Prose Idylls, New and Old

by Charles Kingsley

In the sea, as was to be expected, the change is even more complete. From Biarritz to Cette, you pass from poor Edward Forbes’s Atlantic to his Mediterranean centre of creation. In plain English and fact, whether you agree with his theory or not, you pass from the region of respectable whales, herrings, and salmon, to that of tunnies, sciænas, dorados, and all the gorgons, hydras, and chimæras dire, which are said to grace the fish-markets of Barcelona or Marseilles.

But to this assertion, as to most concerning nature, there are exceptions. Mediterranean fishes slip out of the Straits of Gibraltar, and up the coast of Portugal, and, once in the Bay of Biscay, find the feeding good and the wind against them, and stay there.

So it befalls, that at worthy M. Gardère’s hotel at Biarritz (he has seen service in England, and knows our English ways), you may have at dinner, day after day, salmon, louvine, shad, sardine, dorado, tunny. The first is unknown to the Mediterranean; for Fluellen mistook when he said that there were salmons in Macedon, as well as Monmouth; the louvine is none other than the nasty bass, or sea-perch of the Atlantic; the shad (extinct in these islands, save in the Severn) is a gigantic herring which comes up rivers to spawn; a fish common (with slight differences) to both sides of the North Atlantic; while the sardine, the dorado, and the tunny (whether he be the true tunny or the Alalonga) are Mediterranean fish.

The whale fishery of these shores is long extinct. The Biscayan whale was supposed to be extinct likewise. But like the ibex, and some other animals which man has ceased to hunt, because he fancies that he has killed them all, they seem inclined to reappear. For in 1854 one was washed ashore near St. Jean de Luz, at news whereof Eschricht, the great Danish naturalist, travelled night and day from Copenhagen, and secured the skeleton of the new-old monster.

But during the latter part of the Middle Ages, and on—if I recollect aright—into the seventeenth century, Bayonne, Biarritz, Guettary, and St. Jean de Luz, sent forth their hardy whale-fishers, who slew all the whales of the Biscayan seas, and then crossed the Atlantic, to attack those of the frozen North.

British and American enterprise drove them from the West coast of the Atlantic; and now their descendants are content to stay at home and take the sardine-shoals, and send them in to Bayonne on their daughters’ heads.

Pretty enough it was, at least in outward seeming, to meet a party of those fisher-girls, bare-legged, high-kilted, lithe as deer, trotting, at a long loping pace, up the high road toward Bayonne, each with her basket on her head, as she laughed and sang, and tossed her black hair, and flashed her brown eyes, full of life and the enjoyment of life. Pretty enough. And yet who will blame the rail, which now sends her quickly into Bayonne—or even her fish without her; and relieves the fair young maiden from being degraded into a beast of burden?

Handsome folk are these brown Basques. A mysterious people, who dwell alone, and are not counted among the nations; speaking an unique language, and keeping up unique customs, for which the curious must consult M. Michel’s interesting book. There may be a cross of English blood among them, too, about Biarritz and Bayonne; English features there are, plainly to be seen. And whether or not, one accepts the story of the country, that Anglets, near by, is an old English colony left by our Black Prince, it is certain that Bayonne Cathedral was built in part by English architects, and carries the royal arms of England; and every school history will tell us how this corner of France was long in our hands, and was indeed English long before it was properly French. Moorish blood there may be, too, here and there, left behind by those who built the little ‘atalaya’ or fire-beacon, over the old harbour, to correspond, by its smoke column, with a long line of similar beacons down the Spanish coast. The Basques resemble in look the Southern Welsh—quick-eyed, neat in feature, neat in dress, often, both men and women, beautiful. The men wear a flat Scotch cap of some bright colour, and call it ‘berretta.’ The women tie a gaudy handkerchief round their heads, and compel one corner to stand forward from behind the ear in a triangle, in proportion to the size and stiffness whereof the lady seems to think herself well dressed. But the pretty Basque handkerchief will soon give place to the Parisian bonnet. For every cove among the rocks is now filled with smart bathing-houses, from which, in summer, the gay folk of Paris issue in ‘costume de bain,’ to float about all day on calabashes—having literally no room for the soles of their feet on land. Then are opened casinos, theatre, shops, which lie closed all the winter. Then do the Basque house-owners flee into the moors, and camp out (it is said) on the hills all night, letting their rooms for ten francs a night as mere bed-chambers—for all eating and living is performed in public; while the dove-coloured oxen, with brown holland pinafores over their backs, who dawdle in pairs up and down the long street with their light carts, have to make way for wondrous equipages from the Bois de Boulogne.

Not then, for the wise man, is Biarritz a place to see and to love: but in the winter, when a little knot of quiet pleasant English hold the place against all comers, and wander, undisturbed by fashion, about the quaint little rocks and caves and natural bridges—and watch tumbling into the sea, before the Biscayan surges, the trim walks and summer-houses, which were erected by the municipality in honour of the Empress and her suite. Yearly they tumble in, and yearly are renewed, as the soft greensand strata are graven away, and what must have been once a long promontory becomes a group of fantastic pierced rocks, exactly like those which are immortalized upon the willow-pattern plates.

Owing to this rapid destruction, the rocks of Biarritz are very barren in sea-beasts and sea-weeds. But there is one remarkable exception, where the pools worn in a hard limestone are filled with what seem at first sight beds of china-asters, of all loveliest colours—primrose, sea-green, dove, purple, crimson, pink, ash-grey. They are all prickly sea-eggs (presumably the Echinus lividus, which is found in similar places in the west of Ireland), each buried for life in a cup-shaped hole which he has excavated in the rock, and shut in by an overhanging lip of living lime—seemingly a Nullipore coralline. What they do there, what they think of, or what food is brought into their curious grinding-mills by the Atlantic surges which thunder over them twice a day, who can tell? However they form, without doubt, the most beautiful object which I have ever seen in pool or cove.