Biarritz as a watering-place has an all-the-year-round clientèle; in summer the Spanish and the French, succeeded in winter by Americans, Germans, and English—with a sprinkling of Russians at all times. Biarritz, like Pau, aside from being a really delightful winter resort, where one may escape the rigors of murky November to March in London, is becoming afflicted with a bad case of "sport fever." There are all kinds of sports, some of them reputable enough in their place, but the comic-opera fox-hunting which takes place at Pau and Biarritz is not one of them….
The picturesque "Plage des Basques" lies to the south of the town, bordered with high cliffs, which in turn are surmounted with terraces of villas. The charm of it all is incomparable. To the northwest stretches the limpid horizon of the Bay of Biscay, and to the south the snowy summits of the Pyrenees, and the adorable bays of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Fontarabie, while behind, and to the eastward, lies the quaint country of the Basques, and the mountain trails into Spain in all their savage hardiness.
The off-shore translucent waters of the Gulf of Gascony were the "Sinus Aquitanicus" of the ancients. A colossal rampart of rocks and sand dunes stretches all the way from the Gironde to the Bidassoa, without a harbor worthy of the name save at Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Here the Atlantic waves pound, in time of storm, with all the fury with which they break upon the rocky coasts of Brittany further north. Perhaps this would not be so, but for the fact that the Iberian coast to the southward runs almost at right angles with that of Gascony. As it is, while the climate is mild, Biarritz and the other cities on the coasts of the Gulf of Gascony have a fair proportion of what sailors, the world over, call "rough weather."
The waters of the Gascon Gulf are not always angry; most frequently they are calm and blue, vivid with a translucence worthy of those of Capri, and it is this that makes the beach at Biarritz one of the most popular sea-bathing resorts in France to-day. It is a fashionable watering-place, but it is also, perhaps, the most beautifully disposed city to be found in all the round of the European coast line, its slightly curving slope dominated by a background terrace, decorative in itself, but delightfully set off with its fringe of dwelling-houses, hotels, and casinos. Ostend is superbly laid out, but it is dreary; Monte Carlo is beautiful, but it is ultra; while Trouville is constrained and affected. Biarritz has the best features of all these…. Saint-Jean-de-Luz had a population of ten thousand two centuries ago; to-day it has three thousand, and most of these take in boarders, or in one way or another cater to the hordes of visitors who have made it—or would, if they could have supprest its quiet Basque charm of coloring and character—a little Brighton.
Not all is lost, but four hundred houses were razed in the mid-eighteenth century by a tempest, and the stable population began to creep away; only with recent years an influx of strangers has arrived for a week's or a month's stay to take their places—if idling butterflies of fashion or imaginary invalids can really take the place of a hardworking, industrious colony of fishermen, who thought no more of sailing away to the South Antarctic or the banks of Newfoundland in an eighty-ton whaler than they did of seining sardines from a shallop in the Gulf of Gascony at their doors.
DOWN THE SAONE TO LYONS[A]
[Footnote A: From "Pencillings by the Way." Published by Charles
Scribner, 1852.]
BY NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS
The Saone is about the size of the Mohawk, but not half so beautiful; at least for the greater part of its course. Indeed, you can hardly compare American with European rivers, for the charm is of another description, quite. With us it is nature only, here it is almost all art. Our rivers are lovely, because the outline of the shore is graceful, and particularly because the vegetation is luxuriant. The hills are green, the foliage deep and lavish, the rocks grown over with vines or moss, the mountains in the distance covered with pines and other forest-trees; everything is wild, and nothing looks bare or sterile. The rivers of France are crowned on every height with ruins, and in the bosom of every valley lies a cluster of picturesque stone cottages; but the fields are naked, and there are no trees; the mountains are barren and brown, and everything looks as if the dwellings had been deserted by the people, and nature had at the same time gone to decay.
I can conceive nothing more melancholy than the views upon the Saone, seen, as I saw them, tho vegetation is out everywhere, and the banks should be beautiful if ever. As we approached Lyons the river narrowed and grew bolder, and the last ten miles were enchanting. Naturally the shores at this part of the Saone are exceedingly like the highlands of the Hudson above West Point. Abrupt hills rise from the river's edge, and the windings are sharp and constant. But imagine the highlands of the Hudson crowned with antique chateaux, and covered to the very top with terraces and summer-houses and hanging-gardens, gravel-walks and beds of flowers, instead of wild pines and precipices, and you may get a very correct idea of the Saone above Lyons.