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.
I had occasion, by the time I reached the summit, to wish it had been.
Deep, silent sunshine filled the air, and the long grass of the downs
stood up in the light without a tremor. The downs at Etretat are
magnificent, and the way they stretched off toward Dieppe, with their
shining levels and their faintly-shaded dells, was in itself an
irresistible invitation. On the land-side they have been somewhat
narrowed by cultivation; the woods, and farms, and grain-fields here and
there creep close enough to the edge of the cliff almost to see the
shifting of the tides at its base. But cultivation in Normandy is itself
picturesque, and the pedestrian rarely needs resent its encroachments.
Neither walls nor hedges nor fences are anywhere visible; the whole land
lies open to the breezes and to his curious footsteps. This universal
absence of barriers gives an air of vastness to the landscape, so that
really, in a little French province, you have more of the feeling of
being in a big country than on our own huge continent, which bristles so
incongruously with defensive palings and dykes. Norman farmhouses, too,
with their mossy roofs and their visible beams making all kinds of
triangles upon the ancient plaster of their walls, are very delightful
things. Hereabouts they have always a dark little wood dose beside them;
often a _chênaie_, as the term is--a fantastic little grove of
tempest-tossed oaks. The trees look as if, some night, when the
sea-blasts were howling their loudest and their boughs were tossing most
wildly, the tumult had suddenly been stilled and they had stopped short,
each in the attitude into which the storm was twisting it. The only
thing the storm can do with them now is to blow them straight. The long,
indented coast-line had never seemed to me so charming. It stretched
away into the light haze of the horizon, with such lovely violet spots
in its caves and hollows, and such soft white gleams on its short
headlands--such exquisite gradations of distance and such capricious
interruptions of perspective--that one could only say that the land was
really trying to smile as intensely as the sea. The smile of the sea was
a positive simper. Such a glittering and twinkling, such a softness and
blueness, such tiny little pin-points of foam, and such delicate little
wrinkles of waves--all this made the ocean look like a flattered
portrait.
The day I speak of was a Sunday, and there were to be races at Fécamp,
ten miles away. The agreeable thing was, of course, to walk to Fécamp
over the grassy downs. I walked and walked, over the levels and the
dells, having land and ocean quite to myself. Here and there I met a
shepherd lying flat on his stomach in the sun, while his sheep, in
extreme dishabille (shearing-time being recent), went huddling in front
of me as I approached. Far below, on the blue ocean, like a fly on a
table of lapis, crawled a little steamer, carrying people from Etretat
to the races. I seemed to go much faster, yet the steamer got to Fécamp
before me. But I stopped to gossip with a shepherd on a grassy hillside,
and to admire certain little villages which are niched in small,
transverse, seaward-sloping valleys. The shepherd told me that he had
been farm-servant to the same master for five-and-thirty years--ever
since the age of ten; and that for thirty-five summers he had fed his
flock upon those downs. I don't know whether his sheep were tired of
their diet, but he professed himself very tired of his life. I remarked
that in fine weather it must be charming, and he observed, with humility,
that to thirty-five summers there went a certain number of rainy days.
The walk to Fécamp would be quite satisfactory if it were not for the
_fonds_. The _fonds_ are the transverse valleys just mentioned--the
channels, for the most part, of small water-courses which discharge
themselves into the sea. The downs subside, precipitately, to the level
of the beach, and then slowly lift their grassy shoulders on the other
side of the gully. As the cliffs are of immense height, these
indentations are profound, and drain off a little of the exhilaration of
the too elastic pedestrian. The first _fond_ strikes him as delightfully
picturesque, and he is down the long slope on one side and up the
gigantic hump on the other before he has time to feel hot. But the
second is greeted with that tempered _empressement_ with which you bow
in the street to an acquaintance whom you have met half an hour before;
the third is a stale repetition; the fourth is decidedly one too many,
and the fifth is sensibly exasperating. The _fonds_, in a word, are very
tiresome. It was, if I remember rightly, in the bottom of the last and
widest of the series that I discovered the little town of Yport. Every
little fishing-village on the Norman coast has, within the last ten
years, set up in business as a watering-place; and, though one might
fancy that nature had condemned Yport to modest obscurity, it is plain
she has no idea of being out of the fashion. But she is a miniature
imitation of her rivals. She has a meagre little wood behind her and an
evil-smelling beach, on which bathing is possible only at the highest
tide. At the scorching midday hour at which I inspected her she seemed
absolutely empty, and the ocean, beyond acres of slippery seaweed,
looked very far away. She has everything that a properly appointed
_station de bains_ should have, but everything is on a Lilliputian
scale. The whole place looked like a huge Nüremburg toy. There is a
diminutive hotel, in which, properly, the head-waiter should be a pigmy
and the chambermaid a sprite, and beside it there is a Casino on the
smallest possible scale. Everything about the Casino is so consistently
microscopic, that it seems a matter of course that the newspapers in the
reading-room should be printed in the very finest type. Of course there
is a reading-room, and a dancing-room, and a café, and a billiard-room,
with a bagatelle-board instead of a table, and a little terrace on which
you may walk up and down with very short steps. I hope the prices are as
tiny as everything else, and I suspect, indeed, that Yport honestly
claims, not that she is attractive, but that she is cheap.
I toiled up the perpendicular cliff again, and took my way over the
grass, for another hour, to Fécamp, where I found the peculiarities of
Yport directly reversed. The place is a huge, straggling village, seated
along a wide, shallow bay, and adorned, of course, with the classic
Casino and the row of hotels. But all this is on a very brave scale,
though it is not manifest that the bravery at Fécamp has won a victory;
and, indeed, the local attractions did not strike me as irresistible. A
pebbly beach of immense length, fenced off from the town by a grassy
embankment; a Casino of a bald and unsociable aspect; a principal inn,
with an interminable brown façade, suggestive somehow of an asylum or
an almshouse--such are the most striking features of this particular
watering-place. There are magnificent cliffs on each side of the bay,
but, as the French say, without impropriety, it is the devil to get to
them. There was no one in the hotel, in the Casino, or on the beach; the
whole town being in the act of climbing the farther cliff, to reach the
downs on which the races were to be held. The green hillside was black
with trudging spectators and the long sky-line was fretted with them.
When I say there was no one at the inn, I forget the gentleman at the
door, who informed me positively that he would give me no breakfast; he
seemed to have stayed at home from the races expressly to give himself
this pleasure. But I went farther and fared better, obtaining a meal of
homely succulence in an unfashionable tavern, in a back street, where
the wine was sound, the cutlets were tender, and the serving-maid was
rosy. Then I walked along--for a mile, it seemed--through a dreary, gray
_grand'-rue_, where the sunshine was hot, the odours were portentous,
and the doorsteps garnished with aged fishwives, retired from business,
whose plaited linen coifs gave a value, as the painters say, to the
brown umber of their cheeks. I inspected the harbour and its goodly
basin--with nothing in it--and certain pink and blue houses which
surround it, and then, joining the last stragglers, I clambered up the
side of the cliff to the downs.
The races had already begun, and the ring of spectators was dense. I
picked out some of the smallest people, looked over their heads, and saw
several young farmers, in parti-coloured jackets and very red in the
face, bouncing up and down on handsome cart-horses. Satiated at last
with this diversion, I turned away and wandered down the hill again; and
after strolling through the streets of Fécamp, and gathering not a
little of the wayside entertainment that a seaport and fishing-town
always yields, I repaired to the Abbey-church, a monument of some
importance, and almost as great an object of pride in the town as the
Casino. The Abbey of Fécamp was once a very rich and powerful
establishment, but nothing remains of it now save its church and its
_trappistine_. The church, which is for the most part early gothic, is
very stately and interesting, and the _trappistine_, a distilled liquor
of the Chartreuse family, is much prized by people who take a little
glass after their coffee. By the time I had done with the Abbey the
townsfolk had slid _en masse_ down the cliff again, the yellow afternoon
had come, and the holiday-takers, before the wine-shops, made long and
lively shadows. I hired a sort of two-wheeled gig, without a hood, and
drove back to Etretat in the rosy stage of evening. The gig dandled me
up and down in a fashion of which I had been unconscious since I left
off baby-clothes; but the drive, through the charming Norman country,
over roads which lay among the peaceful meadows like paths across a
park, was altogether delightful. The sunset gave a deeper mellowness to
the standing crops, and in the grassiest corner of the wayside villages
the young men and maidens were dancing like the figures in
vignette-illustrations of classic poets.