HAVING earned, by many years of fidelity, the right to be sometimes
inconstant to our English watering-place, we have dallied for two or
three seasons with a French watering-place: once solely known to us as a
town with a very long street, beginning with an abattoir and ending with
a steam-boat, which it seemed our fate to behold only at daybreak on
winter mornings, when (in the days before continental railroads), just
sufficiently awake to know that we were most uncomfortably asleep, it was
our destiny always to clatter through it, in the coupé of the diligence
from Paris, with a sea of mud behind us, and a sea of tumbling waves
before. In relation to which latter monster, our mind’s eye now recalls
a worthy Frenchman in a seal-skin cap with a braided hood over it, once
our travelling companion in the coupé aforesaid, who, waking up with a
pale and crumpled visage, and looking ruefully out at the grim row of
breakers enjoying themselves fanatically on an instrument of torture
called ‘the Bar,’ inquired of us whether we were ever sick at sea? Both
to prepare his mind for the abject creature we were presently to become,
and also to afford him consolation, we replied, ‘Sir, your servant is
always sick when it is possible to be so.’ He returned, altogether
uncheered by the bright example, ‘Ah, Heaven, but I am always sick, even
when it is impossible to be so.’
The means of communication between the French capital and our French
watering-place are wholly changed since those days; but, the Channel
remains unbridged as yet, and the old floundering and knocking about go
on there. It must be confessed that saving in reasonable (and therefore
rare) sea-weather, the act of arrival at our French watering-place from
England is difficult to be achieved with dignity. Several little
circumstances combine to render the visitor an object of humiliation. In
the first place, the steamer no sooner touches the port, than all the
passengers fall into captivity: being boarded by an overpowering force of
Custom-house officers, and marched into a gloomy dungeon. In the second
place, the road to this dungeon is fenced off with ropes breast-high, and
outside those ropes all the English in the place who have lately been
sea-sick and are now well, assemble in their best clothes to enjoy the
degradation of their dilapidated fellow-creatures. ‘Oh, my gracious! how
ill this one has been!’ ‘Here’s a damp one coming next!’ ‘Here’s a pale
one!’ ‘Oh! Ain’t he green in the face, this next one!’ Even we ourself
(not deficient in natural dignity) have a lively remembrance of
staggering up this detested lane one September day in a gale of wind,
when we were received like an irresistible comic actor, with a burst of
laughter and applause, occasioned by the extreme imbecility of our legs.
We were coming to the third place. In the third place, the captives,
being shut up in the gloomy dungeon, are strained, two or three at a
time, into an inner cell, to be examined as to passports; and across the
doorway of communication, stands a military creature making a bar of his
arm. Two ideas are generally present to the British mind during these
ceremonies; first, that it is necessary to make for the cell with violent
struggles, as if it were a life-boat and the dungeon a ship going down;
secondly, that the military creature’s arm is a national affront, which
the government at home ought instantly to ‘take up.’ The British mind
and body becoming heated by these fantasies, delirious answers are made
to inquiries, and extravagant actions performed. Thus, Johnson persists
in giving Johnson as his baptismal name, and substituting for his
ancestral designation the national ‘Dam!’ Neither can he by any means be
brought to recognise the distinction between a portmanteau-key and a
passport, but will obstinately persevere in tendering the one when asked
for the other. This brings him to the fourth place, in a state of mere
idiotcy; and when he is, in the fourth place, cast out at a little door
into a howling wilderness of touters, he becomes a lunatic with wild eyes
and floating hair until rescued and soothed. If friendless and
unrescued, he is generally put into a railway omnibus and taken to Paris.
But, our French watering-place, when it is once got into, is a very
enjoyable place. It has a varied and beautiful country around it, and
many characteristic and agreeable things within it. To be sure, it might
have fewer bad smells and less decaying refuse, and it might be better
drained, and much cleaner in many parts, and therefore infinitely more
healthy. Still, it is a bright, airy, pleasant, cheerful town; and if
you were to walk down either of its three well-paved main streets,
towards five o’clock in the afternoon, when delicate odours of cookery
fill the air, and its hotel windows (it is full of hotels) give glimpses
of long tables set out for dinner, and made to look sumptuous by the aid
of napkins folded fan-wise, you would rightly judge it to be an
uncommonly good town to eat and drink in.
We have an old walled town, rich in cool public wells of water, on the
top of a hill within and above the present business-town; and if it were
some hundreds of miles further from England, instead of being, on a clear
day, within sight of the grass growing in the crevices of the
chalk-cliffs of Dover, you would long ago have been bored to death about
that town. It is more picturesque and quaint than half the innocent
places which tourists, following their leader like sheep, have made
impostors of. To say nothing of its houses with grave courtyards, its
queer by-corners, and its many-windowed streets white and quiet in the
sunlight, there is an ancient belfry in it that would have been in all
the Annuals and Albums, going and gone, these hundred years if it had but
been more expensive to get at. Happily it has escaped so well, being
only in our French watering-place, that you may like it of your own
accord in a natural manner, without being required to go into convulsions
about it. We regard it as one of the later blessings of our life, that
BILKINS, the only authority on Taste, never took any notice that we can
find out, of our French watering-place. Bilkins never wrote about it,
never pointed out anything to be seen in it, never measured anything in
it, always left it alone. For which relief, Heaven bless the town and
the memory of the immortal Bilkins likewise!
There is a charming walk, arched and shaded by trees, on the old walls
that form the four sides of this High Town, whence you get glimpses of
the streets below, and changing views of the other town and of the river,
and of the hills and of the sea. It is made more agreeable and peculiar
by some of the solemn houses that are rooted in the deep streets below,
bursting into a fresher existence a-top, and having doors and windows,
and even gardens, on these ramparts. A child going in at the courtyard
gate of one of these houses, climbing up the many stairs, and coming out
at the fourth-floor window, might conceive himself another Jack,
alighting on enchanted ground from another bean-stalk. It is a place
wonderfully populous in children; English children, with governesses
reading novels as they walk down the shady lanes of trees, or nursemaids
interchanging gossip on the seats; French children with their smiling
bonnes in snow-white caps, and themselves—if little boys—in straw
head-gear like bee-hives, work-baskets and church hassocks. Three years
ago, there were three weazen old men, one bearing a frayed red ribbon in
his threadbare button-hole, always to be found walking together among
these children, before dinner-time. If they walked for an appetite, they
doubtless lived en pension—were contracted for—otherwise their poverty
would have made it a rash action. They were stooping, blear-eyed, dull
old men, slip-shod and shabby, in long-skirted short-waisted coats and
meagre trousers, and yet with a ghost of gentility hovering in their
company. They spoke little to each other, and looked as if they might
have been politically discontented if they had had vitality enough.
Once, we overheard red-ribbon feebly complain to the other two that
somebody, or something, was ‘a Robber;’ and then they all three set their
mouths so that they would have ground their teeth if they had had any.
The ensuing winter gathered red-ribbon unto the great company of faded
ribbons, and next year the remaining two were there—getting themselves
entangled with hoops and dolls—familiar mysteries to the
children—probably in the eyes of most of them, harmless creatures who had
never been like children, and whom children could never be like. Another
winter came, and another old man went, and so, this present year, the
last of the triumvirate, left off walking—it was no good, now—and sat by
himself on a little solitary bench, with the hoops and the dolls as
lively as ever all about him.
In the Place d’Armes of this town, a little decayed market is held, which
seems to slip through the old gateway, like water, and go rippling down
the hill, to mingle with the murmuring market in the lower town, and get
lost in its movement and bustle. It is very agreeable on an idle summer
morning to pursue this market-stream from the hill-top. It begins,
dozingly and dully, with a few sacks of corn; starts into a surprising
collection of boots and shoes; goes brawling down the hill in a
diversified channel of old cordage, old iron, old crockery, old clothes,
civil and military, old rags, new cotton goods, flaming prints of saints,
little looking-glasses, and incalculable lengths of tape; dives into a
backway, keeping out of sight for a little while, as streams will, or
only sparkling for a moment in the shape of a market drinking-shop; and
suddenly reappears behind the great church, shooting itself into a bright
confusion of white-capped women and blue-bloused men, poultry,
vegetables, fruits, flowers, pots, pans, praying-chairs, soldiers,
country butter, umbrellas and other sun-shades, girl-porters waiting to
be hired with baskets at their backs, and one weazen little old man in a
cocked hat, wearing a cuirass of drinking-glasses and carrying on his
shoulder a crimson temple fluttering with flags, like a glorified
pavior’s rammer without the handle, who rings a little bell in all parts
of the scene, and cries his cooling drink Hola, Hola, Ho-o-o! in a shrill
cracked voice that somehow makes itself heard, above all the chaffering
and vending hum. Early in the afternoon, the whole course of the stream
is dry. The praying-chairs are put back in the church, the umbrellas are
folded up, the unsold goods are carried away, the stalls and stands
disappear, the square is swept, the hackney coaches lounge there to be
hired, and on all the country roads (if you walk about, as much as we do)
you will see the peasant women, always neatly and comfortably dressed,
riding home, with the pleasantest saddle-furniture of clean milk-pails,
bright butter-kegs, and the like, on the jolliest little donkeys in the
world.
We have another market in our French watering-place—that is to say, a few
wooden hutches in the open street, down by the Port—devoted to fish. Our
fishing-boats are famous everywhere; and our fishing people, though they
love lively colours, and taste is neutral (see Bilkins), are among the
most picturesque people we ever encountered. They have not only a
quarter of their own in the town itself, but they occupy whole villages
of their own on the neighbouring cliffs. Their churches and chapels are
their own; they consort with one another, they intermarry among
themselves, their customs are their own, and their costume is their own
and never changes. As soon as one of their boys can walk, he is provided
with a long bright red nightcap; and one of their men would as soon think
of going afloat without his head, as without that indispensable appendage
to it. Then, they wear the noblest boots, with the hugest tops—flapping
and bulging over anyhow; above which, they encase themselves in such
wonderful overalls and petticoat trousers, made to all appearance of
tarry old sails, so additionally stiffened with pitch and salt, that the
wearers have a walk of their own, and go straddling and swinging about
among the boats and barrels and nets and rigging, a sight to see. Then,
their younger women, by dint of going down to the sea barefoot, to fling
their baskets into the boats as they come in with the tide, and bespeak
the first fruits of the haul with propitiatory promises to love and marry
that dear fisherman who shall fill that basket like an Angel, have the
finest legs ever carved by Nature in the brightest mahogany, and they
walk like Juno. Their eyes, too, are so lustrous that their long gold
ear-rings turn dull beside those brilliant neighbours; and when they are
dressed, what with these beauties, and their fine fresh faces, and their
many petticoats—striped petticoats, red petticoats, blue petticoats,
always clean and smart, and never too long—and their home-made stockings,
mulberry-coloured, blue, brown, purple, lilac—which the older women,
taking care of the Dutch-looking children, sit in all sorts of places
knitting, knitting, knitting from morning to night—and what with their
little saucy bright blue jackets, knitted too, and fitting close to their
handsome figures; and what with the natural grace with which they wear
the commonest cap, or fold the commonest handkerchief round their
luxuriant hair—we say, in a word and out of breath, that taking all these
premises into our consideration, it has never been a matter of the least
surprise to us that we have never once met, in the cornfields, on the
dusty roads, by the breezy windmills, on the plots of short sweet grass
overhanging the sea—anywhere—a young fisherman and fisherwoman of our
French watering-place together, but the arm of that fisherman has
invariably been, as a matter of course and without any absurd attempt to
disguise so plain a necessity, round the neck or waist of that
fisherwoman. And we have had no doubt whatever, standing looking at
their uphill streets, house rising above house, and terrace above
terrace, and bright garments here and there lying sunning on rough stone
parapets, that the pleasant mist on all such objects, caused by their
being seen through the brown nets hung across on poles to dry, is, in the
eyes of every true young fisherman, a mist of love and beauty, setting
off the goddess of his heart.
Moreover it is to be observed that these are an industrious people, and a
domestic people, and an honest people. And though we are aware that at
the bidding of Bilkins it is our duty to fall down and worship the
Neapolitans, we make bold very much to prefer the fishing people of our
French watering-place—especially since our last visit to Naples within
these twelvemonths, when we found only four conditions of men remaining
in the whole city: to wit, lazzaroni, priests, spies, and soldiers, and
all of them beggars; the paternal government having banished all its
subjects except the rascals.
But we can never henceforth separate our French watering-place from our
own landlord of two summers, M. Loyal Devasseur, citizen and
town-councillor. Permit us to have the pleasure of presenting M. Loyal
Devasseur.
His own family name is simply Loyal; but, as he is married, and as in
that part of France a husband always adds to his own name the family name
of his wife, he writes himself Loyal Devasseur. He owns a compact little
estate of some twenty or thirty acres on a lofty hill-side, and on it he
has built two country houses, which he lets furnished. They are by many
degrees the best houses that are so let near our French watering-place;
we have had the honour of living in both, and can testify. The
entrance-hall of the first we inhabited was ornamented with a plan of the
estate, representing it as about twice the size of Ireland; insomuch that
when we were yet new to the property (M. Loyal always speaks of it as ‘La
propriété’) we went three miles straight on end in search of the bridge
of Austerlitz—which we afterwards found to be immediately outside the
window. The Château of the Old Guard, in another part of the grounds,
and, according to the plan, about two leagues from the little
dining-room, we sought in vain for a week, until, happening one evening
to sit upon a bench in the forest (forest in the plan), a few yards from
the house-door, we observed at our feet, in the ignominious circumstances
of being upside down and greenly rotten, the Old Guard himself: that is
to say, the painted effigy of a member of that distinguished corps, seven
feet high, and in the act of carrying arms, who had had the misfortune to
be blown down in the previous winter. It will be perceived that M. Loyal
is a staunch admirer of the great Napoleon. He is an old soldier
himself—captain of the National Guard, with a handsome gold vase on his
chimney-piece presented to him by his company—and his respect for the
memory of the illustrious general is enthusiastic. Medallions of him,
portraits of him, busts of him, pictures of him, are thickly sprinkled
all over the property. During the first month of our occupation, it was
our affliction to be constantly knocking down Napoleon: if we touched a
shelf in a dark corner, he toppled over with a crash; and every door we
opened, shook him to the soul. Yet M. Loyal is not a man of mere castles
in the air, or, as he would say, in Spain. He has a specially practical,
contriving, clever, skilful eye and hand. His houses are delightful. He
unites French elegance and English comfort, in a happy manner quite his
own. He has an extraordinary genius for making tasteful little bedrooms
in angles of his roofs, which an Englishman would as soon think of
turning to any account as he would think of cultivating the Desert. We
have ourself reposed deliciously in an elegant chamber of M. Loyal’s
construction, with our head as nearly in the kitchen chimney-pot as we
can conceive it likely for the head of any gentleman, not by profession a
Sweep, to be. And, into whatsoever strange nook M. Loyal’s genius
penetrates, it, in that nook, infallibly constructs a cupboard and a row
of pegs. In either of our houses, we could have put away the knapsacks
and hung up the hats of the whole regiment of Guides.
Aforetime, M. Loyal was a tradesman in the town. You can transact
business with no present tradesman in the town, and give your card ‘chez
M. Loyal,’ but a brighter face shines upon you directly. We doubt if
there is, ever was, or ever will be, a man so universally pleasant in the
minds of people as M. Loyal is in the minds of the citizens of our French
watering-place. They rub their hands and laugh when they speak of him.
Ah, but he is such a good child, such a brave boy, such a generous
spirit, that Monsieur Loyal! It is the honest truth. M. Loyal’s nature
is the nature of a gentleman. He cultivates his ground with his own
hands (assisted by one little labourer, who falls into a fit now and
then); and he digs and delves from morn to eve in prodigious
perspirations—‘works always,’ as he says—but, cover him with dust, mud,
weeds, water, any stains you will, you never can cover the gentleman in
M. Loyal. A portly, upright, broad-shouldered, brown-faced man, whose
soldierly bearing gives him the appearance of being taller than he is,
look into the bright eye of M. Loyal, standing before you in his
working-blouse and cap, not particularly well shaved, and, it may be,
very earthy, and you shall discern in M. Loyal a gentleman whose true
politeness is ingrain, and confirmation of whose word by his bond you
would blush to think of. Not without reason is M. Loyal when he tells
that story, in his own vivacious way, of his travelling to Fulham, near
London, to buy all these hundreds and hundreds of trees you now see upon
the Property, then a bare, bleak hill; and of his sojourning in Fulham
three months; and of his jovial evenings with the market-gardeners; and
of the crowning banquet before his departure, when the market-gardeners
rose as one man, clinked their glasses all together (as the custom at
Fulham is), and cried, ‘Vive Loyal!’
M. Loyal has an agreeable wife, but no family; and he loves to drill the
children of his tenants, or run races with them, or do anything with
them, or for them, that is good-natured. He is of a highly convivial
temperament, and his hospitality is unbounded. Billet a soldier on him,
and he is delighted. Five-and-thirty soldiers had M. Loyal billeted on
him this present summer, and they all got fat and red-faced in two days.
It became a legend among the troops that whosoever got billeted on M.
Loyal rolled in clover; and so it fell out that the fortunate man who
drew the billet ‘M. Loyal Devasseur’ always leaped into the air, though
in heavy marching order. M. Loyal cannot bear to admit anything that
might seem by any implication to disparage the military profession. We
hinted to him once, that we were conscious of a remote doubt arising in
our mind, whether a sou a day for pocket-money, tobacco, stockings,
drink, washing, and social pleasures in general, left a very large margin
for a soldier’s enjoyment. Pardon! said Monsieur Loyal, rather wincing.
It was not a fortune, but—à la bonne heure—it was better than it used to
be! What, we asked him on another occasion, were all those neighbouring
peasants, each living with his family in one room, and each having a
soldier (perhaps two) billeted on him every other night, required to
provide for those soldiers? ‘Faith!’ said M. Loyal, reluctantly; a bed,
monsieur, and fire to cook with, and a candle. And they share their
supper with those soldiers. It is not possible that they could eat
alone.’—‘And what allowance do they get for this?’ said we. Monsieur
Loyal drew himself up taller, took a step back, laid his hand upon his
breast, and said, with majesty, as speaking for himself and all France,
‘Monsieur, it is a contribution to the State!’
It is never going to rain, according to M. Loyal. When it is impossible
to deny that it is now raining in torrents, he says it will be
fine—charming—magnificent—to-morrow. It is never hot on the Property, he
contends. Likewise it is never cold. The flowers, he says, come out,
delighting to grow there; it is like Paradise this morning; it is like
the Garden of Eden. He is a little fanciful in his language: smilingly
observing of Madame Loyal, when she is absent at vespers, that she is
‘gone to her salvation’—allée à son salut. He has a great enjoyment of
tobacco, but nothing would induce him to continue smoking face to face
with a lady. His short black pipe immediately goes into his breast
pocket, scorches his blouse, and nearly sets him on fire. In the Town
Council and on occasions of ceremony, he appears in a full suit of black,
with a waistcoat of magnificent breadth across the chest, and a
shirt-collar of fabulous proportions. Good M. Loyal! Under blouse or
waistcoat, he carries one of the gentlest hearts that beat in a nation
teeming with gentle people. He has had losses, and has been at his best
under them. Not only the loss of his way by night in the Fulham
times—when a bad subject of an Englishman, under pretence of seeing him
home, took him into all the night public-houses, drank ‘arfanarf’ in
every one at his expense, and finally fled, leaving him shipwrecked at
Cleefeeway, which we apprehend to be Ratcliffe Highway—but heavier losses
than that. Long ago a family of children and a mother were left in one
of his houses without money, a whole year. M. Loyal—anything but as rich
as we wish he had been—had not the heart to say ‘you must go;’ so they
stayed on and stayed on, and paying-tenants who would have come in
couldn’t come in, and at last they managed to get helped home across the
water; and M. Loyal kissed the whole group, and said, ‘Adieu, my poor
infants!’ and sat down in their deserted salon and smoked his pipe of
peace.—‘The rent, M. Loyal?’ ‘Eh! well! The rent!’ M. Loyal shakes his
head. ‘Le bon Dieu,’ says M. Loyal presently, ‘will recompense me,’ and
he laughs and smokes his pipe of peace. May he smoke it on the Property,
and not be recompensed, these fifty years!
There are public amusements in our French watering-place, or it would not
be French. They are very popular, and very cheap. The sea-bathing—which
may rank as the most favoured daylight entertainment, inasmuch as the
French visitors bathe all day long, and seldom appear to think of
remaining less than an hour at a time in the water—is astoundingly cheap.
Omnibuses convey you, if you please, from a convenient part of the town
to the beach and back again; you have a clean and comfortable
bathing-machine, dress, linen, and all appliances; and the charge for the
whole is half-a-franc, or fivepence. On the pier, there is usually a
guitar, which seems presumptuously enough to set its tinkling against the
deep hoarseness of the sea, and there is always some boy or woman who
sings, without any voice, little songs without any tune: the strain we
have most frequently heard being an appeal to ‘the sportsman’ not to bag
that choicest of game, the swallow. For bathing purposes, we have also a
subscription establishment with an esplanade, where people lounge about
with telescopes, and seem to get a good deal of weariness for their
money; and we have also an association of individual machine proprietors
combined against this formidable rival. M. Féroce, our own particular
friend in the bathing line, is one of these. How he ever came by his
name we cannot imagine. He is as gentle and polite a man as M. Loyal
Devasseur himself; immensely stout withal; and of a beaming aspect. M.
Féroce has saved so many people from drowning, and has been decorated
with so many medals in consequence, that his stoutness seems a special
dispensation of Providence to enable him to wear them; if his girth were
the girth of an ordinary man, he could never hang them on, all at once.
It is only on very great occasions that M. Féroce displays his shining
honours. At other times they lie by, with rolls of manuscript testifying
to the causes of their presentation, in a huge glass case in the
red-sofa’d salon of his private residence on the beach, where M. Féroce
also keeps his family pictures, his portraits of himself as he appears
both in bathing life and in private life, his little boats that rock by
clockwork, and his other ornamental possessions.
Then, we have a commodious and gay Theatre—or had, for it is burned down
now—where the opera was always preceded by a vaudeville, in which (as
usual) everybody, down to the little old man with the large hat and the
little cane and tassel, who always played either my Uncle or my Papa,
suddenly broke out of the dialogue into the mildest vocal snatches, to
the great perplexity of unaccustomed strangers from Great Britain, who
never could make out when they were singing and when they were
talking—and indeed it was pretty much the same. But, the caterers in the
way of entertainment to whom we are most beholden, are the Society of
Welldoing, who are active all the summer, and give the proceeds of their
good works to the poor. Some of the most agreeable fêtes they contrive,
are announced as ‘Dedicated to the children;’ and the taste with which
they turn a small public enclosure into an elegant garden beautifully
illuminated; and the thorough-going heartiness and energy with which they
personally direct the childish pleasures; are supremely delightful. For
fivepence a head, we have on these occasions donkey races with English
‘Jokeis,’ and other rustic sports; lotteries for toys; roundabouts,
dancing on the grass to the music of an admirable band, fire-balloons and
fireworks. Further, almost every week all through the summer—never mind,
now, on what day of the week—there is a fête in some adjoining village
(called in that part of the country a Ducasse), where the people—really
the people—dance on the green turf in the open air, round a little
orchestra, that seems itself to dance, there is such an airy motion of
flags and streamers all about it. And we do not suppose that between the
Torrid Zone and the North Pole there are to be found male dancers with
such astonishingly loose legs, furnished with so many joints in wrong
places, utterly unknown to Professor Owen, as those who here disport
themselves. Sometimes, the fête appertains to a particular trade; you
will see among the cheerful young women at the joint Ducasse of the
milliners and tailors, a wholesome knowledge of the art of making common
and cheap things uncommon and pretty, by good sense and good taste, that
is a practical lesson to any rank of society in a whole island we could
mention. The oddest feature of these agreeable scenes is the everlasting
Roundabout (we preserve an English word wherever we can, as we are
writing the English language), on the wooden horses of which machine
grown-up people of all ages are wound round and round with the utmost
solemnity, while the proprietor’s wife grinds an organ, capable of only
one tune, in the centre.
As to the boarding-houses of our French watering-place, they are Legion,
and would require a distinct treatise. It is not without a sentiment of
national pride that we believe them to contain more bores from the shores
of Albion than all the clubs in London. As you walk timidly in their
neighbourhood, the very neckcloths and hats of your elderly compatriots
cry to you from the stones of the streets, ‘We are Bores—avoid us!’ We
have never overheard at street corners such lunatic scraps of political
and social discussion as among these dear countrymen of ours. They
believe everything that is impossible and nothing that is true. They
carry rumours, and ask questions, and make corrections and improvements
on one another, staggering to the human intellect. And they are for ever
rushing into the English library, propounding such incomprehensible
paradoxes to the fair mistress of that establishment, that we beg to
recommend her to her Majesty’s gracious consideration as a fit object for
a pension.
The English form a considerable part of the population of our French
watering-place, and are deservedly addressed and respected in many ways.
Some of the surface-addresses to them are odd enough, as when a laundress
puts a placard outside her house announcing her possession of that
curious British instrument, a ‘Mingle;’ or when a tavern-keeper provides
accommodation for the celebrated English game of ‘Nokemdon.’ But, to us,
it is not the least pleasant feature of our French watering-place that a
long and constant fusion of the two great nations there, has taught each
to like the other, and to learn from the other, and to rise superior to
the absurd prejudices that have lingered among the weak and ignorant in
both countries equally.
Drumming and trumpeting of course go on for ever in our French
watering-place. Flag-flying is at a premium, too; but, we cheerfully
avow that we consider a flag a very pretty object, and that we take such
outward signs of innocent liveliness to our heart of hearts. The people,
in the town and in the country, are a busy people who work hard; they are
sober, temperate, good-humoured, light-hearted, and generally remarkable
for their engaging manners. Few just men, not immoderately bilious,
could see them in their recreations without very much respecting the
character that is so easily, so harmlessly, and so simply, pleased.