CHAPTER II.. A Biscayan Beach.

A BISCAYAN BEACH.

Clearly we are in advance of the summer season at Biarritz. It is the latter part of June. The air is soft and warm, the billows lap the shore enticingly. But fashion has not yet transferred its court; the van of the column only has arrived. A few adventurous bathers test the cool surf; the table-d'hôte is slimly attended; the liverymen confidentially assure us, as an inducement for drives, that their prices are now crouching low, for a prodigious leap to follow.

But everything has a pleasing air of anticipation. Since we are to be out of the season at all, we are glad we are in advance of it. This is the youth of the summer, not its old age. People are looking forward; events are approaching, instead of receding; the coming months seem big with indefinite promise of benefit and pleasure.

We quickly become imbued with the general hopefulness of the place. Every one has the look of one making ready. You hear, all day long, when far enough from the waves, a vague, joyous hum of bustle pervading the town. The enterprising click of hammer or trowel falls constantly on the ear. The masons are at work upon the new villas, and our hotel is completing a fine addition for a café; the stores along the busy little main street are being put in order, the windows alluringly stocked, and bright awnings unrolled above them, fenders from the summer's heat. The hotels are fairly awake. Everything is rejoicing that the semi-hibernation is over.

Biarritz, the town, is as delightful, if not as picturesque, as we had hoped. Perhaps it is too modern to be picturesque. In this part of the world at least, one rather requires the picturesque to be allied with the old. The nucleus of Biarritz is old, but that is out of sight in the modern overgrowth; Biarritz, as it is, is of this half century.

This is not, on the whole, to be regretted. Biarritz has no history, no past of associations, no landmarks to be guarded. Vandalism in the form of the modern rebuilder can here work more good than harm. Save for its location at the edge of the wild Basque country, and what it has seen, itself sheltered by obscurity, of the forays of that restless people, the place has little to tell. It is a watering-place, pure and simple, buoyed entirely by the prospering ebb and flow of modern fashion. Let us take it as of to-day, not of yesterday, content to seek its charms under that aspect alone, enjoying it for itself, not for its pedigree.

Biarritz is a prerogative instance of the magnetism of royalty,--of the social power of the court as an institution. It was a watering-place, in a small way, before Eugénie's advent; but there was not a tithe of its present size and popularity. In 1840, it numbered in all not more than fifty houses, a few of them lodgings or humble cafés, but the greater part staid little whitewashed summer-dwellings with green verandas and occasional roof-balconies; set down irregularly, without street or system, along the sunny slopes of the bluff. Murray's Handbook for 1848 gives it passing notice, and disrespectfully styles it the dullest place upon earth for one having no resources of friends upon the spot. But in the modern edition of forty years later, the same manual has come to describe the place in a very different strain; assigns it a population of nearly 6,000; details, with respect, its fashionable rank, its villas and increasing hotels, its graded streets and driveways; and among other things adds the simple remark that "about twenty-one thousand strangers now visit Biarritz every year." Evidently there has been some advance within the span.

It was the Empress of the French who distilled the life-elixir for the quiet little resort. As a maiden, she had spent long summers by its shore, and when she was become the first lady in the land, she turned still to Biarritz, and the midsummer tide of fashion followed after her. Across the downs, on the bluff, stands the Villa Eugénie, the handsel of Biarritz's prosperity; and here about us is the town that grew up to make her court.

Fair France lost as well as gained when the burning walls of the Tuileries crashed in. In these days of the plain French Republic,--of its sober, unornamental, business government,--the contrast is vivid with the glitter and "go" of Louis Napoleon's régime. And the nation feels it, and involuntarily grieves over it. The twenty years have far from sufficed to smother that certain inborn Gallic joy in monarchy,--autocratic rule, a brilliant court, leadership in fashion, and all the pomp and pageantry which the French love so well.

Little more than a century ago, stable governments seemed at last to be ruling the world; civilization had come to believe itself finally at peace; war, it was complacently said, had finished its work; the coming cycles would prove so far tamed as to have outgrown fightings and revolutions. Cultured modern history, like Nature, would refuse to proceed per saltum. Yet the hundred years since gone by have brought wars as fierce, "leaps" of government as tremendous, as any century in the past. It is this same fair France that has contributed more than her share of them, and the Fall of the Second Empire was one of the most dramatic. The world is not, after all, so securely merged from the darkness of the Dark Ages. Within that short century, in Paris itself, the very capital of cultured Europe, there has twice uprisen a human savagery immeasurably exceeding all the tales we are to tell of the fierce past of the Pyrenees.

It needs an effort to-day to picture the social power of France and Eugénie twenty years ago. The mantle has not fallen to England and Alexandra. Only a people like the French can endue fashion with absolutism.

So it was, that when the Empress came to Biarritz, "all the world" came also. From the building of her villa dates the true origin of Biarritz. From that time its growth was progressive and sound. When the empire finally fell, this creature of its making had already passed the danger-point, and so stood unshaken; Biarritz had become too popular, its clientèle too devoted, to part company. Even in the winter it has its increasing colony; in summer its vogue is beyond caprice. The sparkle of the royal occupation has gone, and the royal villa is tenantless; but the place no longer needs a helping hand, for it is abundantly able to walk alone.

II.

In the afternoon we wander down to the sands. The tide is low. The long billows of the Bay of Biscay roll smugly in, hypocritical and placid, with nothing to betray the unenviable reputation they sustain in mediis aquis. The broad, smooth beach is not notably different in kind from other beaches; but we instantly see the peculiar charm of its location. The shore sweeps off in a long, lazy crescent, rounding up, a mile or two to the northward, with the light-house near Bayonne. Southward we cannot follow it from where we stand, for the near irregularities of cliff cut it off from sight. Back from the beach rises the bluff, curving northward with the crescent; at our left it comes boldly down toward the water, partitioning the beach and breaking up at the edge into strange, gaunt capes and peninsulas. Black masses of rock, large and small, are crouching out among the waves, tortured by storms into misshapen forms and anguished attitudes, patted and petted into fantastic humps and contortions. The strata dip at an angle of about twenty-five degrees, and the stone is friable and defenceless. Soothingly now the water is running over and around these rocks, or whitens their outlines with foam; granting their piteous torsos, in merciful caprice, a day's brief respite from the agony of its scourgings.

The afternoon sun shines brightly against the bathing pavilion, irradiating its red and yellow brick. Along the narrow; sheltered platform at its front, sit matronly French dowagers, holding their daughters, as it were, in leash, and talking of women and things, and affairs of state. Though early in the season, the beach is well sprinkled with people. A few attempt the bathing again, but the rest saunter here and there or enjoy beach-chairs at a stipulated rental. The elderly French gentleman, a dapper and interesting, specimen rarely paralleled at home, strolls about contentedly on the asphalt promenade back from the beach, smoking a cigar and fingering a light bamboo. Younger men, also well-dressed, pass in couples, or walk with a mother and daughter,--never with the daughter alone. Boatmen and candy-peddlers ramble in and out, a Basque fisherman or two linger about the scene, and dogs, a pony and a captive monkey, add an element of animal life.

Despite its sunny holiday temperament, Biarritz was one of certain Biscayan villages once denounced as "given up to the worship of the devil,"--thus denounced by Henry IV's bloodthirsty inquisitor, Pierre de Lancre, a veritable French Jeffreys, and the same who in 1609 put to death no less than eight hundred persons on the ground of sorcery. "He tells us that the devils and malignant spirits banished from Japan and the Indies took refuge here in the mountains of Labourd. Above all, he asserts that the young girls of Biarritz, always celebrated for their beauty, 'have in their left eye a mark impressed by the devil.'"

Happily we have no devil in this nineteenth century, and in the clear glance of these Biarritz peasants loitering on the sands, we find that his brand-marks have disappeared with him.

A few of the faces we meet are English; many are Spanish, and show that Biarritz draws its worshipers from the South as from the North. Indeed, a large proportion of its summer society wears the mantilla and wields the fan. Other marks, too, of Spanish dress are here, as where little girls in many-hued outfit romp along the sands, dragooned by dark-faced nurses in true Iberian costume. Three or four brilliant red parasols add amazingly to the general effect of the scene.

We repair to the stone parapet before the pavilion, and gravely paying our dues for chairs, sit and watch the picture. There is no charge for sitting on the beach, but this is severely frowned upon at Biarritz. The dues are two sous per chair, and, with true Continental thrift, they are always rigorously collected. Whether one wanders into the open square of the Palais Royal at Paris, or listens to the music in the Place de Tourny at Bordeaux, or watches the waves at Biarritz, the old woman with her little black bag at once appears upon the scene. Some Frenchless friends in Paris, on one occasion, guilelessly seated in the gardens of the Palais Royal, took the collector simply for a pertinacious beggar-woman, and waved her airily off. She returned to the charge, of course, in indignant French, and grew angrier every moment as she found herself still loftily ignored. A warm fracas was in prospect, when a passing American fortunately cleared up the complication; the woman would have called in a gendarme unhesitatingly, to enforce her diminutive claim.

On the bluff, beyond the pavilion, Eugénie's villa, a square, rich building of English brick, surveys the scene its existence has brought about. Around us, on the beach, the nurses sit in the shade of the rocks and discourse on the respective failings of their charges. Children dig in the sand with pail and shovel, with the same zest as at home. Child-nature changes little with locality. So recently from the great unknown, it is not yet seamed and crusted by environment. I suppose that children fairly represent the prehistoric man. Impulse, appetite, passion,--all the gusts of the moment sway them. We quell our emotions so uniformly, as we grow on, that we finally hardly feel their struggles. The children have richer life than we, in some respects:

"Faith and wonder and the primal earth Are born into the world with every child."

I make no doubt that Nimrod, or Achilles and Ajax, great children that they were, as ready to cry as to feast, to laugh as to fight, hunting mightily, sulking in the tent, or defying the lightning,--intense, sudden, human all through,--drank down their strong, muddy potion of existence with a smack far heartier than the reflective sips of life which civilization has now taught us to take. Childhood is wide and free and abounding and near to nature, and we can take thoughts from it, and ponder, perhaps dubiously, on the distance we since have traveled.

The children dig in the sand, and throw it over the nurses, just as they are doing at Old Orchard and Old Point. Here, with a maid, is a pair of children who freely show one attribute of childhood not so pleasing as others,--cruelty. They have a little monkey, fastened by collar and chain, and it is pitiful and yet ludicrous to see the close watch the animal keeps on his captors' movements. He has found a slack chain his best policy, and adapts his every motion anxiously and solicitously to the leaps of the boy. But the utmost vigilance avails him little. When the child is weary with running and sudden turns, which have called for marvelous dexterity of accommodation on the part of the monkey, the chain is hauled up, with the animal clinging worriedly to it, and he is flung far out into the fringe of waves, to pick his shivering way up again and again from the water. These children have a white rat, also, which they chase over the sand, and souse into puddles, and otherwise maltreat. It is useless to interfere parentally, and we hardly see our way to buying either rat or monkey, even to ensure them a peaceable old age. One wonders why children have this queer taint of cruelty. Unconscious cruelty it may be, but it seems none the less out of place in their fresh, unused nature. We outgrow some rude vices as well as rude virtues, in becoming older, and there is comfort in that.

III.

The bluff, coming out to the sea, cuts off, close at hand, the curve of the shore toward the south, and we climb by a sloping path. From the top, we look down upon, the beach we have left; back upon the downs cluster the numberless private villas which form a feature of Biarritz; to the left, over the near roofs and hotels of the town, we can see the first far-off pickets of the Pyrenees; while immediately in front now appear below us three or four rocky bays and coves, broken by the lines of the cliff and partly sheltered by the rocks out at sea. "Many of these rocks," writes an old-time visitor, in the pleasantly aging English of 1840, "are perforated with holes, so that, with a high sea and an incoming tide, and always, indeed, in some degree, when the tide flows, the water pours through these hollows and rents, presenting the singular appearance of many cascades. Some of the rocks lying close to the shore, and many of those which form the cliff, are worn into vast caverns. In these the waves make ceaseless music,--a hollow, dismal sound, like distant thunder,--and when a broad, swelling wave bounds into these caverns and breaks in some distant chamber, the shock, to one standing on the beach, is like a slight earthquake. But when a storm rises in the Bay of Biscay, and a northwest wind sweeps across the Atlantic, the scene is grand beyond the power of description. The whole space covered with rocks, which are scattered over the coast, is an expanse of foam, boiling whirlpools and cataracts, and the noise of the tremendous waves, rushing into these vast caverns and lashing their inner walls, is grander a thousand times than the most terrific thunder-storm that ever burst from the sky."

INGLIS: Switzerland and the South of France.

In these little coves now float idle pleasure-boats, bright with paint and listless awnings, and ready to be manned by their stout Basque rowers. Here, too, are the fishermen's cabins, snugly built in against the rocks, and garnished with baskets and poles, and with men repairing their nets. The irregular curves of the bluff, broken here into abrupt and dislocated masses, lend themselves readily to winding paths, and we ramble on, curving upward and downward, over short bridges and through little tunnels under the rocks, each turn giving a new view of the bay or the town.

Finally we round another promontory, cross a last bridge to a large rock-islet standing out from the mainland, and lo! the crescent of the coast is completed, and far to the south we see a low mountain ending the curve; it is Spain.

IV.

In the dreamy summer stillness, we sit with, content, looking at those distant hills, listening to the lapping of the waves, watching the sun sink lower toward the sea. The afternoon sunlight makes a glade across the waters,--seeming to one from a western sea-board like some strange disarrangement in the day.

The rounded mountains before us are indeed in Spain, a communicative fisherman tells us. At the foot of the outermost, eighteen miles away, is hidden the old Spanish town of Fuenterrabia. On its other side, in a hollow of the coast, lies San Sebastian. Nearer us, though well down along the sweep of the grey clay bluffs, is St. Jean de Luz, which, with the others, lies on our intended way.

We seem to see, conforming to the crescent of that foreign coast, the menacing crescent of the Armada, parting from Spanish shores, just three hundred years ago to a month, to crush Anglo-Saxon civilization. There before us lies the land of intolerance and bigotry which gave it being, the land of Philip the Second and his Inquisition. But for Drake and Howard and England's "wooden walls," events would have moved differently during the last three centuries,--in our country as in theirs.

The last spark of the sun has disappeared in the water. We turn into the town in the fading light, passing another large bathing pavilion in a sheltered cove, and saunter homeward through an undulating street, the aorta of Biarritz. It is not a wide street, but it is busy and brisk, and it has a refurbished look like newly scoured metal. Neat dwelling-houses, guarded behind stone walls and well-kept hedges, display frequent signs of furnished apartments to let Small and large shops alternate sociably in the line; there is the épicerie or grocery-store, with raisins and olives and Albert biscuits in the window; next is a lace and worsted shop, where black Spanish nettings vie with gay crotchet-work,--

"By Heaven, it is a splendid sight to see Their rival scarfs of mix'd embroidery,"

all made by hand, and bewilderingly low-priced. Now we come to a mirrored café, the Frenchman's hearth-side; it compels a détour into the middle of the street, since the sidewalk is quite preempted by its chairs and tiny tables. Here is another Spanish store, conspicuous for its painted tambourines with pendent webs of red and yellow worsted, and for its spreading fans, color-dashed with exciting pictures of bull-fights and spangled matadors. A hotel appears next, across the way, standing back from the street, with: a small, triangular park between; and then comes a pretentious bric-à-brac bazaar, and another café, and a confectioner's, and a tobacco-store,--each presided over by a buxom French matron, affable and vigilant, and clearly the animating spirit of the establishment.

Tiny carriages of a peculiar species, with donkeys and boy drivers, line the streets. The carriage holds one,--say an infirm dowager seeking the afternoon breeze,--and if the driver's attendance is desired, he is able to run beside it for miles. It is light and noiseless, comfortably cushioned, always within call, and governed by a beneficently trifling tariff. These vinaigrettes, as they are called, would be appreciated at home, if habit took kindly to novelties. How greatly they might simplify problems of calling and shopping! Our conveyances are all cumbrous. We must have the huge barouche, the coach, the close-shut coupé. Even the phaeton yields to the high T-cart. But convention is autocratic, and would frown on these vinaigrettes as it frowns on many useful ideas. Another unfortunate victim of its taboo is the sedan-chair, which would be lustily stared at to-day, yet the utility of which might be made positively inestimable. One who reads of the Chinese palanquins, or sees the carrying-chairs of Switzerland, convenient and always in demand, or who watches these agile little vinaigrettes darting along the ways, wonders that similar devices do not force their way, if need be, into universal favor.

Another mode of conveyance, once peculiarly popular with Biarritz, might be more difficult of exportation. This was the promenade en cacolet. The town of Bayonne is but five miles distant, by a delightful road, and formerly, particularly before the railroad came in, to ridicule old ways, every one went to Bayonne en cacolet. It is no longer so, and the world has lost a unique custom. The contrivance was very simple: the motive power was a donkey or a horse, and the conveyance consisted of a wooden frame or yoke fitting across the animal's back, with a seat projecting from each side. One seat was for the driver, usually a lively Basque peasant-woman; the other was for the passenger. There was a small arm-piece, at the outside of each seat, and generally there was a cushion. This was once a favorite means of travel between Bayonne and Biarritz. It was expeditious, enlivening,--and highly insecure; that was one of its charms. Throughout the ride there was a ludicrous titillation of insecurity; but it was greatest at the start and at the finish. For, the seats being evenly balanced, to mount was in itself high art. Driver and passenger needed to spring at precisely the same instant, or the result was dust and ashes. Trial after trial was needed by the neophyte; he must be, as an eye-witness of long ago aptly describes it, "as watchful of the mutual signal as a file of soldiers who wait the command 'make ready,--present,--fire!' A second's delay,--a second's precipitation,--proves fatal; the seat is attained, and at the same moment up goes the opposite empty seat, and down goes the equestrian between the horse's feet.... In descending, it is still worse; because there is more hurry, more impatience, on arriving at the end of a journey; and an injudicious descent does not visit its effects upon one but upon both travelers; for unless the person who descends be extremely quick in his motions, his seat flies up before he has quite left it, and oversets him, and the opposite weight, of course, goes plump to the ground,--with as fatal effects as cutting the hammock-strings of a middy's berth."

INGLIS.

Perilous balancing feats and a high degree of skill were evidently demanded of him who would journey en cacolet. Requiring thus a special training, so to speak, as well as a nice equivalence in weight between passenger and driver difficult to always realize, its use is not likely to supersede that of wheeled vehicles. To take a ride en cacolet, one might have a long hunt before finding a driver who should be his proper counterpoise; and it would be often inconvenient, not to say impracticable, thus to have to order one's driver according to measure.

It is the evening dining-hour as we find ourselves at last in the open court-yard of our hotel and seek the welcoming light of its salle. The hotels of Biarritz are handsome, even to elegance,--elegance which seems wasted on the few people now in them. But numbers do not seem to affect the anxious concern of Continental hotel-keepers. The same elaborate and formal table-d'hôte is served for our small company and a few others, as will, later on, be prepared for a houseful of guests. The waiters don the same ducal costume and with it the same grave decorum; and our attendant Ganymede, bending respectfully to present his laden salver, watches my selection of a portion of the pullet with as anxious solicitude as could be shown by the mother hen herself. The solemnity of a table-d'hôte, and the silencing effect it has on the most talkative, is invariable, as it is inexplicable, and accents sharply the contrast with the breezy clatter of the American summer hotel dining-hall. This is not to say that either is, in all ways, to be preferred. Each in its own setting. There is a comforting stir and whir about the great, bare, sociable dining-hall at Crawford's or at the Grand Union, which causes a European table-d'hôte utterly to pale and dwindle. And there is a satisfying quiet, a self-respecting, ritualistic calm, in the frescoed salle-a-manger of the Schweizerhof, or of the Grand Hotel at Biarritz, which makes its American rival seem impetuous and unrestful, and even a trifle garish. 'Tis hard to choose. Man and mood both vary. There is no parallel. The two modes of dining are as wide apart as the countries and their characteristics, and each is, in the best sense, distinctly typical.

There is music during the evening in the little park we passed, and the best of Biarritz assembles to enjoy the programme. We charter chairs with the rest. Tables go with the chairs without extra charge, waiters follow up the tables, and soon all the world is sipping its coffee or cordials, and listening to Zampa. Outside, around the fence enclosing the little park, revolves an endless procession of the poorer people,--thrifty folk who are here as earners, not spenders, and would not dream of melting their two sous into a chair. Round the small enclosure they go, by couples or threes, like asteroids round the sun, staring with interest at the more aristocratic assemblage within,--just as the family circle stares at the boxes. And the music sings on pleasantly for all, this mild summer evening in Biarritz.