A BISCAYAN BEACH.
Clearly we are in advance of the summer season at Biarritz. It is the
latter part of June. The air is soft and warm, the billows lap the shore
enticingly. But fashion has not yet transferred its court; the van of
the column only has arrived. A few adventurous bathers test the cool
surf; the table-d'hôte is slimly attended; the liverymen confidentially
assure us, as an inducement for drives, that their prices are now
crouching low, for a prodigious leap to follow.
But everything has a pleasing air of anticipation. Since we are to be
out of the season at all, we are glad we are in advance of it. This is
the youth of the summer, not its old age. People are looking forward;
events are approaching, instead of receding; the coming months seem big
with indefinite promise of benefit and pleasure.
We quickly become imbued with the general hopefulness of the place.
Every one has the look of one making ready. You hear, all day long, when
far enough from the waves, a vague, joyous hum of bustle pervading the
town. The enterprising click of hammer or trowel falls constantly on the
ear. The masons are at work upon the new villas, and our hotel is
completing a fine addition for a café; the stores along the busy little
main street are being put in order, the windows alluringly stocked, and
bright awnings unrolled above them, fenders from the summer's heat. The
hotels are fairly awake. Everything is rejoicing that the
semi-hibernation is over.
[Illustration: RELIEF MAP OF THE CENTRAL PYRENEES]
Biarritz, the town, is as delightful, if not as picturesque, as we had
hoped. Perhaps it is too modern to be picturesque. In this part of the
world at least, one rather requires the picturesque to be allied with
the old. The nucleus of Biarritz is old, but that is out of sight in the
modern overgrowth; Biarritz, as it is, is of this half century.
This is not, on the whole, to be regretted. Biarritz has no history, no
past of associations, no landmarks to be guarded. Vandalism in the form
of the modern rebuilder can here work more good than harm. Save for its
location at the edge of the wild Basque country, and what it has seen,
itself sheltered by obscurity, of the forays of that restless people,
the place has little to tell. It is a watering-place, pure and simple,
buoyed entirely by the prospering ebb and flow of modern fashion. Let us
take it as of to-day, not of yesterday, content to seek its charms under
that aspect alone, enjoying it for itself, not for its pedigree.
Biarritz is a prerogative instance of the magnetism of royalty,--of the
social power of the court as an institution. It was a watering-place, in
a small way, before Eugénie's advent; but there was not a tithe of its
present size and popularity. In 1840, it numbered in all not more than
fifty houses, a few of them lodgings or humble cafés, but the greater
part staid little whitewashed summer-dwellings with green verandas and
occasional roof-balconies; set down irregularly, without street or
system, along the sunny slopes of the bluff. Murray's _Handbook_ for
1848 gives it passing notice, and disrespectfully styles it the dullest
place upon earth for one having no resources of friends upon the spot.
But in the modern edition of forty years later, the same manual has come
to describe the place in a very different strain; assigns it a
population of nearly 6,000; details, with respect, its fashionable rank,
its villas and increasing hotels, its graded streets and driveways; and
among other things adds the simple remark that "about twenty-one
thousand strangers now visit Biarritz every year." Evidently there has
been some advance within the span.
It was the Empress of the French who distilled the life-elixir for the
quiet little resort. As a maiden, she had spent long summers by its
shore, and when she was become the first lady in the land, she turned
still to Biarritz, and the midsummer tide of fashion followed after her.
Across the downs, on the bluff, stands the _Villa Eugénie_, the handsel
of Biarritz's prosperity; and here about us is the town that grew up to
make her court.
Fair France lost as well as gained when the burning walls of the
Tuileries crashed in. In these days of the plain French Republic,--of
its sober, unornamental, business government,--the contrast is vivid
with the glitter and "go" of Louis Napoleon's régime. And the nation
feels it, and involuntarily grieves over it. The twenty years have far
from sufficed to smother that certain inborn Gallic joy in
monarchy,--autocratic rule, a brilliant court, leadership in fashion,
and all the pomp and pageantry which the French love so well.
Little more than a century ago, stable governments seemed at last to be
ruling the world; civilization had come to believe itself finally at
peace; war, it was complacently said, had finished its work; the coming
cycles would prove so far tamed as to have outgrown fightings and
revolutions. Cultured modern history, like Nature, would refuse to
proceed _per saltum_. Yet the hundred years since gone by have brought
wars as fierce, "leaps" of government as tremendous, as any century in
the past. It is this same fair France that has contributed more than her
share of them, and the Fall of the Second Empire was one of the most
dramatic. The world is not, after all, so securely merged from the
darkness of the Dark Ages. Within that short century, in Paris itself,
the very capital of cultured Europe, there has twice uprisen a human
savagery immeasurably exceeding all the tales we are to tell of the
fierce past of the Pyrenees.
It needs an effort to-day to picture the social power of France and
Eugénie twenty years ago. The mantle has not fallen to England and
Alexandra. Only a people like the French can endue fashion with
absolutism.
So it was, that when the Empress came to Biarritz, "all the world" came
also. From the building of her villa dates the true origin of Biarritz.
From that time its growth was progressive and sound. When the empire
finally fell, this creature of its making had already passed the
danger-point, and so stood unshaken; Biarritz had become too popular,
its clientèle too devoted, to part company. Even in the winter it has
its increasing colony; in summer its vogue is beyond caprice. The
sparkle of the royal occupation has gone, and the royal villa is
tenantless; but the place no longer needs a helping hand, for it is
abundantly able to walk alone.
[Illustration: BEACH AND VILLA EUGÉNIE AT BIARRITZ.]
II.
In the afternoon we wander down to the sands. The tide is low. The long
billows of the Bay of Biscay roll smugly in, hypocritical and placid,
with nothing to betray the unenviable reputation they sustain _in mediis
aquis_. The broad, smooth beach is not notably different in kind from
other beaches; but we instantly see the peculiar charm of its location.
The shore sweeps off in a long, lazy crescent, rounding up, a mile or
two to the northward, with the light-house near Bayonne. Southward we
cannot follow it from where we stand, for the near irregularities of
cliff cut it off from sight. Back from the beach rises the bluff,
curving northward with the crescent; at our left it comes boldly down
toward the water, partitioning the beach and breaking up at the edge
into strange, gaunt capes and peninsulas. Black masses of rock, large
and small, are crouching out among the waves, tortured by storms into
misshapen forms and anguished attitudes, patted and petted into
fantastic humps and contortions. The strata dip at an angle of about
twenty-five degrees, and the stone is friable and defenceless.
Soothingly now the water is running over and around these rocks, or
whitens their outlines with foam; granting their piteous torsos, in
merciful caprice, a day's brief respite from the agony of its
scourgings.
The afternoon sun shines brightly against the bathing pavilion,
irradiating its red and yellow brick. Along the narrow; sheltered
platform at its front, sit matronly French dowagers, holding their
daughters, as it were, in leash, and talking of women and things, and
affairs of state. Though early in the season, the beach is well
sprinkled with people. A few attempt the bathing again, but the rest
saunter here and there or enjoy beach-chairs at a stipulated rental. The
elderly French gentleman, a dapper and interesting, specimen rarely
paralleled at home, strolls about contentedly on the asphalt promenade
back from the beach, smoking a cigar and fingering a light bamboo.
Younger men, also well-dressed, pass in couples, or walk with a mother
and daughter,--never with the daughter alone. Boatmen and candy-peddlers
ramble in and out, a Basque fisherman or two linger about the scene, and
dogs, a pony and a captive monkey, add an element of animal life.
Despite its sunny holiday temperament, Biarritz was one of certain
Biscayan villages once denounced as "given up to the worship of the
devil,"--thus denounced by Henry IV's bloodthirsty inquisitor, Pierre de
Lancre, a veritable French Jeffreys, and the same who in 1609 put to
death no less than eight hundred persons on the ground of sorcery. "He
tells us that the devils and malignant spirits banished from Japan and
the Indies took refuge here in the mountains of Labourd. Above all, he
asserts that the young girls of Biarritz, always celebrated for their
beauty, 'have in their left eye a mark impressed by the devil.'"
Happily we have no devil in this nineteenth century, and in the clear
glance of these Biarritz peasants loitering on the sands, we find that
his brand-marks have disappeared with him.
A few of the faces we meet are English; many are Spanish, and show that
Biarritz draws its worshipers from the South as from the North. Indeed,
a large proportion of its summer society wears the mantilla and wields
the fan. Other marks, too, of Spanish dress are here, as where little
girls in many-hued outfit romp along the sands, dragooned by dark-faced
nurses in true Iberian costume. Three or four brilliant red parasols add
amazingly to the general effect of the scene.
We repair to the stone parapet before the pavilion, and gravely paying
our dues for chairs, sit and watch the picture. There is no charge for
sitting on the beach, but this is severely frowned upon at Biarritz. The
dues are two sous per chair, and, with true Continental thrift, they are
always rigorously collected. Whether one wanders into the open square of
the Palais Royal at Paris, or listens to the music in the Place de
Tourny at Bordeaux, or watches the waves at Biarritz, the old woman with
her little black bag at once appears upon the scene. Some Frenchless
friends in Paris, on one occasion, guilelessly seated in the gardens of
the Palais Royal, took the collector simply for a pertinacious
beggar-woman, and waved her airily off. She returned to the charge, of
course, in indignant French, and grew angrier every moment as she found
herself still loftily ignored. A warm fracas was in prospect, when a
passing American fortunately cleared up the complication; the woman
would have called in a gendarme unhesitatingly, to enforce her
diminutive claim.
On the bluff, beyond the pavilion, Eugénie's villa, a square, rich
building of English brick, surveys the scene its existence has brought
about. Around us, on the beach, the nurses sit in the shade of the rocks
and discourse on the respective failings of their charges. Children dig
in the sand with pail and shovel, with the same zest as at home.
Child-nature changes little with locality. So recently from the great
unknown, it is not yet seamed and crusted by environment. I suppose that
children fairly represent the prehistoric man. Impulse, appetite,
passion,--all the gusts of the moment sway them. We quell our emotions
so uniformly, as we grow on, that we finally hardly feel their
struggles. The children have richer life than we, in some respects:
"Faith and wonder and the primal earth
Are born into the world with every child."
I make no doubt that Nimrod, or Achilles and Ajax, great children that
they were, as ready to cry as to feast, to laugh as to fight, hunting
mightily, sulking in the tent, or defying the lightning,--intense,
sudden, human all through,--drank down their strong, muddy potion of
existence with a smack far heartier than the reflective sips of life
which civilization has now taught us to take. Childhood is wide and free
and abounding and near to nature, and we can take thoughts from it, and
ponder, perhaps dubiously, on the distance we since have traveled.
The children dig in the sand, and throw it over the nurses, just as they
are doing at Old Orchard and Old Point. Here, with a maid, is a pair of
children who freely show one attribute of childhood not so pleasing as
others,--cruelty. They have a little monkey, fastened by collar and
chain, and it is pitiful and yet ludicrous to see the close watch the
animal keeps on his captors' movements. He has found a slack chain his
best policy, and adapts his every motion anxiously and solicitously to
the leaps of the boy. But the utmost vigilance avails him little. When
the child is weary with running and sudden turns, which have called for
marvelous dexterity of accommodation on the part of the monkey, the
chain is hauled up, with the animal clinging worriedly to it, and he is
flung far out into the fringe of waves, to pick his shivering way up
again and again from the water. These children have a white rat, also,
which they chase over the sand, and souse into puddles, and otherwise
maltreat. It is useless to interfere parentally, and we hardly see our
way to buying either rat or monkey, even to ensure them a peaceable old
age. One wonders why children have this queer taint of cruelty.
Unconscious cruelty it may be, but it seems none the less out of place
in their fresh, unused nature. We outgrow some rude vices as well as
rude virtues, in becoming older, and there is comfort in that.
III.
The bluff, coming out to the sea, cuts off, close at hand, the curve of
the shore toward the south, and we climb by a sloping path. From the
top, we look down upon, the beach we have left; back upon the downs
cluster the numberless private villas which form a feature of Biarritz;
to the left, over the near roofs and hotels of the town, we can see the
first far-off pickets of the Pyrenees; while immediately in front now
appear below us three or four rocky bays and coves, broken by the lines
of the cliff and partly sheltered by the rocks out at sea. "Many of
these rocks," writes an old-time visitor,[2] in the pleasantly aging
English of 1840, "are perforated with holes, so that, with a high sea
and an incoming tide, and always, indeed, in some degree, when the tide
flows, the water pours through these hollows and rents, presenting the
singular appearance of many cascades. Some of the rocks lying close to
the shore, and many of those which form the cliff, are worn into vast
caverns. In these the waves make ceaseless music,--a hollow, dismal
sound, like distant thunder,--and when a broad, swelling wave bounds
into these caverns and breaks in some distant chamber, the shock, to
one standing on the beach, is like a slight earthquake. But when a storm
rises in the Bay of Biscay, and a northwest wind sweeps across the
Atlantic, the scene is grand beyond the power of description. The whole
space covered with rocks, which are scattered over the coast, is an
expanse of foam, boiling whirlpools and cataracts, and the noise of the
tremendous waves, rushing into these vast caverns and lashing their
inner walls, is grander a thousand times than the most terrific
thunder-storm that ever burst from the sky."
[2] INGLIS: Switzerland and the South of France.
In these little coves now float idle pleasure-boats, bright with paint
and listless awnings, and ready to be manned by their stout Basque
rowers. Here, too, are the fishermen's cabins, snugly built in against
the rocks, and garnished with baskets and poles, and with men repairing
their nets. The irregular curves of the bluff, broken here into abrupt
and dislocated masses, lend themselves readily to winding paths, and we
ramble on, curving upward and downward, over short bridges and through
little tunnels under the rocks, each turn giving a new view of the bay
or the town.
Finally we round another promontory, cross a last bridge to a large
rock-islet standing out from the mainland, and lo! the crescent of the
coast is completed, and far to the south we see a low mountain ending
the curve; it is Spain.
IV.
In the dreamy summer stillness, we sit with, content, looking at those
distant hills, listening to the lapping of the waves, watching the sun
sink lower toward the sea. The afternoon sunlight makes a glade across
the waters,--seeming to one from a western sea-board like some
strange disarrangement in the day.
[Illustration: "HERE TOO ARE THE FISHERMEN'S CABINS."]
The rounded mountains before us are indeed in Spain, a communicative
fisherman tells us. At the foot of the outermost, eighteen miles away,
is hidden the old Spanish town of Fuenterrabia. On its other side, in a
hollow of the coast, lies San Sebastian. Nearer us, though well down
along the sweep of the grey clay bluffs, is St. Jean de Luz, which, with
the others, lies on our intended way.
We seem to see, conforming to the crescent of that foreign coast, the
menacing crescent of the Armada, parting from Spanish shores, just three
hundred years ago to a month, to crush Anglo-Saxon civilization. There
before us lies the land of intolerance and bigotry which gave it being,
the land of Philip the Second and his Inquisition. But for Drake and
Howard and England's "wooden walls," events would have moved differently
during the last three centuries,--in our country as in theirs.
V.
The last spark of the sun has disappeared in the water. We turn into the
town in the fading light, passing another large bathing pavilion in a
sheltered cove, and saunter homeward through an undulating street, the
aorta of Biarritz. It is not a wide street, but it is busy and brisk,
and it has a refurbished look like newly scoured metal. Neat
dwelling-houses, guarded behind stone walls and well-kept hedges,
display frequent signs of furnished apartments to let Small and large
shops alternate sociably in the line; there is the _épicerie_ or
grocery-store, with raisins and olives and Albert biscuits in the
window; next is a lace and worsted shop, where black Spanish nettings
vie with gay crotchet-work,--
"By Heaven, it is a splendid sight to see
Their rival scarfs of mix'd embroidery,"
all made by hand, and bewilderingly low-priced. Now we come to a
mirrored café, the Frenchman's hearth-side; it compels a détour into the
middle of the street, since the sidewalk is quite preempted by its
chairs and tiny tables. Here is another Spanish store, conspicuous for
its painted tambourines with pendent webs of red and yellow worsted, and
for its spreading fans, color-dashed with exciting pictures of
bull-fights and spangled matadors. A hotel appears next, across the way,
standing back from the street, with: a small, triangular park between;
and then comes a pretentious bric-à-brac bazaar, and another café, and a
confectioner's, and a tobacco-store,--each presided over by a buxom
French matron, affable and vigilant, and clearly the animating spirit of
the establishment.
Tiny carriages of a peculiar species, with donkeys and boy drivers, line
the streets. The carriage holds one,--say an infirm dowager seeking the
afternoon breeze,--and if the driver's attendance is desired, he is able
to run beside it for miles. It is light and noiseless, comfortably
cushioned, always within call, and governed by a beneficently trifling
tariff. These _vinaigrettes_, as they are called, would be appreciated
at home, if habit took kindly to novelties. How greatly they might
simplify problems of calling and shopping! Our conveyances are all
cumbrous. We must have the huge barouche, the coach, the close-shut
coupé. Even the phaeton yields to the high T-cart. But convention is
autocratic, and would frown on these vinaigrettes as it frowns on many
useful ideas. Another unfortunate victim of its taboo is the
sedan-chair, which would be lustily stared at to-day, yet the utility of
which might be made positively inestimable. One who reads of the Chinese
palanquins, or sees the carrying-chairs of Switzerland, convenient and
always in demand, or who watches these agile little vinaigrettes darting
along the ways, wonders that similar devices do not force their way, if
need be, into universal favor.
Another mode of conveyance, once peculiarly popular with Biarritz, might
be more difficult of exportation. This was the _promenade en cacolet_.
The town of Bayonne is but five miles distant, by a delightful road, and
formerly, particularly before the railroad came in, to ridicule old
ways, every one went to Bayonne _en cacolet_. It is no longer so, and
the world has lost a unique custom. The contrivance was very simple: the
motive power was a donkey or a horse, and the conveyance consisted of a
wooden frame or yoke fitting across the animal's back, with a seat
projecting from each side. One seat was for the driver, usually a lively
Basque peasant-woman; the other was for the passenger. There was a small
arm-piece, at the outside of each seat, and generally there was a
cushion. This was once a favorite means of travel between Bayonne and
Biarritz. It was expeditious, enlivening,--and highly insecure; that was
one of its charms. Throughout the ride there was a ludicrous titillation
of insecurity; but it was greatest at the start and at the finish. For,
the seats being evenly balanced, to mount was in itself high art. Driver
and passenger needed to spring at precisely the same instant, or the
result was dust and ashes. Trial after trial was needed by the neophyte;
he must be, as an eye-witness[3] of long ago aptly describes it, "as
watchful of the mutual signal as a file of soldiers who wait the command
'make ready,--present,--fire!' A second's delay,--a second's
precipitation,--proves fatal; the seat is attained, and at the same
moment up goes the opposite empty seat, and down goes the equestrian
between the horse's feet.... In descending, it is still worse; because
there is more hurry, more impatience, on arriving at the end of a
journey; and an injudicious descent does not visit its effects upon one
but upon both travelers; for unless the person who descends be extremely
quick in his motions, his seat flies up before he has quite left it, and
oversets him, and the opposite weight, of course, goes plump to the
ground,--with as fatal effects as cutting the hammock-strings of a
middy's berth."
[3] INGLIS.
[Illustration]
Perilous balancing feats and a high degree of skill were evidently
demanded of him who would journey _en cacolet_. Requiring thus a special
training, so to speak, as well as a nice equivalence in weight between
passenger and driver difficult to always realize, its use is not likely
to supersede that of wheeled vehicles. To take a ride _en cacolet_, one
might have a long hunt before finding a driver who should be his proper
counterpoise; and it would be often inconvenient, not to say
impracticable, thus to have to order one's driver according to measure.
It is the evening dining-hour as we find ourselves at last in the open
court-yard of our hotel and seek the welcoming light of its _salle_. The
hotels of Biarritz are handsome, even to elegance,--elegance which seems
wasted on the few people now in them. But numbers do not seem to affect
the anxious concern of Continental hotel-keepers. The same elaborate and
formal table-d'hôte is served for our small company and a few others, as
will, later on, be prepared for a houseful of guests. The waiters don
the same ducal costume and with it the same grave decorum; and our
attendant Ganymede, bending respectfully to present his laden salver,
watches my selection of a portion of the pullet with as anxious
solicitude as could be shown by the mother hen herself. The solemnity of
a table-d'hôte, and the silencing effect it has on the most talkative,
is invariable, as it is inexplicable, and accents sharply the contrast
with the breezy clatter of the American summer hotel dining-hall. This
is not to say that either is, in all ways, to be preferred. Each in its
own setting. There is a comforting stir and whir about the great, bare,
sociable dining-hall at Crawford's or at the Grand Union, which causes a
European table-d'hôte utterly to pale and dwindle. And there is a
satisfying quiet, a self-respecting, ritualistic calm, in the frescoed
salle-a-manger of the Schweizerhof, or of the Grand Hotel at Biarritz,
which makes its American rival seem impetuous and unrestful, and even a
trifle garish. 'Tis hard to choose. Man and mood both vary. There is no
parallel. The two modes of dining are as wide apart as the countries
and their characteristics, and each is, in the best sense, distinctly
typical.
VI
There is music during the evening in the little park we passed, and the
best of Biarritz assembles to enjoy the programme. We charter chairs
with the rest. Tables go with the chairs without extra charge, waiters
follow up the tables, and soon all the world is sipping its coffee or
cordials, and listening to Zampa. Outside, around the fence enclosing
the little park, revolves an endless procession of the poorer
people,--thrifty folk who are here as earners, not spenders, and would
not dream of melting their two sous into a chair. Round the small
enclosure they go, by couples or threes, like asteroids round the sun,
staring with interest at the more aristocratic assemblage within,--just
as the family circle stares at the boxes. And the music sings on
pleasantly for all, this mild summer evening in Biarritz.