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There was something very impressive in the way their evil brows, looking as if they were all stained with blood and rust, were bent upon the blue expanse of the sleeping sea. In a month of beautiful weather at Etretal, every day was not an excursion, but every day seemed indeed a picked day.
Biarritz is bright, crowded, irregular, filled with many sounds, and not without a certain second-rate picturesqueness; but it struck me as common and cocknified, and my vision travelled back to modest little Etretal, by its northern sea, as to a more truly delectable resting-place. The southwestern coast of France has little of the exquisite charm of the Mediterranean shore.
I had been thinking the white sea-walls of Etretal the finest thing conceivable in this way, but the huge red porphoritic-looking masses of St. Jouin have an even grander character. I have rarely seen anything more picturesque. They are strange, fantastic, out of keeping with the country, and for some rather arbitrary reason suggested to me a Spanish or even African landscape.
I shall have narrated that the French, at the seaside, are not "sociable" as Americans affect to be in a similar situation, and I should subjoin that at Etretal it was very well on the whole that they were not.
At Etretal no making of acquaintance was observable; people went about in compact, cohesive groups, of natural formation, governed doubtless, internally, by humane regulation, but presenting to the world an impenetrable defensive front.
I rose and came forth with the sense that it was the finest day of summer, and that one ought to do something uncommon by way of keeping it. At Etretal it was uncommon to take a walk; the custom of the country is to lie all day upon the pebbly strand watching, as we should say in America, your fellow boarders.
By the time I had done with the Abbey, the townsfolk had slid en masse down the cliff again, the yellow afternoon had come, and the holiday takers, before the wine-shops, made long and lively shadows. I hired a sort of two-wheeled gig, without a board, and drove back to Etretal in the rosy stage of evening.
The downs at Etretal are magnificent, and the way they stretched off toward Dieppe, with their shining levels and their faintly-shaded dells, was in itself an irresistible invitation.
The peasants deliver themselves with rather a drawl, but what they speak is good clean French that any cockney can understand, which is more than can be said sometimes for the violent jargon that emanates from the fishing folk of Etretal.
If you are well fed, you can perhaps afford to be ill lodged; whereas, I doubt whether enjoyment of the most commodious apartments is compatible with inanition and dyspepsia. If I had not cut short my mild retrospect by these possibly milder generalizations, I should have touched lightly upon some of the social phenomena of which the little beach at Etretal was the scene.
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