Delamare-Deboutteville and the stagecoach

Edouard Delamare-Deboutteville was born on February 8, 1856, to a family of wealthy industrialists in the region. After graduating as an engineer from Rouen Industrial School, he became passionate about gas and gasoline engines and in 1884 in his Montgrimont manor in Fontaine-le-Bourg he patented and designed an adaptation of a hunting wagon to run his four-stroke 8 hp and 3.8-litre engine.

Leon Malandain, his mechanic, in charge of the tests on the Cailly road, took advantage of the market place to turn around, helped as he was by the inhabitants in his endeavour.

The experiment was short-lived, because Edouard Delamare-Deboutteville was more interested in the development of the combustion engine than that of an automobile. He perfected it and filed nearly 40 patents. From 8 hp in 1884, the power reached 100 hp in 1889, 700 hp in 1900.

The engine then competed with the steam engines, with equal power, but with much greater flexibility of start-up and maintenance.

For these inventions, he received gold medals and honorary degrees at the 1900 World's Fair.

He died prematurely on 17 February 1901 in his manor.

When the motor-hunting wagon made its U-turn in front of the Cailly halls, it was close to one of the last stagecoaches for transporting passengers to Rouen.

Here's what journalist Georges Dubosc wrote a few years later:"The most typical of the stagecoaches still existing is certainly the coach for Cailly. It is the one that best recalls the ancient horse-drawn carriages of the good old days, rolling and stumbling through the ruts of the old roads of France. Seeing it without horses, as if washed up on the pavement, in front of the Hôtel du Cygne, Place Beauvoisine, close to a newsstand, one cannot imagine the true aspect of the venerable banger. It is to be seen, tumbling down on the trot of its three horses the turning points of the Côte de Neufchâtel, low on its muddy wheels, wide and stocky, bulky and heavy.

The Cailly stagecoach with its coupe - because it has a coupe, - with its canary yellow body, similar to the yellow of the beautiful Sèvres stagecoach, painted by Géricault, looks like the sedans of the Émigrés. Above all, it has those mysterious airs that would have delighted Barbey d'Aurevilly, when, at nightfall, it runs down the road lined with shivering poplars, near this now abandoned Vert-Galant inn. It still gets on with its top deck covered with packages and its stretcher swinging close to the ground, led by le Père Douyer, gravely seated near its open coupe, placidly leading its horse crew."

It continued until at least 1914, led by Henri Gaugué (MPLF) and Paul Boucher here on the photograph.