It was another picked day--you see how freely I pick them--when I went
to breakfast at Saint-Jouin, chez la belle Ernestine. The beautiful
Ernestine is as hospitable as she is fair, and to contemplate her charms
you have only to order breakfast. They shine forth the more brilliantly
in proportion as your order is liberal, and Ernestine is beautiful
according as your bill is large. In this case she comes and smiles,
really very handsomely, round your table, and you feel some hesitation
in accusing so well-favoured a person of extortion. She keeps an inn at
the end of a lane which diverges from the high road between Etretat and
Havre, and it is an indispensable feature of your "station" at the
former place that you choose some fine morning and seek her hospitality.
She has been a celebrity these twenty years, and is no longer a simple
maiden in her flower; but twenty years, if they have diminished her
early bloom, have richly augmented her _musée_. This is a collection of
all the verses and sketches, the autographs, photographs, monographs,
trinkets, presented to the amiable hostess by admiring tourists. It
covers the walls of her sitting-room and fills half a dozen big albums
which you look at while breakfast is being prepared, just as if you were
awaiting dinner in genteel society. Most Frenchmen of the day whom one
has heard of appear to have called at Saint-Jouin, and to have left
their _homages_. Each of them has turned a compliment with pen or
pencil, and you may see in a glass case on the parlour wall what
Alexandre Dumas _fils_ thought of the landlady's nose, and how several
painters measured her ankles.
Of course you must make this excursion in good company, and I affirm
that I was in the very best. The company prefers, equally of course, to
have its breakfast in the orchard in front of the house; which, if the
repast is good, will make it seem better still, and if it is poor, will
carry off its poorness. Clever innkeepers should always make their
victims (in tolerable weather) eat in the garden. I forget whether
Ernestine's breakfast was intrinsically good or bad, but I distinctly
remember enjoying it, and making everything welcome. Everything, that
is, save the party at the other table--the Paris actresses and the
American gentlemen. The combination of these two classes of persons,
individually so delightful, results in certain phenomena which seem less
in harmony with appleboughs and summer breezes than with the gas-lamps
and thick perfumes of a _cabinet particulier_; and yet it was
characteristic of this odd mixture of things that Mademoiselle
Ernestine, coming to chat with her customers, should bear a beautiful
infant on her arm, and smile with artless pride on being assured of its
filial resemblance to herself. She looked handsomer than ever as she
caressed this startling attribute of presumptive spinsterhood.
Saint-Jouin is close to the sea and to the finest cliffs in the world.
One of my companions, who had laden the carriage with the implements of
a painter, went off into a sunny meadow to take the portrait of a
windmill, and I, choosing the better portion, wandered through a little
green valley with the other. Ten minutes brought us to the edge of the
cliffs, which at this point of the coast are simply sublime. I had
supposed the white sea-walls of Etretat the finest thing possible in
this way, but the huge red porphyritic-looking masses of Saint-Jouin
have an even grander character. I have rarely seen a landscape more
"plastic." They are strange, fantastic, out of keeping with the country,
and for some rather arbitrary reason suggested to me a Spanish or even
an African prospect. Certain sun-scorched precipices in Spanish sierras
must have very much the same warmth of tone and desolation of attitude.
The great distinction of the cliffs of Saint-Jouin is their
extraordinary doubleness. Falling to an immense depth, they encounter a
certain outward ledge, or terrace, where they pause and play a dozen
fantastic tricks, such as piling up rocks into the likeness of needles
and watch-towers; then they plunge again, and in another splendid sweep
descend to the beach. There was something very impressive in the way
their evil brows, looking as if they were stained with blood and rust,
were bent upon the indifferent--the sleeping--sea.