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 the genius 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 two bateaux de surveillance have 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 a salon 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.
VIII
FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES
1876
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.
I
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.