ETRETAT

1876

The coast of Normandy and Picardy, from Trouville to Boulogne, is a

chain of _stations balnéaires_, each with its particular claim to

patronage. The grounds of the claim are in some cases not especially

obvious; but they are generally found to reside in the fact that if

one's spirits, on arriving, are low, so also are the prices. There are

the places that are dear and brilliant, like Trouville and Dieppe, and

places that are cheap and dreary, like Fécamp and Cabourg. Then there

are the places that are both cheap and pleasant. This delightful

combination of qualities may be found at the modest _plage_ from which I

write these lines. At Etretat you may enjoy some of the finest

cliff-scenery it has been my fortune to behold, and you may breakfast

and dine at the principal hotel for the sum of five and a half francs a

day. You may engage a room in the town over the butcher's, the baker's,

the cobbler's, at a rate that will depend upon your talent for driving a

bargain, but that in no case will be exorbitant. Add to this that there

are no other opportunities at Etretat to spend money. You wear old

clothes, you walk about in canvas shoes, you deck your head with a

fisherman's cap (when made of white flannel these articles may be

extolled for their coolness, convenience, and picturesqueness), you lie

on the pebbly strand most of the day, watching the cliffs, the waves,

and the bathers; in the evening you converse with your acquaintance on

the terrace of the Casino, and you keep monkish hours. Though Etretat

enjoys great and deserved popularity, I see no symptoms of the decline

of these simple fashions--no menace of the invasion of luxury. A little

more luxury, indeed, might be imported without doing any harm; though

after all we soon learn that it is an idle enough prejudice that has

hitherto prevented us from keeping our soap in a sugar-dish and

regarding a small rock, placed against a door, as an efficient

substitute for a key. From a Parisian point of view, Etretat is

certainly primitive, but it would be affectation on the part of an

American to pretend that he was not agreeably surprised to find a

"summer resort," in which he had been warned that he would have to rough

it, so elaborately appointed and organised. Etretat may be primitive,

but Etretat is French, and therefore Etretat is "administered."

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.