M. DE BLOWITZ AT HIS SUMMER HOME.
This reticence is superb, and one of its practical results has been the remarkable physical vigor of this man who is after all no longer young. One should see him in his country home. M. de Blowitz went up and down the north coast of France, hunting for an eyry. He found it on the wooded top of one of the side slopes of the thousand and one ravines in which fishermen along that coast had fixed their cabins, at the small hamlet of Les Petites Dalles. Like Alphonse Karr at Etretat, he made the fame of this spot. Your guide-book will tell you the fact. “M. de Blowitz, correspondent of the English newspaper the ‘Times,’ has a villa here.” I defy you to find any other distinction special to this place. The high Normandy coast is always charming, but it is equally so at a hundred other points. And of what charm there is here simply as village, M. Blowitz’s presence would seem to threaten the partial extinction. For this very presence is rendering the spot famous and crowded. Sit in the afternoon listening to the three violins that provide the music, and, taking your absinthe on one of those hard benches within the narrow limits of the space there called Casino, you will run the risk of overhearing a conversation like this:
“This is your first summer here?”
“Yes, came last night. I am tired of Pau, and thought I could bury myself here. But there’s too much world.”
“Yes, but what a world it is!”
“Oh, I don’t mind that! They say there’s enough society in the villas. Since de Blowitz built the Lampottes and has brought his friends down, there are some people très bien de la meilleure société on the cliffs. That’s the place up there, the house with the flag above all the others. I walked up there this morning. He has a tennis court. Looking up the gravel walk, I saw him sitting on the veranda. That’s M. Ernest Daudet’s place just under him in the trees—mais voilà; there he is.”
Towards three o’clock in the afternoon, indeed, almost daily, M. de Blowitz has an amiable habit. He walks down with members of his family, and the guests who are staying with him, to the pretty bathing-cabins, in front of which stretches an improvised awning, and, picturesque in his colored flannels, he sits himself down with a cigar to watch the bathers. He, the most distinguished of European critics, is here and now the object of many curious and admiring observations. He holds here a little court on the shingle beach. Brightly dressed women gather to him from every point of the compass; while he who has his emissaries in every quarter of the world, and whose subtle influence is felt at each episode of the European movement, gives himself up with pardonable indulgence—under the ample umbrella—to the pretty trifles of glib women’s charm and chatter. Before he has enjoyed enough, and obedient to one of those harmless devices in which well-taught men of the world often indulge, he retires from this charmed and, as I can affirm, charming circle, and climbs to the great villa on the cliff. There are letters to be written and telegrams to be sent to Paris, and perhaps an article meditated during the afternoon.
M. DE BLOWITZ IN HIS STUDY.
The doors of the Lampottes are wide open upon the great veranda, and the winds of the channel enter there, warmed from blowing over the upland grass. The life within is the ideally tranquil existence of an English country gentleman. Where did this cosmopolite, who really has no English roots, learn the system? For the hospitality of England can scarcely be translated with full flavor into any other idiom. The schloss of Germany or of the Tyrol, the chateau of France, have never, within my experience of lazy summers, afforded just the same delightful background as the country house of England. Yet to the Lampottes the peculiar air has somehow been conjured. All the country round about this house is Norman, and therefore English—that is, dense, rich, familiar—so that the English illusion is complete. But no reader of M. de Blowitz’s correspondence 170 in the “Times” would ever have thought of placing the author in these surroundings. The raconteur of the reminiscences in “Harper’s Magazine” must appeal to the American reader as a sort of bustling incarnation of the ubiquitous telegraph, unwearied, and knowing not even in his dreams the first soothing tremor of the sound of the word “rest.” On the contrary, M. de Blowitz rests frequently and smiles quietly. Large himself, he likes large air, large rooms, large landscapes, large and general ideas. And what contributes to all this more than rest, which gives time to think? It is a generous and natural temper, and that is why the great doors from the veranda are open to the channel winds.
Although M. de Blowitz wears in his buttonhole, in bright contrast to the famous flowing tie, the rosette of the French Legion of Honor, he is not in race a Frenchman; yet he is sufficiently French in two conspicuous characteristics. The French strike me as being, with the Americans, the most naturally intelligent people on the western part of the planet. But the Frenchman is also bon enfant, and for the moment I do not stop to consider that he always remains enfant. To be intelligent and bon enfant at once is to promise all kinds of successes in life, and to be both is to make success charming. M. de Blowitz is both. He has been, therefore, a charming success. The nature of this success defies analysis, but as a result can be described.