The beach, one morning, we found suddenly peopled with artists. It was a little city of tents. Beneath striped awnings and white umbrellas a multitude of flat-capped heads sat immovably still on their three-legged stools, or darted hither and thither. Paris was evidently beginning to empty its studios; the Normandy beaches now furnished the better model.
One morning we were in luck. A certain blonde beard had counted early in the day on having the beach to himself. He had posed his model in the open daylight, that he might paint her in the sun. He had placed her, seated on an edge of seawall; for a background there was the curve of the yellow sands and the flat breadth of the sea, with the droop of the sky meeting the sea miles away. The girl was a slim, fair shape, with long, thin legs and delicately moulded arms; she was dressed in the fillet and chiton of Greece. During her long poses she was as immovable as an antique marble; her natural grace and prettiness were transfigured into positive beauty by the flowing lines and the pink draperies of her Attic costume. Seated thus, she was a breathing embodiment of the best Greek period. When the rests came, her jump from the wall landed her square on her feet and at the latter end of the nineteenth century. Once free, she bounded from her perch on the high sea-wall. In an instant she had tucked her tinted draperies within the slender girdle; her sandalled feet must be untrammelled, she was about to take her run on the beach. Soon she was pelting, irreverently, her painter with a shower of loose pebbles. Next she had challenged him to a race; when she reached the goal, her thin, bare arms were uplifted as she clapped and shouted for glee; the Quartier Latin in her blood was having its moment of high revelry in the morning sun.
This little grisette, running about free and unshackled in her loose draperies, quite unabashed in her state of semi-nudity—gay, reckless, wooing pleasure on the wing, surely she might have posed as the embodied archetype of France itself. So has this pagan among modern nations borrowed something of the antique spirit of wantonness. Along with its theft of the Attic charm and grace, it has captured, also, something of its sublime indifference; in the very teeth of the dull modern world, France has laughed opinion to scorn.
At noon the tents were all deserted. It was at this hour that the inn garden was full. The gayety and laughter overflowed the walls. Everyone talked at once; the orders were like a rattle of artillery—painting for hours in the open air gives a fine edge to appetite, and patience is never the true twin of hunger. Everything but the potage was certain to be on time.
Colinette, released from her Greek draperies, with her Parisian bodice had recovered the blague of the studios.
"Sacré nom de—on reste donc claquemuré ainsi toute la matinée! And all for an omelette—a puny, good-for-nothing omelette. And you—you've lost your tongue, it seems?" And a shrill voice pierced the air as Colinette gave her painter the hint of her prodding elbow. With the appearance of the omelette the reign of good humor would return. Everything then went as merrily as that marriage-bell which, apparently, is the only one absent in Bohemia's gay chimes.
These arbors had obviously been built out of pure charity: they appeared to have been constructed on the principle that since man, painting man, is often forced to live alone, from economic necessity, it is therefore only the commonest charity to provide him with the proper surroundings for eating à deux. The little tables beneath the kiosks were strictly tête-à-tête tables; even the chairs, like the visitors, appeared to come only in couples.
The Frenchman has been reproached with the sin of ingratitude; has been convicted, indeed, as possessed of more of that pride that comes late—the day after the gift of bounty has been given—than some other of his fellow-mortals. Yet here were a company of Frenchmen—and Frenchwomen—proving in no ordinary fashion their equipment in this rare virtue. It was early in May; up yonder, where the Seine flows beneath the Parisian bridges, the pulse of the gay Paris world was beating in time to the spring in the air. Yet these artists had deserted the asphalt of the boulevards for the cobbles of a village street, the delights of the café chantant had been exchanged for the miracle of the moon rising over the sea, and for the song of the thrush in the bush.
The Frenchman, more easily and with simpler art than any of his modern brethren, can change the prose of our dull, practical life into poetry; he can turn lyrical at a moment's notice. He possesses the power of transmuting the commonplace into the idyllic, by merely clapping on his cap and turning his back on the haunts of men. He has retained a singular—an almost ideal sensitiveness, of mental cuticle—such acuteness of sensation, that a journey to a field will oftentimes yield him all the flavor of a long voyage, and a sudden introduction to a forest, the rapture that commonly comes only with some unwonted aspect of nature. Perhaps it is because of this natural poet indwelling in a Frenchman, that makes him content to remain so much at home. Surely the extraordinary is the costly necessity for barren minds; the richly-endowed can see the beauty that lies the other side of their own door-step.