A Motor-flight Through France

In this richly observant travel narrative, Edith Wharton turns the motor-car into an instrument of rediscovery, freeing travel from railway schedules and letting northern France unfold in all its cultivated intimacy. From Boulogne to Amiens, through Hesdin, Arras, and on toward Beauvais, Rouen, and the Seine towns beyond, she finds a landscape shaped by human memory: clipped avenues, smiling villages, historic roads, and fields ordered with elegance rather than wildness. Against this backdrop, great cathedrals and ruined fortresses emerge as living records of faith, labor, ambition, and time. Wharton's central fascination is Gothic art, especially in Amiens, where the cathedral dominates the town with moral and historical force, and in Beauvais, where an unfinished choir becomes a sublime emblem of aspiration. In Rouen, she discovers unexpected harmonies between medieval and Renaissance detail, while her admiration extends to overlooked treasures such as Gerhard David's Virgin of the Grapes. The journey continues to Château Gaillard, Neuvy Saint-Sépulcre, and Poitiers, where churches, ruins, and provincial life together reveal France as a layered, enduring masterpiece. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.