for it in boarding-school French or German.

There is a keen supervision of food products in France, by
governmental inspection and control, and one is certain of what he is
getting when he buys his _filet_ at the butcher's, and if he
patronizes hotels and restaurants of an approved class he is equally
sure that he is eating beef in his _bouille_ and mutton in his
_ragout_.

Horse-meat is sold largely, and perhaps certain substitutes for
rabbit, but you only buy horsemeat at a horse butcher's, so there is
no deception here. You buy horse-meat as horse-meat, and not as beef,
in the same way that you buy oleomargarine as oleomargarine, and not
as butter, and the French law deals hardly with the fraudulent seller
of either.

The law does not interfere with one's private likes and dislikes, and
if you choose to make your breakfast off of oysters and Creme
Chantilly--as more than one American has been known to do on the
Paris boulevards--there is no law to stop you, as there is in
Germany, if you want beer and fruit together. Doubtless this is a
good law; it sounds reasonable; but the individual should have sense
enough to be able to select a menu from non-antagonistic ingredients.

Foreigners, by which English and Americans mean people of Continental
Europe, know vastly more of the art of catering to the traveller than
do Anglo-Saxons. This is the first, last, and intermediate verse of
the litany of good cheer. We may catch up with our Latin and Teuton
brothers, or we may not. Time will tell, if we don't expire from the
over-eating of pie and muffins before that time arrives.

[Illustration: Road Map of France]

Chapter V
The Grand Tour

[Illustration: Grand Tour]

The advantages of touring by automobile are many: to see the country,
to travel agreeably, to be independent of railways, and to be an
opportunist--that is to say to be able to fly off at a tangent of
fifty or a hundred kilometres at a moment's notice, in order to take
in some fete or fair, or celebration or pilgrimage.

"_Le tourisme en automobile_" is growing all over the world, but
after all it is generally only in or near the great cities and towns
that one meets an automobile on the road. They hug the great towns
and their neighbouring resorts wit