When we were at Arcachon telegraph poles were being put up. The method of setting up these eminences was distinctly curious, to the English eye. There was an immense amount of propping up, and many anxious glances bestowed on the poles before anything could be accomplished. The men on whom this tremendous labour devolves have to wear curious iron clasps strapped on to their boots, so that they should be able to dig into the bark as they swarm up the poles for the poles are just trunks of pine trees stripped of their branches, and many of them look very crooked.
In many of the gardens poinsettias were flowering, and hanging clusters of a vivid red flower which our hotel proprietress called "Songe de Cardinal." It was the same tint of scarlet as the berries called "Archutus" or "Arbousses," which grow here in abundance by the side of the road on bushes, and are like a large variety of raspberry, a cross between that and a strawberry. It has a very pleasant flavour when eaten with cream: this our waiter confided to me, and, after tasting the mixture, I quite agreed with him, although the proprietress had treated the idea with scorn.
In November the roads, in places, are red with the fallen fruit of this plant. There are also curious long brown seed cases which had dropped from trees something like acacias, but which have a smaller leaf than our English variety. The tint of the pods is a warm reddish brown; they are about the length of one's forearm, the inner edges all sticky with resin.
In the village street the inevitable little stream, which is encouraged in most French towns, runs beside the roadside, and is fed by all the pailfuls of dirty water that are flung from time to time into its midst. The plage at Arcachon is not attractive in autumn, and it is difficult to understand how it can be a magnet at a warmer time of the year to the hundreds that frequent it. An arm of land stretches all round the little inland pool—for it is not much more than a pool—in which in summer time the bathers disport themselves. In November, of course, it requires an enormous effort of imagination to picture it full of sailing ships and pleasure boats.
Murray mentions a particular kind of boat, long, pointed, narrow and shallow, which was much to the fore in 1867, and which he imagined to be indigenous to the soil, so to speak. But, apparently, they have changed all that. I only saw one that was built as he describes, and this was green and black in colour. He also mentions stilts being worn by the peasants at Arcachon and the neighbourhood near the village, but of these we saw few traces. There were pictures of them in an old print of the chapelle built in 1722, and in a photo of the shepherds of the plains. The photos, indeed, are numerous in the whole country of the Gironde of anciens costumes, but when one sets oneself to try and find their counterparts in real life, evidences are practically nil. All that remains of them in these matter-of-fact, levelling days, in which so much that is quaint, characteristic and peculiar is whittled down to one ordinary dead level of alikeness, are the stiff white caps, varied in shape and size, according to the district, and the sabots. Some of the peasants here often go about the streets in woollen bed-slippers, but most of them use wooden sabots—pointed, and with leathern straps over the foot.
One gets quite used to the sight of two sabots standing lonely without their inmates in the entrance to some shop, their toes pointing inwards, just as they have been left (as if they were some conveyance or other—in a sense, of course, they are—which is left outside to await the owner's return). Continually the women leave them like this, and proceed to the interior of the shop in their stockinged feet.
Sometimes the countrywomen go about without any covering at all to their heads, and it is quite usual to see them thus in church as well as in the streets. The men wear a little round cap, fitting tightly over the head like a bathing cap, and very full, baggy trousers, close at the ankles, dark brown or dark blue as to colour, and very frequently velveteen as to material.
At La Teste, a village close to Arcachon, the women much affect the high-crowned black straw hat, blue aprons and blue knickerbockers. At most of the cottage doors were groups of them, knitting and chatting; and, as we passed, the old grandmother of the party would be irresistibly impelled to step out into the road to catch a further glimpse of the strangers within their borders—clad in quite as unusual garments as their own appeared to ours.
There are no lack of variety of occupations open to the feminine persuasion: the women light the street lamps; they arrange and pack oysters; fish, and sell the fish when caught. They work in the fields; they tend the homely cow, as well as the three occupations which some folk will persist in regarding as the only ones to which women—never mind what their talents or capabilities—can expect to be admitted, viz: the care of children and needlework and cooking! I saw one quite old woman white-washing the front of her cottage with a low-handled, mop-like broom, very energetically, while her husband sat by and watched the process, at his ease.