EVERYTHING ON WHEELS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 May 1939, Page 8

EVERYTHING ON WHEELS

MUSEUM OF CAMPIEGNE. MANY RELICS OF PAST DAYS. More than a thousand people a day, at the height of the season, visited Compiegne’s Musee de la Voiture, or museum of locomotion, last year. A courtyard and wing of the palace of Compiegne, built for Louis XV and famous as a residence of Napoleon and the Empress Marie Louise, are given over to the Musee de la Voiture. In the covered courtyard are a hundred vehicles whose equal is not to be found elsewhere. Gathered together here are specimens of the most elegant coachwork of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cinderella might well have stepped from a lovely gold and grey coach, of which every inch is covered with gilt carving and delicate painting. Another vehicle that has come to rest here is a light but elegant trap, in which two sisters drove back to France from exile after the Revolution. Close by is a carriage which, with its flat roof and open seats, is almost a char-a-banc. It belonged to Louis-Philippe, and when Queen Victoria made her first visit to France, in 1843, she rode in it with the royal family at Eu. In another part of the courtyard is a high-hung black carriage around which crowds surged and whose occupant peered out anxiously. This is the carriage in which Napoleon rode part of the way to Paris on his return from Elba. If some of the carriages speak of the nobility and personages of history, a travelling coach speaks of the people. This is a “demidiligence,” with the faded names still on its sides of the towns between which it plied. How often has the empty, hooded seat been filled with the bulky form of the driyer wrapped up for his ride, and the big basket “boot” behind been loaded with precious luggage! In another part is an English relic, a handsome cab that in its day has trundled along Piccadilly, It was bought by a Frenchman more than half a century ago, who drove jt to the coast, and from the French port, himself.

Some of the carriages will have their brief day of revived glory, for in a few weeks they will be taken out to join in a procession organised by the town. They will be accompanied by some of their automobile brethren. Among the early motor cars in the museum is one which' was the first to travel at more than 100 kilometres (62 miles) an hour, a feat performed in 1899.

•The railway also has its place in this museum, With quaint accoutrements of its early days. It is surprising to discover that railway porters in France in the first days of steam locomotion were provided with short swords. In this section England is also represented, both in engravings and souvenirs of old handbills and railway tickets. On the landing of a flight of fetairs one finds the very small carriage in which Queen Victoria, in her last years, was drivel when she visited Nice each year in the winter. It is kept as neat and spruce and polished as when John Brown looked it over critically. There is another souvenir connected with the que'en in this museum, an engraving twenty feet long by five inches high of Queen Victoria’s coronation procession in 1838.