At ten o’clock in the morning, Doriot and Rigoulot set out for the first leg of their trip, from Valentigney to Paris. It was about a three-hundred-mile drive. They filled their car with tools, luggage, and a few water tanks. The Type 3 was powered by a two-and-a-half horsepower engine from Daimler and had four gears with a reverse gear.
Trouble struck early. Because the gas tanks were placed too low, the wicks of the headlamps were not receiving enough gasoline, and they were burning up. The two devised the “especially ingenious idea of covering the [gas tank] with fresh grasses in order to maintain it at the lowest possible temperature.” This solution helped gasoline reach the lamps more easily and it improved the flow of the fuel throughout the engine so the gears worked more smoothly.
Although the car reached speeds as high as thirteen miles per hour on flat stretches, it slowed down on hills. Auguste would throw the car into first gear, which reduced the speed to a near crawl. On very steep hills, while Doriot drove, Rigoulot followed the car, ready to push it if the motor stopped. But, happily, the motor chugged along.
Over the next few days, the two continued their journey. Along the way they slept in small French towns with charming names such as Coutrey, Bar-sur-Aube, and Provins. Three days later, after reaching Paris at one o’clock in the afternoon, the two men “made a triumphal entry” at the factory of Panhard-Levassor, another innovative French car-maker. Armand Peugeot greeted them with a big smile. Their average speed during the first leg was a respectable eight miles an hour.
A few days later, full of confidence, the two set out to establish the Paris-Brest record. At the time, there was no such thing as a gas station. So as a precaution, Doriot and Rigoulot had Peugeot employees place fuel supplies in advance of their arrival with railroad stationmasters every sixty miles or so. As it turned out, the stationmasters were often afraid to keep the gas for the racers for fear it would catch fire. In those cases, Auguste approached drycleaning establishments and asked to borrow or buy the liquid used to clean their customers’ clothes.
Rigoulot and Doriot covered one hundred twenty-five miles the first day. The following day they drove another one hundred miles without serious trouble. But while they were headed toward Brest, a problem in the differential delayed them twenty-four hours just outside of Morlaix. They had to make use of all their ingenuity in order to repair the damage, borrowing tools from the shoemaker of the hamlet and using a schoolyard offered up by a kindly teacher to repair the car.
That evening, after dark, “in the midst of the indescribable tumult of a curiously enthusiastic crowd,” the quadricycle arrived at Brest. The two men drove along the Rue de Siam, where they were greeted by M. Magnus, the Brest representative of Peugeot. After a night of rest, they set forth on their return voyage. The trip was filled with many comic moments that illustrated the radical and frightening nature of this new machine. Throughout the entire race, telegraphs alerted people of the advancing racers. In many villages, trumpeters sounded the approach of the rumbling vehicle. In one town, villagers “in strange and scanty garb” rushed out of their houses and inns to marvel at the oncoming vehicle.
“Thus it happened one Sunday morning, in Brittany, a worthy gentleman … surprised by the sound of the clarion just at the moment when he was changing his clothes, rushed out on the sidewalk holding his trousers in his hands, one leg in and one leg out of the trousers, while there came rushing out to stand beside him another curious individual from a barber shop, with the towel still at his neck, one half of his face shaved while soap suds covered the other half ! Moreover, as the dogs were not yet used to automobiles, they often bothered us the first days. Therefore, having found near Dreux a wagon whip, we took possession of it and when a dog disturbed us by jumping and running about us, we had only to raise the whip to get rid of him. This method, which should still be useful in many countries, rendered us a real service.”
Other onlookers were less amused. When Doriot and Rigoulet pulled into one village where people were going to church, “we saw women fall to their knees and [cross] themselves at our passing.” They thought the car was the sign of Satan.
The return to Paris was accomplished without any major problems. While there, they took “several Paris personalities interested in this new form of locomotion” for rides in their car. The two then returned to Valentigney without a hitch. All in all, it was a stunning success. Rigoulot and Doriot had covered fifteen hundred miles in 139 hours at an average speed of nine miles an hour without a serious accident other than the differential glitch. Instead of ruin, the Paris-Brest et Retour had made their reputations. That year, thanks to the race, Peugeot sold five cars, and boosted its output to twenty-nine cars the following year.
The year 1894 brought Peugeot and Auguste Doriot another level of fame. In July, Pierre Giffard and Le Petit Journal decided to hold the first race exclusively for automobiles. There would be no bicycles riding alongside Auguste this time—the car had earned the right to its own contest.
The contest was called the Paris-Rouen Trial of 1894 and was run from Paris to Rouen, a city about eighty miles northwest of the French capital. It was not truly a race but rather a point-to-point contest during which the reliability and performance of the vehicles were judged. The intrepid drivers competed without crash helmets, protective clothing, or barriers, racing over, as the great English driver Charles Jarrott put it, “the never-ending road that led to an unobtainable horizon.” The string of epic motor racing contests that subsequently took place prior to World War I were regarded with as much awe, excitement, and alarm as putting a man on the moon, and it all started with this 1894 contest.
The race organizers declared Auguste Doriot the winner. He had finished the course at an average speed of 11.5 miles per hour, slightly faster than the pace he set three years earlier. Doriot shared the seventy-thousand-franc purse with a car from Panhard-Levassor, which came in second. A famous picture taken after the race shows Auguste sitting in the car beside Giffard. Two other men sit across from them. A crowd of children and men surround the car, staring at the men and their bizarre contraption. Giffard and the two other men look back at the camera, smiling, while August looks straight ahead with a stern and focused expression, as if he was still surveying the road, racing toward that unobtainable horizon.
To Auguste, 1894 was a momentous year for a far more personal reason. While Auguste was living in Valentigney, he met a young woman named Berthe Camille Baehler. Berthe, known as Camille to her family, came from Voujeaucourt, another village in Franche-Comte, just east of Valentigney. Camille was born on August 16, 1870 to a Swiss father and French mother. Her father, Jean Baehler, came from Uetendorf, a Swiss village outside of Bern. Baehler supported his family through trading wood between Switzerland and France, and settled in Voujeaucourt, where he met his wife. Since Camille’s mother died when she was a child, she was raised by her grandmother and three older sisters.
A family photo taken when Camille was thirty-eight shows a fit, attractive woman with a heart-shaped face wearing a long white dress. In the photo, Camille tied her voluptuous mane of brown hair behind her head, which accentuated her short, straight nose, wide-set eyes, and pretty thin lips. Camille was advanced for her time. She spoke English and graduated from a French lycée, earning a living as a schoolteacher. Like Auguste, Camille was an adventurous spirit. Once, around 1890, she even traveled to Canada where she worked as a nurse and teacher for the children of a wealthy family in Montreal. Camille came back from Canada to marry Auguste, a marriage that was encouraged by their respective parents.
On September 27, 1894, Auguste and Camille were married in Valentigney. He was a relatively old thirty, while she was a fetching twenty-four. The couple shared a deep bond and created a loving home and atmosphere for their two children. After the wedding, Armand Peugeot sent Auguste to Paris to serve as the director of its factory and technical director of Peugeot’s first showroom on L’avenue de la Grande-Armée. Cars were so new that people did not know how to operate these machines, so Auguste taught customers how to drive, and took care