🥀 Within a walk of industrial Boulogne is the little village without
hotels or a “season,” left altogether to the fisher families.
🥀 The propriety of the little boy of these fishermen is so great that
when he bathes—on Sundays—having no gear for that occasion, he does not
enter the sea unless encumbered by an apron of his mother’s, secured
round his neck. Nor does he set his feet into the first shallow ripple
until he shall have crossed himself with the sea-water. In his own bays,
apart, on his own sands untrodden by strangers and out of view, should
you follow this coast of Boulogne towards the south, you may surprise
him fulfilling thus his modest rites.
🥀 Nothing was ever more uncentralized than the fishing village of the
Pas de Calais. Except that Paris eats its fish, and that therefore from
Paris must filter down a little narrow gain—how narrow when it reaches
the hand that set the sail and drew the net, one must gather from the
poverty of these clambering streets—the village is separate, and there
is no cord of communication. Does music, for example, travel these few
miles, this longer distance made by the bad roads, the smell of fish,
and the incommunicable poverty? The boys here do not sing the tunes that
run in cities. Does the press cross the boundaries that close that
village to the world? A woman, trim and talkative, walks over from
Boulogne in the morning with so few newspapers that if the vigour of her
race should fail her for once, and she should take the little
_diligence_, her profits would be gone at a blow. There is indeed that
barrier to literature—a dialect that has to be reckoned with. That
dialect is mixed with old and alienated English; surely not because of
the small intercourse with our sailors when the fishermen go to
Boulogne, but perhaps by reason of old colonizing of a coast which, in
our aggressive days, we not only conquered but inhabited. Those
colonists were, it is true, so dealt with by the plague that not many of
them remained to improve the height and diminish the pelvic breadth of
these French people; but language is of more subtle penetration than the
influences that command the body; it prevails and clings, persists,
outlives, and wears the local accent rather than die.
🥀 The way from Boulogne lies through the quarter devoted to the
factories—the _usines_ that call the regiment of very young girls,
marching in rows, companies of friends ten strong, linked by the arm,
daily to thirteen hours’ labour. The streets of this industrial quarter
of Boulogne are old, well-built, high-roofed, shuttered, full of
character; but the factory-smoke hangs about them, and between this road
and that lie those damaged lands, neither free nor captive, subject to
accidents of country and borough, that have everywhere been laid out by
the hand that broke down the walls of cities. And then, as you climb the
hill, and turn from the factory to the road leading stumblingly to the
fishing-village, you are compelled to know that the refuse of a
fishing-village is fish.
🥀 Everywhere is woman—thick-set woman, warmly clad and with
well-drawn-up stockings—evident and active out of doors. But on Sunday
only is the fisherwoman to be seen with her baby out in the sea air.
Where, one wonders, does the baby abide all the week by day (he has a
clean little home by night with a religious picture over his neat bed)
whilst his mother is bent under the burdens, or striding on the errands,
or pushing the carts, or hauling the ropes, of the labour of the little
port? She is too much and too continually bent, strained, and striving.
She is cloudily, though not stormily, grave, so that after one has seen
her for six days earning so violently her bare bread, it is almost a
surprise to find her long-captive and long-diverted smile set free on
Sunday for her child. She suns him, sitting on a stone in front of her
own momentous and perpetual sea; and after this brief play he disappears
again from the light of sea and sun. The older children have their
reunited Sunday also. You may find on the grassy cliff two families and
one pack of cards; two fathers, two mothers, and all the children at a
game.