"A la bonne heure; parlez-moi de ça!"
"A la bonne heure; parlez-moi de ça!"
You eventually return to Paris on the top of a tramcar. It is a very different affair to go out and dine at the Bois de Boulogne, at the charming restaurant which is near the cascade and the Longchamp racecourse. Here are no ballad-singers, but stately trees majestically grouped and making long evening shadows on a lawn, and irreproachable tables, and carriages rolling up behind high-stepping horses and depositing all sorts of ladies. The drive back through the wood at night is most charming, and the coolness of the air extreme, however hot you may still be certain to find the city.
The best thing, therefore, is not to go back. I write these lines at an inn at Havre, before a window which frames the picture of the seaward path of the transatlantic steamers. One of the great black ships is at this moment painted on the canvas, very near, and beginning its outward journey. I watch it to the right-hand ledge of the window, which is as far as so poor a sailor need be expected to follow it. The hotel at Havre is called, for mysterious reasons, "Frascati"—reasons which I give up the attempt to fathom, so undiscoverable are its points of analogy with the lovely village of the same name which nestles among the olives of the Roman hills. The locality has its charms, however. It is very agreeable, for instance, at the end of a hot journey, to sit down to dinner in a great open cage, hung over the Atlantic, and, while the sea-breeze cools your wine, watch the swiftly-moving ships pass before you like the figures on the field of a magic lantern. It is pleasant also to open your eyes in the early dawn, before the light is intense, and without moving your head on the pillow, enjoy the same clear vision of the ocean highway. In the vague dusk, with their rapid gliding, the passing vessels look like the ghosts of wrecked ships. Most seaports are picturesque, and Havre is not the least so; but my enjoyment has been not of my goal, but of my journey.
My head is full of the twenty-four hours I have just passed at Rouen, and of the charming sail down the Seine to Honfleur. Rouen is a city of very ancient renown, and yet I confess I was not prepared to find a little town of so much expression. The traveller who treads the Rouen streets at the present day sees but the shadow of their former characteristics; for the besom of M. Haussmann has swept through the city, and a train of "embellishments" has followed in its track. The streets have been widened and straightened, and the old houses—gems of mediæval domestic architecture—which formed the peculiar treasure of the place, have been more than decimated. A great deal remains, however, and American eyes are quick to make discoveries. The cathedral, the churches, the Palais de Justice, are alone a splendid group of monuments, and a stroll through the streets reveals a collection of brown and sculptured façades, of quaintly-timbered gables, of curious turrets and casements, of doorways which still may be called rich. Every now and then a considerable stretch of duskiness and crookedness delights the sentimental tourist who is to pass but a couple of nights at Rouen, and who does not care if his favourite adjective happen to imply another element which also is spelled with ap. It is nothing to him that the picturesque is pestiferous. It is everything to him that the great front of the cathedral is magnificently battered, heavy, impressive. It has been defaced immensely, and is now hardly more than a collection of empty niches. I do not mean, of course, that the wanton tourist rejoices in the absence of the statues which once filled them, but up to the present moment, at least, he is not sorry that the façade has not been restored. It consists of a sort of screen, pierced in the centre with a huge wheel-window, crowned with a pyramid of chiselled needles and spires, flanked with two turrets capped with tall empty canopies, and covered, generally, with sculptures—friezes, statues, excrescences. On each side of it rises a great tower; one a rugged mass of early Norman work, with little ornament save its hatcheted closed arches, and its great naked base, as huge and white as the bottom of a chalk-cliff; the other a specimen of sixteenth century gothic, extremely flamboyant and confounding to the eye. The sides of the cathedral are as yet more or less imbedded in certain black and dwarfish old houses, but if you pass around them by a long détour, you arrive at two superb lateral porches. The so-called Portail des Libraires, in especial, on the northern side, is a magnificent affair, sculptured from summit to base (it is now restored), and preceded by a long forecourt, in which the guild of booksellers used to hold its musty traffic. From here you see the immense central tower, perched above the junction of the transepts and the nave, and crowned with a gigantic iron spire, lately erected to replace one which was destroyed by lightning in the early part of the century. This gaunt pyramid has the drawback, to American eyes, of resembling too much the tall fire-towers which are seen in transatlantic cities, and its dimensions are such that, viewed from a distance, it fairly makes little Rouen look top-heavy. Behind the choir, within, is a beautiful lady-chapel, and in this chapel are two enchanting works of art. The larger and more striking of these is the tomb of the two Cardinals d'Amboise, uncle and nephew—the elder, if I mistake not, minister of Louis XII. It consists of a shallow, oblong recess in the wall, lined with gilded and fretted marble, and corniced with delicate little statues. Within the recess the figures of the two cardinals are kneeling, with folded hands and ruggedly earnest faces, their long robes spread out behind them with magnificent amplitude. They are full of life, dignity, and piety; they look like portraits of Holbein transferred into marble. The base of the monument is composed of a series of admirable little images representing the cardinal and other virtues, and the effect of the whole work is wonderfully grave and rich. The discreet traveller will never miss an opportunity to come into a great church at eventide—the hour when his fellow-travellers, less discreet, are lingering over the table d'hôte, when the painted windows glow with a deeper splendour, when the long wand of the beadle, slowly tapping the pavement, or the shuffle of the old sacristan, has a ghostly resonance along the empty nave, and three or four work-weary women, before a dusky chapel, are mumbling for the remission of unimaginable sins. At this hour, at Rouen, the tomb of the Duke of Brézé, husband of Diana of Poitiers, placed opposite to the monument I have just described, seemed to me the most beautiful thing in the world. It is presumably the work of the delightful Jean Goujon, and it bears the stamp of his graceful and inventive talent. The deceased is lying on his back, almost naked, with a part of his shroud bound in a knot about his head—a realistic but not a repulsive image of death. At his head kneels the amiable Diana, in sober garments, all decency and devotion; at his feet stands the Virgin, a charming young woman with a charming child. Above, on another tier, the subject of the monument is represented in the fulness of life, dressed as for a tournament, bestriding a high-stepping war-horse, riding forth like a Roland or a Galahad. The architecture of the tomb is exceedingly graceful and the subordinate figures admirable, but the image of the dead Duke is altogether a masterpiece. The other evening, in the solemn stillness and the fading light of the great cathedral, it seemed irresistibly human and touching. The spectator felt a sort of impulse to smooth out the shroud and straighten the helpless hands.
The second church of Rouen, Saint-Ouen, the beautiful and harmonious, has no monuments of this value, but it offers within a higher interest than the Cathedral. Without, it looks like an English abbey, scraped and restored, disencumbered of huddling neighbours and surrounded on three sides by a beautiful garden. Seen to this excellent advantage it is one of the noblest of churches; but within, it is one of the most fascinating. My taste in architecture greatly resembles my opinions in fruit; the particular melon or pear or peach that I am eating appears to me to place either peaches, pears, or melons, beyond all other succulent things. In the same way, in a fine building the present impression is the one that convinces me most. This is deplorable levity; yet I risk the affirmationà proposof Saint-Ouen. I can imagine no happier combination of lightness and majesty. Its proportions bring tears to the eyes. I have left myself space only to recommend the sail down the Seine from Rouen to the mouth of the stream; but I recommend it in the highest terms. The heat was extreme and the little steamer most primitive, but the river is as entertaining as one could wish. It makes an infinite number of bends and corners and angles, rounded off by a charming vegetation. Abrupt and rocky hills go with it all the way—hills with cornfields lying in their hollows and deep woods crowning their tops. Out of the woodland peep old manors, and beneath, between the hills and the stream, are high-thatched farmsteads, lying deep in their meadows and orchards, cottages pallisaded with hollyhocks, gray old Norman churches and villas flanked with big horse-chestnuts. It is a land of peace and plenty, and remarkable to Anglo-Saxon eyes for the English-looking details of its scenery. I noticed a hundred places where one might have been in Kent as well as in Normandy. In fact it is almost better than Kent, for Kent has no Seine. At the last the river becomes unmistakably an arm of the sea, and as a river, therefore, less interesting. But crooked little Honfleur, with its miniature port, clinging to the side of a cliff as luxuriant as one of the headlands of the Mediterranean, gratifies in a high degree the tourist with a propensity for sketching.
The coast of Normandy and Picardy, from Trouville to Boulogne, is a chain ofstations balnéaires, each with its particular claim to patronage. The grounds of the claim are in some cases not especially obvious; but they are generally found to reside in the fact that if one's spirits, on arriving, are low, so also are the prices. There are the places that are dear and brilliant, like Trouville and Dieppe, and places that are cheap and dreary, like Fécamp and Cabourg. Then there are the places that are both cheap and pleasant. This delightful combination of qualities may be found at the modestplagefrom which I write these lines. At Etretat you may enjoy some of the finest cliff-scenery it has been my fortune to behold, and you may breakfast and dine at the principal hotel for the sum of five and a half francs a day. You may engage a room in the town over the butcher's, the baker's, the cobbler's, at a rate that will depend upon your talent for driving a bargain, but that in no case will be exorbitant. Add to this that there are no other opportunities at Etretat to spend money. You wear old clothes, you walk about in canvas shoes, you deck your head with a fisherman's cap (when made of white flannel these articles may be extolled for their coolness, convenience, and picturesqueness), you lie on the pebbly strand most of the day, watching the cliffs, the waves, and the bathers; in the evening you converse with your acquaintance on the terrace of the Casino, and you keep monkish hours. Though Etretat enjoys great and deserved popularity, I see no symptoms of the decline of these simple fashions—no menace of the invasion of luxury. A little more luxury, indeed, might be imported without doing any harm; though after all we soon learn that it is an idle enough prejudice that has hitherto prevented us from keeping our soap in a sugar-dish and regarding a small rock, placed against a door, as an efficient substitute for a key. From a Parisian point of view, Etretat is certainly primitive, but it would be affectation on the part of an American to pretend that he was not agreeably surprised to find a "summer resort," in which he had been warned that he would have to rough it, so elaborately appointed and organised. Etretat may be primitive, but Etretat is French, and therefore Etretat is "administered."
Like most of the French watering-places, the place has a limited past. Twenty years ago it was but a cluster of fishing-huts. A group of artists and literary people were its first colonists, and Alphonse Karr became the mouthpiece of their enthusiasm. In vulgar phrase, he wrote up Etretat, and he lives in legend, at the present hour, as thegenius loci. The main street is named after him; the gable of the chief inn—the classic Hôtel Blanquet—is adorned with a coloured medallion representing his cropped head and long beard; the shops are stocked with his photographs and with pictures of his villa. Like the magician who has evoked the spirit, he has made his how and retired; but the artistic fraternity, his disciples, still haunt the place, and it enjoys also the favour of theatrical people, three or four of whom, having retired upon their laurels, possess villas here. From my open window, as I write these lines, I look out beyond a little cluster of clean housetops at the long green flank of the down, as it slopes to the village from the summit of the cliff. To the right is the top of an old storm-twisted grove of oaks, in the heart of which stands a brown old farmhouse; then comes the sharp, even outline of the down, with its side spotted with little flat bushes and wrinkled with winding paths, along which here and there I see a bright figure moving; on the left, above the edge of the cliff, stands a bleak little chapel, dedicated to our Lady of the fishing-folk. Just here a provoking chimney starts up and cuts off my view of the downward plunge of the cliff, showing me, with a bar of blue ocean beyond, but a glimpse of its white cheek—its fantastic profile is to the left. But there is not far to go to see without impediments. Three minutes' walk along the Rue Alphonse Karr, where every house is a shop, and every shop has lodgers above it, who scramble bedward by a ladder and trap-door, brings you to the little pebbly bay where the cliffs are perpendicular and the foreign life of Etretat goes forward. At one end are the small fishing-smacks, with their green sides and their black sails, resting crookedly upon the stones; at the other is the Casino, and the two or three tiers of bathing-houses on the slope of the beach in front of it. This beach may be said to be Etretat. It is so steep and stony as to make circulation impossible; one's only course is to plant a camp-chair among the stones or to look for a soft spot in the pebbles, and to abide in the position so chosen. And yet it is the spot in Etretat most sacred to tranquil pleasure.
The French do not treat their beaches as we do ours—as places for a glance, a dip, or a trot, places animated simply during the balneary hours, and wrapped in natural desolation for the rest of the twenty-four. They love them, they adore them, they take possession of them, they live upon them. The people here sit upon the beach from morning to night; whole families come early and establish themselves, with umbrellas and rugs, books and work. The ladies get sunburnt and don't mind it; the gentlemen smoke interminably; the children roll over on the pointed pebbles and stare at the sun like young eagles. (The children's lot I rather commiserate; they have no wooden spades and pails; they have no sand to delve and grub in; they can dig no trenches and canals, nor see the creeping tide flood them.) The great occupation and amusement is the bathing, which has many entertaining features (I allude to it as a spectacle), especially for strangers who keep an eye upon national idiosyncrasies. The French take their bathing very seriously; supplemented by opéra-bouffe in the evening at the Casino, it is their most preferred form of communion with nature. The spectators and the bathers commingle in graceful promiscuity; it is the freedom of the golden age. The whole beach becomes a large family party, in which the sweetest familiarities prevail. There is more or less costume, but the minimum rather than the maximum is found the more comfortable. Bathers come out of their dressing-houses wrapped in short white sheets, which they deposit on the stones, taking an air-bath for some minutes before entering the water. Like everything in France, the bathing is excellently managed, and you feel the firm hand of a paternal and overlooking government the moment you issue from your hut. The Government will on no consideration consent to your being rash. There are six or eight worthy old sons of Neptune on the beach—perfect amphibious creatures—who, if you are a new-comer, immediately accost you and demand pledges that you know how to swim. If you do not, they give you much excellent advice, and keep an eye on you while you are in the water. They are moreover obliged to render you any service you may demand—to pour buckets of water over your head, to fetch your bathing-sheet and your slippers, to carry your wife and children into the sea, to dip them, cheer them, sustain them, to teach them how to swim and how to dive, to hover about, in short, like ministering and trickling angels. At a short distance from the shore are two boats, freighted with sundry other marine divinities, who remain there perpetually, taking it as a personal offence if you venture out too far.
The French themselves have every pretext for venturing, being in general excellent swimmers. Every one swims, and swims indefatigably—men, women, and children. I have been especially struck with the prowess of the ladies, who take the neatest possible headers from the two long plunging-boards which are rigged in the water upon high wheels. As you recline upon the beach you may observe Mademoiselle X. issue from her cabin—Mademoiselle X., the actress of the Palais Royal Theatre, whom you have seen and applauded behind the footlights. She wears a bathing-dress in which, as regards the trousers, even what I have called the minimum has been appreciably scanted; but she trips down, surveying her liberated limbs. "C'est convenable, j'espère, hein?" says Mademoiselle, and trots up the spring-board which projects over the waves with one end uppermost, like a great see-saw. She balances a moment, and then gives a great aerial dive, executing on the way the most graceful of somersaults. This performance the star of the Palais Royal repeats during the ensuing hour, at intervals of five minutes, and leaves you, as you lie tossing little stones into the water, to consider the curious and delicate question why a lady may go so far as to put herself into a single scant clinging garment and take a straight leap, head downward, before three hundred spectators, without violation of propriety—and why impropriety should begin only when she turns over in the air in such a way that for five seconds her head is upwards. The logic of the matter is mysterious; white and black are divided by a hair. But the fact remains that virtue is on one side of the hair and vice on the other. There are some days here so still and radiant, however, that it seems as if vice itself, steeped in such an air and such a sea, might be diluted into innocence. The sea is as blue as melted sapphires, and the rugged white faces of the bordering cliffs make a silver frame for the picture. Every one is idle, amused, good-natured; the bathers take to the water as easily as mermen and mermaids. The bathing-men in the twobateaux de surveillancehave in their charge a freight of rosy children, more or less chubbily naked, and they have nailed a gay streamer and a rude nosegay to their low mastheads. The swimmers dip and rise, circling round the boats and playing with the children. Every now and then they grasp the sides of the boats and cling to them in a dozen harmonious attitudes, making one fancy that Eugène Delacroix's great picture of Dante and Virgil on the Styx, with the damned trying to scramble into Charon's bark, has been repainted as a scene on one of the streams of Paradise. The swimmers are not the damned, but the blessed, and the demonstrative French babies are the cherubs.
The Casino at Etretat is a modest but respectable establishment, with a sufficiently capacious terrace, directly upon the beach, a café, a billiard-room, a ballroom—which may also be used as a theatre, a reading-room, and asalon de conversation. It is in very good taste, without any attempt at gilding or mirrors; the ballroom, in fact, is quite a masterpiece, with its charm of effect produced simply by unpainted woods and happy proportions. Three evenings in the week a blond young man in a white necktie plays waltzes on a grand piano; but the effect is not that of an American "hop," owing to the young ladies of France not being permitted to dance in public places. They may only sit wistfully beside their mammas. Imagine a "hop" at which sweet seventeen is condemned to immobility. The burden of the gaiety is sustained by three or four rosy English maidens and as many of their American sisters. On the other evenings a weak little operatic troupe gives light specimens of the lyric drama, the privilege of enjoying which is covered by your subscription to the Casino. The French hurry in joyously (four times a week in July and August!) at the sound of the bell, but I can give no report of the performances. Sometimes I look through the lighted windows and see, on the diminutive stage, a short-skirted young woman with one hand on her heart and the other persuasively extended. Through the hot unpleasant air comes a little ghost of a roulade. I turn away and walk on the terrace and listen to the ocean vocalising to the stars.
But there are (by daylight) other walks at Etretat than the terrace, and no account of the place is complete without some commemoration of the admirable cliffs. They are the finest I have seen; their fantastic needles and buttresses, at either end of the little bay, give to careless Etretat an extreme distinction. In spite of there being no sands, a persistent admirer of nature will walk a long distance upon the tiresome sea-margin of pebbles for the sake of being under them and visiting some of their quiet caves and embrowned recesses, varnished by the ocean into splendid tones. Seen in this way from directly below, they look stupendous; they hold up their heads with attitudes quite Alpine. They are marvellously white and straight and smooth; they have the tint and something of the surface of time-yellowed marble, and here and there, at their summits, they break into quaint little pinnacles and turrets. But to be on the top of them is even better; here you may walk over miles of grassy, breezy down, with the woods, contorted and sea-stunted, of old farmsteads on your land-side (the farmhouses here have all a charming way of being buried in a wood, like the castle of the Sleeping Beauty), coming every little while upon a weather-blackened old shepherd and his flock (their conversation—the shepherds'—is delightful), or on some little seaward-plunging valley, holding in its green hollow a diminutive agricultural village, curtained round from the sea-winds by a dense stockade of trees. So you may go southward or northward, without impediment, to Havre or to Dieppe.
The other day, before the first fire of winter, when the deepening dusk had compelled me to close my book and wheel my chair closer, I indulged in a retrospect. The objects of it were not far distant, and yet they were already interfused with the mellow tints of the past. In the crackling flame the last remnant of the summer appeared to shrink up and vanish. But the flicker of its destruction made a sort of fantastic imagery, and in the midst of the winter fire the summer sunshine seemed to glow. It lit up a series of visible memories.
One of the first was that of a perfect day on the coast of Normandy—a warm, still Sunday in the early part of August. From my pillow, on waking, I could look at a strip of blue sea and a great cube of white cliff. I observed that the sea had never been so brilliant, and that the cliff was shining as if it had been painted in the night. I rose and came forth with the sense that it was the finest day of summer, and that one ought to do something uncommon by way of keeping it. At Etretat it was uncommon to take a walk; the custom of the country is to lie all day upon the pebbly strand, watching, as we should say in America, one's fellow-boarders. Your leisurely stroll, in a scanty sheet, from your bathing-cabin into the water, and your trickling progress from the water back into your cabin, form, as a general thing, the sum total of your pedestrianism. For the rest you remain horizontal, contemplating the horizon. To mark the day with a white stone, therefore, it was quite sufficient to stretch my legs. So I climbed the huge grassy cliff which shuts in the little bay on the right (as you lie on the beach, head upward), and gained the bleak white chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde, which a lady told me she was sure was the original of Matthew Arnold's "little gray church on the windy shore." This is very likely; but the little church to-day was not gray, neither was the shore windy.
I had occasion, by the time I reached the summit, to wish it had been. Deep, silent sunshine filled the air, and the long grass of the downs stood up in the light without a tremor. The downs at Etretat are magnificent, and the way they stretched off toward Dieppe, with their shining levels and their faintly-shaded dells, was in itself an irresistible invitation. On the land-side they have been somewhat narrowed by cultivation; the woods, and farms, and grain-fields here and there creep close enough to the edge of the cliff almost to see the shifting of the tides at its base. But cultivation in Normandy is itself picturesque, and the pedestrian rarely needs resent its encroachments. Neither walls nor hedges nor fences are anywhere visible; the whole land lies open to the breezes and to his curious footsteps. This universal absence of barriers gives an air of vastness to the landscape, so that really, in a little French province, you have more of the feeling of being in a big country than on our own huge continent, which bristles so incongruously with defensive palings and dykes. Norman farmhouses, too, with their mossy roofs and their visible beams making all kinds of triangles upon the ancient plaster of their walls, are very delightful things. Hereabouts they have always a dark little wood dose beside them; often achênaie, as the term is—a fantastic little grove of tempest-tossed oaks. The trees look as if, some night, when the sea-blasts were howling their loudest and their boughs were tossing most wildly, the tumult had suddenly been stilled and they had stopped short, each in the attitude into which the storm was twisting it. The only thing the storm can do with them now is to blow them straight. The long, indented coast-line had never seemed to me so charming. It stretched away into the light haze of the horizon, with such lovely violet spots in its caves and hollows, and such soft white gleams on its short headlands—such exquisite gradations of distance and such capricious interruptions of perspective—that one could only say that the land was really trying to smile as intensely as the sea. The smile of the sea was a positive simper. Such a glittering and twinkling, such a softness and blueness, such tiny little pin-points of foam, and such delicate little wrinkles of waves—all this made the ocean look like a flattered portrait.
The day I speak of was a Sunday, and there were to be races at Fécamp, ten miles away. The agreeable thing was, of course, to walk to Fécamp over the grassy downs. I walked and walked, over the levels and the dells, having land and ocean quite to myself. Here and there I met a shepherd lying flat on his stomach in the sun, while his sheep, in extreme dishabille (shearing-time being recent), went huddling in front of me as I approached. Far below, on the blue ocean, like a fly on a table of lapis, crawled a little steamer, carrying people from Etretat to the races. I seemed to go much faster, yet the steamer got to Fécamp before me. But I stopped to gossip with a shepherd on a grassy hillside, and to admire certain little villages which are niched in small, transverse, seaward-sloping valleys. The shepherd told me that he had been farm-servant to the same master for five-and-thirty years—ever since the age of ten; and that for thirty-five summers he had fed his flock upon those downs. I don't know whether his sheep were tired of their diet, but he professed himself very tired of his life. I remarked that in fine weather it must be charming, and he observed, with humility, that to thirty-five summers there went a certain number of rainy days.
The walk to Fécamp would be quite satisfactory if it were not for thefonds. Thefondsare the transverse valleys just mentioned—the channels, for the most part, of small water-courses which discharge themselves into the sea. The downs subside, precipitately, to the level of the beach, and then slowly lift their grassy shoulders on the other side of the gully. As the cliffs are of immense height, these indentations are profound, and drain off a little of the exhilaration of the too elastic pedestrian. The firstfondstrikes him as delightfully picturesque, and he is down the long slope on one side and up the gigantic hump on the other before he has time to feel hot. But the second is greeted with that temperedempressementwith which you bow in the street to an acquaintance whom you have met half an hour before; the third is a stale repetition; the fourth is decidedly one too many, and the fifth is sensibly exasperating. Thefonds, in a word, are very tiresome. It was, if I remember rightly, in the bottom of the last and widest of the series that I discovered the little town of Yport. Every little fishing-village on the Norman coast has, within the last ten years, set up in business as a watering-place; and, though one might fancy that nature had condemned Yport to modest obscurity, it is plain she has no idea of being out of the fashion. But she is a miniature imitation of her rivals. She has a meagre little wood behind her and an evil-smelling beach, on which bathing is possible only at the highest tide. At the scorching midday hour at which I inspected her she seemed absolutely empty, and the ocean, beyond acres of slippery seaweed, looked very far away. She has everything that a properly appointedstation de bainsshould have, but everything is on a Lilliputian scale. The whole place looked like a huge Nüremburg toy. There is a diminutive hotel, in which, properly, the head-waiter should be a pigmy and the chambermaid a sprite, and beside it there is a Casino on the smallest possible scale. Everything about the Casino is so consistently microscopic, that it seems a matter of course that the newspapers in the reading-room should be printed in the very finest type. Of course there is a reading-room, and a dancing-room, and a café, and a billiard-room, with a bagatelle-board instead of a table, and a little terrace on which you may walk up and down with very short steps. I hope the prices are as tiny as everything else, and I suspect, indeed, that Yport honestly claims, not that she is attractive, but that she is cheap.
I toiled up the perpendicular cliff again, and took my way over the grass, for another hour, to Fécamp, where I found the peculiarities of Yport directly reversed. The place is a huge, straggling village, seated along a wide, shallow bay, and adorned, of course, with the classic Casino and the row of hotels. But all this is on a very brave scale, though it is not manifest that the bravery at Fécamp has won a victory; and, indeed, the local attractions did not strike me as irresistible. A pebbly beach of immense length, fenced off from the town by a grassy embankment; a Casino of a bald and unsociable aspect; a principal inn, with an interminable brown façade, suggestive somehow of an asylum or an almshouse—such are the most striking features of this particular watering-place. There are magnificent cliffs on each side of the bay, but, as the French say, without impropriety, it is the devil to get to them. There was no one in the hotel, in the Casino, or on the beach; the whole town being in the act of climbing the farther cliff, to reach the downs on which the races were to be held. The green hillside was black with trudging spectators and the long sky-line was fretted with them. When I say there was no one at the inn, I forget the gentleman at the door, who informed me positively that he would give me no breakfast; he seemed to have stayed at home from the races expressly to give himself this pleasure. But I went farther and fared better, obtaining a meal of homely succulence in an unfashionable tavern, in a back street, where the wine was sound, the cutlets were tender, and the serving-maid was rosy. Then I walked along—for a mile, it seemed—through a dreary, graygrand'-rue, where the sunshine was hot, the odours were portentous, and the doorsteps garnished with aged fishwives, retired from business, whose plaited linen coifs gave a value, as the painters say, to the brown umber of their cheeks. I inspected the harbour and its goodly basin—with nothing in it—and certain pink and blue houses which surround it, and then, joining the last stragglers, I clambered up the side of the cliff to the downs.
The races had already begun, and the ring of spectators was dense. I picked out some of the smallest people, looked over their heads, and saw several young farmers, in parti-coloured jackets and very red in the face, bouncing up and down on handsome cart-horses. Satiated at last with this diversion, I turned away and wandered down the hill again; and after strolling through the streets of Fécamp, and gathering not a little of the wayside entertainment that a seaport and fishing-town always yields, I repaired to the Abbey-church, a monument of some importance, and almost as great an object of pride in the town as the Casino. The Abbey of Fécamp was once a very rich and powerful establishment, but nothing remains of it now save its church and itstrappistine. The church, which is for the most part early gothic, is very stately and interesting, and thetrappistine, a distilled liquor of the Chartreuse family, is much prized by people who take a little glass after their coffee. By the time I had done with the Abbey the townsfolk had sliden massedown the cliff again, the yellow afternoon had come, and the holiday-takers, before the wine-shops, made long and lively shadows. I hired a sort of two-wheeled gig, without a hood, and drove back to Etretat in the rosy stage of evening. The gig dandled me up and down in a fashion of which I had been unconscious since I left off baby-clothes; but the drive, through the charming Norman country, over roads which lay among the peaceful meadows like paths across a park, was altogether delightful. The sunset gave a deeper mellowness to the standing crops, and in the grassiest corner of the wayside villages the young men and maidens were dancing like the figures in vignette-illustrations of classic poets.
It was another picked day—you see how freely I pick them—when I went to breakfast at Saint-Jouin, chez la belle Ernestine. The beautiful Ernestine is as hospitable as she is fair, and to contemplate her charms you have only to order breakfast. They shine forth the more brilliantly in proportion as your order is liberal, and Ernestine is beautiful according as your bill is large. In this case she comes and smiles, really very handsomely, round your table, and you feel some hesitation in accusing so well-favoured a person of extortion. She keeps an inn at the end of a lane which diverges from the high road between Etretat and Havre, and it is an indispensable feature of your "station" at the former place that you choose some fine morning and seek her hospitality. She has been a celebrity these twenty years, and is no longer a simple maiden in her flower; but twenty years, if they have diminished her early bloom, have richly augmented hermusée. This is a collection of all the verses and sketches, the autographs, photographs, monographs, trinkets, presented to the amiable hostess by admiring tourists. It covers the walls of her sitting-room and fills half a dozen big albums which you look at while breakfast is being prepared, just as if you were awaiting dinner in genteel society. Most Frenchmen of the day whom one has heard of appear to have called at Saint-Jouin, and to have left theirhomages. Each of them has turned a compliment with pen or pencil, and you may see in a glass case on the parlour wall what Alexandre Dumasfilsthought of the landlady's nose, and how several painters measured her ankles.
Of course you must make this excursion in good company, and I affirm that I was in the very best. The company prefers, equally of course, to have its breakfast in the orchard in front of the house; which, if the repast is good, will make it seem better still, and if it is poor, will carry off its poorness. Clever innkeepers should always make their victims (in tolerable weather) eat in the garden. I forget whether Ernestine's breakfast was intrinsically good or bad, but I distinctly remember enjoying it, and making everything welcome. Everything, that is, save the party at the other table—the Paris actresses and the American gentlemen. The combination of these two classes of persons, individually so delightful, results in certain phenomena which seem less in harmony with appleboughs and summer breezes than with the gas-lamps and thick perfumes of acabinet particulier; and yet it was characteristic of this odd mixture of things that Mademoiselle Ernestine, coming to chat with her customers, should bear a beautiful infant on her arm, and smile with artless pride on being assured of its filial resemblance to herself. She looked handsomer than ever as she caressed this startling attribute of presumptive spinsterhood.
Saint-Jouin is close to the sea and to the finest cliffs in the world. One of my companions, who had laden the carriage with the implements of a painter, went off into a sunny meadow to take the portrait of a windmill, and I, choosing the better portion, wandered through a little green valley with the other. Ten minutes brought us to the edge of the cliffs, which at this point of the coast are simply sublime. I had supposed the white sea-walls of Etretat the finest thing possible in this way, but the huge red porphyritic-looking masses of Saint-Jouin have an even grander character. I have rarely seen a landscape more "plastic." They are strange, fantastic, out of keeping with the country, and for some rather arbitrary reason suggested to me a Spanish or even an African prospect. Certain sun-scorched precipices in Spanish sierras must have very much the same warmth of tone and desolation of attitude. The great distinction of the cliffs of Saint-Jouin is their extraordinary doubleness. Falling to an immense depth, they encounter a certain outward ledge, or terrace, where they pause and play a dozen fantastic tricks, such as piling up rocks into the likeness of needles and watch-towers; then they plunge again, and in another splendid sweep descend to the beach. There was something very impressive in the way their evil brows, looking as if they were stained with blood and rust, were bent upon the indifferent—the sleeping—sea.
In a month of beautiful weather at Etretat, every day was not an excursion, but every day seemed indeed a picked day. For that matter, as I lay on the beach watching the procession of the easy-going hours, I took a good many mental excursions. The one, perhaps, on which I oftenest embarked, was a comparison between French manners, French, habits, French types, and those of my native land. These comparisons are not invidious; I do not conclude against one party and in favour of the other; as the French say,je constatesimply. The French people about me were "spending the summer," just as I had so often seen my fellow-countrymen spend it, and it seemed to me, as it had seemed to me at home, that this operation places men and women under a sort of monstrous magnifying-glass. The human figure has a higher relief in the country than in town, and I know of no place where psychological studies prosper so much as at the seaside. I shall not pretend to relate my observations in the order in which they occurred to me (or indeed to relate them in full at all); but I may say that one of the foremost was to this effect—that the summer-question, for every one, had been more easily settled than it usually is in America. The solution of the problem of where to go had not been a thin-petalled rose, plucked from among particularly sharp-pointed thorns. People presented themselves with a calmness and freshness very different from the haggardness of aspect which announces that the American citizen and his family have "secured accommodations." This impression, with me, rests perhaps on the fact that most Frenchwomen turned of thirty—the average wives and mothers—are so comfortably endowed with flesh. I have never seen such richness of contour as among the maturebaigneusesof Etretat. The lean and desiccated person into whom a dozen years of matrimony so often converts the blooming American girl is not emulated in France. A majestic plumpness flourished all around me—the plumpness of triple chins and deeply dimpled hands. I mused upon it, and I discovered that it was the result of the best breakfasts and dinners in the world. It was the corpulence of ladies who are thoroughly well fed, and who never walk a step that they can spare. The assiduity with which the women of America measure the length of our democratic pavements is doubtless a factor in their frequent absence of redundancy of outline. As a "regular boarder" at the Hôtel Blanquet—pronounced by Anglo-Saxon visitors Blanket—I found myself initiated into the mysteries of the French dietary system. I assent to the common tradition that the French are a temperate people, so long as it is understood in this sense—that they eat no more than they want to. But their wants are very comprehensive. Their capacity strikes me as enormous, and we ourselves, if we are less regulated, are certainly much more slender consumers.
The American breakfast has, I believe, long been a subject of irony to the foreign observer; but the American breakfast is an ascetic meal compared with the Frenchdéjeûner-à-la-fourchette. The latter, indeed, is simply a dinner without soup; it differs neither generically nor specifically from the evening-repast. If it excludes soup, it includes eggs, prepared in a hundred forms; and if it proscribes champagne, it admits beer in foaming pitchers, so that the balance is fairly preserved. I think that an American will often suffer vicariously from the reflection that a French family which sits down at half-past eleven to fish and entries and roasts, to asparagus and beans, to salad and dessert, and cheese and coffee, proposes to do exactly the same thing at half-past six. But we may be sure at any rate that the dinner will be as good as the breakfast, and that the breakfast has nothing to fear from prospective comparison with the dinner; and we may further reflect that in a country where the pleasures of the table are thoroughly organised, it is natural that they should be prolonged and reiterated. Nothing is more noticeable among the French than their superior intelligence in dietary matters; every one seems naturally a judge, a dilettante. They have analysed tastes and savours to a finer point than we; they are aware of differences and relations of which we take no heed. Observe a Frenchman of any age and of any condition (I have been quite as much struck with it in the very young men as in the old), as he orders his breakfast or his dinner at a Parisian restaurant, and you will perceive that the operation is much more solemn than it is apt to be in New York or in London. Monsieur has, in a word, a certain ideal for a particular repast, and it will make a difference in his happiness whether the kidneys, for instance, of a certain style, are chopped to the ultimate or only to the penultimate smallness. His directions and admonitions to the waiter are therefore minute and exquisite, and eloquently accentuated by the pressure of thumb and forefinger; and it must be added that the imagination of the waiter is usually quite worthy of the refined communion opened to it.
This subtler sense of quality is observable even among those classes in which in other countries it is generally forestalled by a depressing consciousness on the subject of quantity. Observe your concierge and his wife at their mid-day meal, as you pass up and down stairs. They are not satisfying nature upon green tea and potatoes; they are seated before a repast which has been reasoned out, which, on its modest scale, is served in courses, and has a beginning, a middle, an end. I will not say that the French sense of comfort is confined to the philosophy of nutrition, but it is certainly here that it is most highly evolved. French people must have a good dinner and a good bed; but they are willing that the bed should be stationed and the dinner be eaten in the most insufferable corners. Your porter and his wife dine with a certain distinction, and sleep soft in their lodge; but their lodge is in all probability a fetid black hole, five feet square, in which, in England or in America, people of their talents would never consent to live. The French are willing to abide in the dark, to huddle together, to forego privacy, to let bad smells grow great among them. They have an accursed passion for coquettish furniture; for cold, brittle chairs, for tables with scalloped edges, for ottomans without backs, for fireplaces muffled in plush and fringe. A French bedroom is a bitter mockery—a ghastly attempt to serve two masters which succeeds in being agreeable to neither. It is a thing of traps and delusions, constructed on the assumption that it is inelegant to be known to wash or to sleep, and yet pervaded with suggestions of uncleanness compared with which the matutinal "tub," wellen évidence, is a delightful symbol of purity. This comes of course from that supreme French quality, the source of half the charm of the French mind as well as of all its dryness, the genius for economy. It is wasting a room to let it be a bedroom alone; so it must be tricked out ingeniously as a sitting-room, and ends by being (in many cases) insufferable both by night and by day. But allowing all weight to these latter reflections, it is still very possible that the French have the better part. If you are well fed, you can perhaps afford to be ill lodged; whereas enjoyment of the most commodious apartments is incompatible with inanition and dyspepsia.
If I had not cut short my mild retrospect by these possibly milder generalisations, I should have touched lightly upon some of the social phenomena of which the little beach at Etretat was the scene. I should have narrated that the French, at the seaside, are not "sociable" as Americans affect to be in a similar situation, and I should subjoin that at Etretat it was very well on the whole that they should not have been. The immeasurably greater simplicity of composition of American society makes sociability with us a comparatively untaxed virtue; but anything like an equal exercise of it in France would be attended with alarming drawbacks. Sociability (in the American sense of the word) in any aristocratic country would indeed be very much like an attempt to establish visiting relations between birds and fishes. At Etretat no making of acquaintance was to be perceived; people went about in compact, cohesive groups, of natural formation, governed doubtless, internally, by humane regulations, but presenting to the world an impenetrable defensive front. The groups usually formed a solid phalanx around two or three young girls, compressed into the centre, the preservation of whose innocence was their chief solicitude. These groups were doubtless wisely constituted, for with half a dozencocottes, in scarlet petticoats, scattered over the sunny, harmless-looking beach, what were mammas and duennas to do? I used to pity the young ladies at first, for this perpetual application of the leading-string; but a little reflection showed me that the French have ordered this as well as they have ordered everything else. The case is not nearly so hard as it would be with us, for there is this immense difference between the lot of thejeune filleand her American sister, that the former may as a general thing be said to be certain to marry. "Alas, to marry badly," the Anglo-Saxon objector may reply. But the objection is precipitate; for if French marriages are almost always arranged, it must be added that they are in the majority of cases arranged successfully. Therefore, if ajeune filleis for three or four years tied with a very short rope and compelled to browse exclusively upon the meagre herbage which sprouts in the maternal shadow, she has at least the comfort of reflecting that, according to the native phrase,on s'occupe de la marier—that measures are being carefully taken to promote her to a condition of unbounded liberty. Whatever, to her imagination, marriage may fail to mean, it at least means freedom and consideration. It does not mean, as it so often means in America, being socially shelved—and it is not too much to say, in certain circles, degraded; it means being socially launched and consecrated. It means becoming that exalted personage, amère de famille. To be amère de familleis to occupy not simply (as is mostly the case with us) a sentimental, but really an official position. The consideration, the authority, the domestic pomp and circumstance allotted to a French mamma are in striking contrast with the amiable tolerance which in our own social order is so often the most liberal measure that the female parent may venture to expect at her children's hands, and which, on the part of the young lady of eighteen who represents the family in society, is not unfrequently tempered by a conscientious severity. All this is worth waiting for, especially if you have not to wait very long. Mademoiselle is married certainly, and married early, and she is sufficiently well informed to know, and to be sustained by the knowledge, that the sentimental expansion which may not take place at present will have an open field after her marriage. That it should precede her marriage seems to her as unnatural as that she should put on her shoes before her stockings. And besides all this, to browse in the maternal shadow is not considered in the least a hardship. A young French girl who isbien-élevée—an expression which means so much—will be sure to consider her mother's company the most delightful in the world, and to think that the herbage which sprouts about this lady's petticoats is peculiarly tender and succulent. It may be fanciful, but it often seems to me that the tone with which such a young girl saysMa mèrehas a peculiar intensity of meaning. I am at least not wrong in affirming that in the accent with which the mamma—especially if she be of the well-rounded order alluded to above—speaks ofMa fillethere is a kind of sacerdotal dignity.
After this came two or three pictures of quite another complexion—pictures of which a long green valley, almost in the centre of France, makes the general setting. The valley itself, indeed, forms one delightful picture, although the country which surrounds it is by no means one of the regions that place themselves on exhibition. It is the old territory of the Gâtinais, which has much history, but no renown of beauty. It is very quiet, deliciously rural, immitigably French; the typical, average, "pleasant" France of history, literature, and art—of art, of landscape-art, perhaps, especially. Wherever I look I seem to see one of the familiar pictures on a dealer's wall—a Lambinet, a Troyon, a Daubigny, a Diaz. The Lambinets perhaps are in the majority; the mood of the landscape usually expresses itself in silvery lights and vivid greens. The history of this part of France is the history of the monarchy, and its language is, I won't say absolutely the classic tongue, but a nearer approach to it than any local patois. The peasants deliver themselves with rather a drawl, but their French is as consecutive as that of Ollendorf.
Each side of the long valley is a continuous ridge, which offers it a high, wooded horizon, and through the middle of it there flows a charming stream, wandering, winding and doubling, smothered here and there in rushes, and spreading into lily-coated reaches, beneath the clear shadow of tall, straight, light-leaved trees. On each side of the stream the meadows stretch away flat, clean, magnificent, lozenged across with rows of lateral foliage, under which a cow-maiden sits on the grass, hooting now and then, nasally, to the large-uddered browsers in front of her. There are no hedges nor palings nor walls; it is all a single estate. Occasionally in the meadows there rises a cluster of red-roofed hovels—each a diminutive village. At other points, at about half an hour's walk apart, are three charming old houses. The châteaux are extremely different, but, both as pictures and as dwellings, each has its points. They are very intimate with each other, so that these points may be amicably discussed. The points in one case, however, are remarkably strong. The little oldcastelI mention stands directly in the attenuated river, on an island just great enough to hold it, and the garden-flowers grow upon the farther bank. This, of course, is a most delightful affair. But I found something very agreeable in the aspect of one of the others, when I made it the goal of certain of those walks before breakfast, which of cool mornings, in the late summer, do not fall into the category of ascetic pleasures. (In France, indeed, if one did not do a great many things before breakfast, the work of life would be but meagrely performed.)
The dwelling in question stands on the top of the long ridge which encloses the comfortable valley to the south, being by its position quite in the midst of its appurtenant acres. It is not particularly "kept up," but its quiet rustiness and untrimmedness only help it to be familiar. A grassy plateau approaches it from the edge of the hill, bordered on one side by a short avenue of horse-chestnuts, and on the other by a dusky wood. Beyond the chestnuts are the steep-roofed, yellow-walled farm-buildings, and under cover of the wood a stretch of beaten turf, where, on Sundays and holidays, the farm-servants play at bowls. Directly before the house is a little square garden, enclosed by a low parapet, which is interrupted by a high gateway of mossy pillars and iron arabesques, the whole of it muffled in creeping plants. The house, with its yellow walls and russet roof, is ample and substantial; it is a very propergentilhommière. In a corner of the garden, at the angle of the parapet, rises that classic emblem of rural gentility, thepigeonnier, the old stone dovecot. It is a great round tower, as broad of base as a lighthouse, with its roof shaped like an extinguisher, and a big hole in its upper portion, in and out of which a dove is always fluttering.
You see all this from the windows of the drawing-room. Be sure that the drawing-room is panelled in white and gray, with old rococo mouldings over the doorways and mantelpiece. The open gateway of the garden, with its tangled creepers, makes a frame for the picture that lies beyond the grassy esplanade where the thistles have been suffered to grow round a disused stone well, placed in odd remoteness from the house (if, indeed, it be not a relic of an earlier habitation): a picture of a wide green country, rising beyond the unseen valley and stretching away to a far horizon in deep blue lines of wood. Behind, through other windows, you look out on the gardens proper. There are places that take one's fancy by some accident of expression, some mystery of accident. This one is high and breezy, both genial and reserved, plain yet picturesque, extremely cheerful and a little melancholy. It has what in the arts is called "style," and so I have attempted to commemorate it.
Going to call on the peasants was as charming an affair as a chapter in one of George Sand's rural tales. I went one Sunday morning with my hostess, who knew them well and enjoyed their most garrulous confidence. I don't mean that they told her all their secrets, but they told her a good many; if the French peasant is a simpleton, he is a very shrewd simpleton. At any rate, of a Sunday morning in August, when he is stopping at home from work and has put on his best jacket and trousers, and is loafing at the door of his neighbour's cabin, he is a very charming person. The peasantry in the region I speak of had admirably good manners. The curé gave me a low account of their morals, by which he meant, on the whole, I suspect, that they were moderate church-goers. But they have the instinct of civility and a talent for conversation; they know how to play the host and the entertainer. By "he," just now, I meant she quite as much; it is rare that, in speaking superlatively of the French, in any connection, one does not think of the women even more than of the men. They constantly strike the foreigner as a stronger expression of the qualities of the race. On the occasion I speak of the first room in the very humble cabins I successively visited—in some cases, evidently, it was the only room—had been set into irreproachable order for the day. It had usually a fine brownness of tone, generated by the high chimney-place, with its swinging pots, the important bed, in its dusky niche, with its flowered curtains, the big-bellied earthenware in the cupboard, the long-legged clock in the corner, the thick, quiet light of the small, deeply-set window, the mixture, on all things, of smoke-stain and the polish of horny hands. Into the midst of this "la Rabillon" or "la mère Léger" brings forward her chairs and begs us to be seated, and, seating herself, with crossed hands, smiles expressively and answers abundantly every inquiry about her cow, her husband, her bees, her eggs, her baby. The men linger half outside and half in, with their shoulders against dressers and door-posts; every one smiles with that simple, clear-eyed smile of the gratified peasant; they talk much more like George Sand's Berrichons than might be supposed. And if they receive us without gross awkwardness, they speed us on our way with proportionate urbanity. I go to six or eight little hovels, all of them dirty outside and clean within; I am entertained everywhere with the bonhomie, the quaintness, the good faces and good manners of their occupants, and I finish my tour with an esteem for my new acquaintance which is not diminished by learning that several of them have thirty or forty thousand francs carefully put away.
And yet, as I say, M. le Curé thinks they are in a bad way, and he knows something about them. M. le Curé, too, is not a dealer in scandal; there is something delightfully quaint in the way in which he deprecates an un-Christian construction of his words. There is more than one curé in the valley whose charms I celebrate; but the worthy priest of whom I speak is the pearl of the local priesthood. He has been accused, I believe, of pretensions toilluminisme; but even in his most illuminated moments it can never occur to him that he has been chronicled in an American magazine, and therefore it is not indiscreet to say that he is the curé, not of Gy, but of the village nearest to Gy. I write this sentence half for the pleasure of putting down that briefest of village-names and seeing how it looks in print. But it may be elongated at will, and yet be only improved. If you wish to be very specific, you may call it Gy-les-Nonnains—Gy of the Little Nuns. I went with my hostess, another morning, to call upon M. le Curé, who himself opened his garden door to us (there was a crooked little black cross perched upon it), and, lifting his rustycalotte, stood there a moment in the sunshine, smiling a greeting more benignant than his words.
A ruralpresbytèreis not a very sumptuous dwelling, and M. le Curé's little drawing-room reminded me of a Yankee parlour (minusthe subscription-books from Hartford on the centre-table) in some out-of-the-way corner of New England. But he took us into his very diminutive garden, and showed us an ornament that would not have flourished in the shadow of a Yankee parlour—a rude stone image of the Virgin, which he had become possessed of I know not how, and for which he was building a sort of niche in the wall. The work was going on slowly, for he must take the labour as he could get it; but he appealed to his visitors, with a smile of indulgent irony, for an assurance that his little structure would not make too bad a figure. One of them told him that she would send him some white flowers to set out round the statue; whereupon he clasped his hands together over his snuff-box and expressed cheerful views of the world we live in. A couple of days afterward he came to breakfast, and of course arrived early, in his new cassock and band. I found him in the billiard-room, walking up and down alone and reading his breviary. The combination of the locality, the personage and the occupation, made me smile; and I smiled again when, after breakfast, I found him strolling about the garden, puffing a cigarette. Of course he had an excellent appetite; but there is something rather cruel in those alternations of diet to which the French parish priest is subjected. At home he lives like a peasant—a fact which, in itself, is not particularly cruel, inasmuch as he has usually—or in many cases—been brought up to that life. But his fellow-peasants don't breakfast at the château and gaze down the savoury vistas opened by cutlets à la Soubise. They have not the acute pain of relapsing into the stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of course it is by no means every day, or every week even, that M. le Curé breakfasts at the château; but there must nevertheless be a certain uncomfortable crookedness in his position. He lives like a labourer, yet he is treated like a gentleman. The latter character must seem to him sometimes to have rather a point of irony. But to the ideal curé, of course, all characters are equal; he thinks neither too ill of his bad breakfasts nor too well of his good ones. I won't say that the excellent man I speak of is the ideal curé, but I suspect he is an approach to it; he has a grain of the epicurean to an ounce of stoicism. In the garden-path, beside the moat, while he puffed his cigarette, he told me how he had held up his head to the Prussians; for, hard as it seemed to believe it, that pastoral valley had been occupied by ravaging Teutons. According to this recital, he had spoken his mind civilly, but very distinctly, to the group of officers who had made themselves at home in his dwelling—had informed them that it grieved him profoundly that he was obliged to meet them standing there in hissoutane, and not out in the fields with a musket in his hands and a dozen congenial spirits at his side. The scene must have been dramatic. The first of the officers got up from table and asked for the privilege of shaking his hand. "M. le Curé," he said, "j'estime hautement votre caractère."
Six miles away—or nearer, by a charming shaded walk along a canal—was an ancient town with a legend—a legend which, as a child, I read in my lesson-book at school, marvelling at the woodcut above it, in which a ferocious dog was tearing a strange man to pieces, while the king and his courtiers sat by as if they were at the circus. I allude to it chiefly in order to mention the name of one of its promenades, which is the stateliest, beyond all comparison, in the world; the name, I mean, not the street. The latter is called the Promenade des Belles Manières. Could anything be finer than that? With what a sweep gentlemen must once have taken off their hats there; how ladies must once have curtsied, regardless of gutters, and how people must have turned out their toes as they walked!
My next impressions were gathered on the margin of a southern sea—if the Bay of Biscay indeed deserve so sympathetic a name. We generally have a mental image beforehand of a place on which we may intend to project ourself, and I supposed I had a tolerably vivid prevision of Biarritz. I don't know why, but I had a singular sense of having been there; the name always seemed to me expressive. I saw the way it lay along its gleaming beach; I had taken in imagination long walks toward Spain over the low cliffs, with the blue sea always to my right and the blue Pyrenees always before me. My only fear was that my mental picture had not been brilliant enough; but this could easily be touched up on the spot. In truth, however, on the spot I was exclusively occupied in toning it down. Biarritz seemed to be decidedly below its reputation; I am at a loss to see how its reputation was made. There is a partial explanation that is obvious enough. There is a low, square, bare brick mansion seated on the sands, under shelter of a cliff; it is one of the first objects to attract the attention of an arriving stranger. It is not picturesque, it is not romantic, and even in the days of its prosperity it never can have been impressive. It is called the Villa Eugénie, and it explains in a great measure, as I say, the Biarritz which the arriving stranger, with some dismay, perceives about him. It has the aspect of one of the "cottages" of Newport during the winter season, but is surrounded by a vegetation much less dense than the prodigies of arborescence now so frequent at Newport. It was what the newspapers call the "favourite resort" of the ex-Empress of the French, who might have been seen at her imperial avocations with a good glass, at any time, from the Casino. The Casino, I hasten to add, has quite the air of an establishment frequented by gentlemen who look at ladies' windows with telescopes. There are Casinos and Casinos, and that of Biarritz is, in the summary French phrase, "impossible." Except for its view, it is moreover very unattractive. Perched on the top of a cliff which has just space enough to hold its immense brick foundations, it has no garden, no promenade, no shade, no place of out-of-door reunion—the most indispensable feature of a Casino. It turns its back to the Pyrenees and to Spain, and looks out prettily enough over a blue ocean to an arm of the low French coast.
Biarritz, for the rest, scrambles over two or three steep hills, directly above the sea, in a promiscuous, many-coloured, noisy fashion. It is a watering-place pure and simple; every house has an expensive little shop in the basement and a still more expensive set of rooms to let above stairs. The houses are blue and pink and green; they stick to the hillsides as they can, and being near Spain, you try to fancy they look Spanish. You succeed, perhaps, even a little, and are rewarded for your zeal by finding, when you cross the border a few days afterward, that the houses at San Sebastian look strikingly French. Biarritz is bright, crowded, irregular, filled with many sounds, and not without a certain second-rate pictorial quality; but it struck me as common and cockneyfied, and my vision travelled back to modest little Etretat, by its northern sea, as to a very much more downy couch. The south-western coast of France has little of the exquisite charm of the Mediterranean shore. It has of course a southern expression which in itself is always delightful. You see a brilliant, yellow sun, with a pink-faced, red-tiled house staring up at it. You can see here and there a trellis and an orange-tree, a peasant-woman in a gold necklace, driving a donkey, a lame beggar adorned with earrings, a glimpse of blue sea between white garden-walls. But the superabundant detail of the French Riviera is wanting; the softness, luxuriousness, enchantment.
The most pictorial thing at Biarritz is the Basque population, which overflows from the adjacent Spanish provinces and swarms in the crooked streets. It lounges all day in the public places, sprawls upon the curbstones, clings to the face of the cliffs, and vociferates continually a shrill, strange tongue, which has no discoverable affinity with any other. The Basques look like hardier and thriftier Neapolitan lazzaroni; if the superficial resemblance is striking, the difference is very much in their favour. Although those specimens which I observed at Biarritz appeared to enjoy an excess of leisure, they had nothing of a shiftless or beggarly air, and seemed as little disposed to ask favours as to confer them. The roads leading into Spain were dotted with them, and here they were coming and going as if on important business—the business of the abominable Don Carlos himself. They struck me as a very handsome race. The men are invariably clean-shaven; smooth chins seem a positively religious observance. They wear little round maroon-coloured caps, like those of sailor-boys, dark stuff shirts, and curious white shoes, made of strips of rope laid together—an article of toilet which makes them look like honorary members of base-ball clubs. They sling their jackets cavalier-fashion, over one shoulder, hold their heads very high, swing their arms very bravely, step out very lightly, and, when you meet them in the country at eventide, charging down a hillside in companies of half a dozen, make altogether a most impressive appearance. With their smooth chins and childish caps, they may be taken, in the distance, for a lot of very naughty little boys; for they have always a cigarette in their teeth.
The best thing at Biarritz is your opportunity for driving over into Spain. Coming speedily to a consciousness of this fact, I found a charm in sitting in a landau and rolling away to San Sebastian behind a coachman in a high glazed hat with long streamers, a jacket of scarlet and silver and a pair of yellow breeches and jack-boots. If it has been the desire of one's heart and the dream of one's life to visit the land of Cervantes, even grazing it so lightly as by a day's excursion from Biarritz is a matter to encourage visions. Everything helping—the admirable scenery, the charming day, the operatic coachman, the smooth-rolling carriage—I am afraid I became more visionary than it is decent to tell of. You move toward the magnificent undulations of the Pyrenees, as if you were going to plunge straight into them; but in reality you travel beneath them and beside them, pass between their expiring spurs and the sea. It is on proceeding beyond San Sebastian that you seriously attack them. But they are already extremely vivid—none the less so that in this region they abound in suggestions of the recent Carlist war. Their far-away peaks and ridges are crowned with lonely Spanish watch-towers, and their lower slopes are dotted with demolished dwellings. It was hereabouts that the fighting was most constant. But the healing powers of nature are as remarkable as the destructive powers of man, and the rich September landscape appeared already to have forgotten the injuries of yesterday. Everything seemed to me a small foretaste of Spain; I discovered an unreasonable amount of local colour. I discovered it at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the last French town, in a great brown church, filled with galleries and boxes, like a playhouse—the altar and choir, indeed, looked very much like a proscenium; at Bohébie, on the Bidassoa, the small yellow stream which divides France from Spain, and which at this point offers to view the celebrated Isle of Pheasants, a little bushy strip of earth adorned with a decayed commemorative monument, on which, in the seventeenth century, the affairs of Louis XIV. and the Iberian monarch were discussed in ornamental conference; at Fuentarabia (glorious name), a mouldering relic of Spanish stateliness; at Hendaye, at Irun, at Benteria, and finally at San Sebastian. At all of these wayside towns the houses show marks of Alphonsist bullets (the region was strongly Carlist); but to be riddled and battered seems to carry out the meaning of the pompous old escutcheons carven above the doorways, some of them covering almost half the house. It struck me, in fact, that the narrower and shabbier was the poor little dusky dwelling, the grander and more elaborate was this noble advertisement. But it represented knightly prowess, and pitiless time had taken up the challenge. I found it a luxury to ramble through the narrow single street of Irun and Benteria, between the strange-coloured houses, the striped awnings, the universal balconies and the heraldic doorways.
San Sebastian is a lively watering-place, and is set down in the guide-books as the Biarritz or the Brighton of Spain. It has of course a new quarter in the provincial-elegant style (fresh stucco cafés, barber-shops, and apartments to let), looking out upon a planted promenade and a charming bay, locked in fortified heights, with a narrow portal to the ocean. I walked about for two or three hours and devoted most of my attention to the old quarter, the town proper, which has a great frowning gate upon the harbour, through which you look along a vista of gaudy house-fronts, balconies, awnings, surmounted by a narrow strip of sky. Here the local colour was richer, the manners more naïf. Here too was a church with a flamboyant Jesuit façade and an interior redolent of Spanish Catholicism. There was a life-sized effigy of the Virgin perched upon a table beside the great altar (she appeared to have been walking abroad in a procession), which I looked at with extreme interest. She seemed to me a heroine, a solid Spanish person, as perfect a reality as Don Quixote or Saint Theresa. She was dressed in an extraordinary splendour of laces, brocades and jewels, her coiffure and complexion were of the finest, and she evidently would answer to her name if you should speak to her. Mustering up the stateliest title I could think of, I addressed her as Dona Maria of the Holy Office; whereupon she looked round the great dusky, perfumed church, to see whether we were alone, and then she dropped her fringed eyelids and held out her hand to be kissed. She was the sentiment of Spanish Catholicism; gloomy, yet bedizened, emotional as a woman and mechanical as a doll. After a moment I grew afraid of her, and went slinking away. After this I didn't really recover my spirits until I had the satisfaction of hearing myself addressed as "Caballero." I was hailed with this epithet by a ragged infant, with sickly eyes and a cigarette in his lips, who invited me to cast a copper into the sea, that he might dive for it; and even with these limitations, the sensation seemed worth the cost of my excursion. It appeared kinder, to my gratitude, to make the infant dive upon the pavement.
A few days later I went back to San Sebastian, to be present at a bull-fight; but I suppose my right to descant upon this entertainment should be measured less by the gratification it afforded me than by the question whether there is room in literature for another chapter on this subject. I incline to think there is not; the national pastime of Spain is the best-described thing in the world. Besides, there are other reasons for not describing it. It is extremely disgusting, and one should not describe disgusting things—except (according to the new school) in novels, where they have not really occurred, and are invented on purpose. Description apart, one has taken a certain sort of pleasure in the bull-fight, and yet how is one to state gracefully that one has taken pleasure in a disgusting thing? It is a hard case. If you record your pleasure, you seem to exaggerate it and to calumniate your delicacy; and if you record nothing but your displeasure, you feel as if you were wanting in suppleness. Thus much I can say, at any rate, that as there had been no bull-fights in that part of the country during the Carlist war, the native dilettanti (and every man, woman, and child of them comes under this denomination) returned to their precious pastime with peculiar zest. The spectacle, therefore, had an unusual splendour. Under these circumstances it is highly effective. The weather was beautiful; the near mountains peeped over the top of the vast open arena, as if they too were curious; weary of disembowelled horses and posturingespadas, the spectator (in the boxes) might turn away and look through an unglazed window at the empty town and the cloud-shadowed sea. But few of the native spectators availed themselves of this privilege. Beside me sat a blooming matron, in a white lace mantilla, with three very juvenile daughters; and if these ladies sometimes yawned they never shuddered. For myself, I confess that if I sometimes shuddered I never yawned. A long list of bulls was sacrificed, each of whom had pretensions to originality. Thebanderillos, in their silk stockings and embroidered satin costumes, skipped about with a great deal of attitude; theespadafolded his arms within six inches of the bull's nose and stared him out of countenance; yet I thought the bull, in any case, a finer fellow than any of his tormentors, and I thought his tormentors finer fellows than the spectators. In truth, we were all, for the time, rather sorry fellows together. A bull-fight will, to a certain extent, bear looking at, but it will not bear thinking of. There was a more innocent effect in what I saw afterward, when we all came away, in the late afternoon, as the shadows were at their longest: the bright-coloured southern crowd, spreading itself over the grass, and the women, with mantillas and fans, and the Andalusian gait, strolling up and down before the mountains and the sea.