Our French Watering-Place
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 coupe 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 coupe 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
propriete') 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 Chateau 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 - a 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' - allee a 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. Feroce, 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. Feroce 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. Feroce 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. Feroce
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 fetes
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 fete
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 fete 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.
-THE END-
Charles Dickens' short story: Our French Watering-Place
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