In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity

by Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd

Those women who do intend to go into the water, or to wear fetching bathing costumes at a safe distance from the waves, dress in their own rooms, if they live anywhere near the beach, and issue cloaked, hatted, and followed by maids. The maid is an essential feature of the scenic effect. She carries anything that may be needed, and she gives cachet to her mistress. There is a theory, too, that she represents the proprieties. It is quite improper to go to the beach without a maid, and so the Parisienne, no matter how lurid her reputation nor how startling her attire, goes beachward with her maid trotting demurely at her heels.

The bathing at Trouville is not particularly picturesque, though much imaginative description of its startling features has been written, and conditions at the resort seem favourable for a spectacular display of sea nymphs. Trouville is the summer paradise of Parisian cocottes, and the average Parisian cocotte is not as a rule strikingly averse to conspicuous rôles; but Narragansett Pier can show, during one fine summer day, more audacious bathing costumes than will be seen at Trouville in a week; and though little chorus girls up from Paris for a holiday may tumble about in the waves, among a crowd of bathers that but repeats the bathing types familiar the world over, the notorious "filles" do not go into the water any more than do the great ladies of Deauville.

There are some piquant and attractive bathing costumes worn on the sands by women who do not go in for serious bathing, but the Trouville show at the bathing hour is under the gay striped tents or on the promenade, where women in Paris frocks and hats chat lightly with men in informal summer attire, and where the grande dame of the Faubourg St. Germain touches elbows with the cocotte of the Boulevards.

After the bathing hour the crowd scatters again to the hotels and villas, and though in the afternoon there is an immense and amusing crowd on the promenade, the very smart set is not seen there again until the next morning.

It is so very busy, this smart set. The days are not long enough for the goings and comings that must be crowded into them. The fashionable women make elaborate toilettes for déjeuner at café or club or villa, and after the déjeuner they pour out upon the terraces, arrayed in their most ravishing costumes. Automobiles, coaches, smart traps of all kinds, are in waiting. Madame enters the one that is to have the honour of harbouring her mousseline and silk and lace, lifts her exquisite sunshade, scatters smiles and gay jests among her friends, and is off to the races.

Not even at Auteuil, Chantilly, or the Grand Prix can one see more superb and extravagant costuming than in the Tribune or the pesage at Trouville. The crowd is less mixed than at the Paris races and there is more uniform elegance of dress, while the beautiful pesage with its velvety turf, its masses of bloom, its shaded paths, offers the most delightful of settings in which to display the latest creation of Paquin, or a daring but successful innovation from Reboux.

The club of Deauville provides a scenic arrangement even more perfectly adapted to the great show of frocks and mondaines, than is the pesage, and here is the centre of that exclusive social life of which the outsider can form but a vague idea, though the other side of Trouville may afford him most enjoyable entertainment. The golf course of the club is said to be the finest on the continent, the tennis courts are always full, polo is played there by the crack players of all Europe, and there is never a time when there is not something amusing on the club tapis.

Perhaps, instead of races or club events, a garden party at one of the Deauville villas claims the fashionables. Or perhaps the garden party is in some nearby resort such as Houlgate or Villers, and the clean white road leading to the rendezvous is crowded with automobiles and traps as the appointed hour approaches. The automobile has added much to the gaiety of the Normandy season. It has brought the resorts closer together, has made intimate social intercourse between them more possible. For great social events, the clans gather from every direction, coming even from far-away spas and châteaux. Wherever the races are in progress, there a host of automobiles makes its appearance, each machine laden with a jolly party from some one of the innumerable Normandy resorts. There is much motoring, too, in quest of luncheon or dinner. Madame and her friends forsake the Parisian cuisine of the Trouville hotel and motor merrily along the wonderful road to Caen, where in one of the quaint old restaurants that huddle near the market-place, one may have the best of Norman cooking and enjoy—or at least sample—one of the tripe dinners for which the restaurant is famed. A vulgar dish, tripe—but not tripe à la mode de Caen. The chef will tell you proudly that there are fifty Norman ways of cooking tripe, each more masterly than the other, and he will prove to you that the ordinary domestic tripe is to the tripe of Caen as the fried egg of the Bowery restaurant to the œufs sur le plat of the Café Foyot,—or to the omelette of Madame Poulard.