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Updated: June 12, 2025
We were not accepting the situation with the true phlegm of philosophers; he felt that he had just cause for protest. What possible difference could it make to us whether we were landed at Trouville or at Villerville? But to him to be accused of betraying two ladies to allow the whole of the Havre quays to behold in him a man disgraced, dishonored!
Bargaining, when one teems with talent, may be as exciting as any other form of conquest. Madame's days were chiefly passed in imitation of the occupation so dear to an earlier, hardier race, that race kings have knighted for their powers in dealing mightily with their weaker neighbors. Madame, it is true, was only a woman, and Villerville was somewhat slimly populated.
Renard, meanwhile, was taking pains to assure us that in less than a month the Villerville beaches would be crowded; only the artists of the brushes were here now; the artists of high life would scarcely be found deserting the Avenue des Acacias before June. "French people are always coming to the seashore, you know or trying to come. It's a part of their emotional religion to worship the sea.
Suddenly a belfry grew out of the grain-fields. "Nous voici here's Villerville!" cried lustily into the twilight our coachman's thick peasant voice. With the butt-end of his whip he pointed toward the hill that the belfry crowned. Below the little hamlet church lay the village. A high, steep street plunged recklessly downward toward the cliff; we as recklessly were following it.
He would take us across yes, us and our luggage, and land us yes, at Villerville, for that. The baker's boy gave a long, slow whistle, with relish. "Dame!" he ejaculated, between his teeth, as he turned away. The rival captains at first had drawn back; they had looked at their comrade darkly, beneath their berets, as they might at a deserter with whom they meant to deal later on.
He had not, from the first, been in the least deceived. It became the more difficult to smooth the situation into shape. "We had thought perhaps to rent a villa, we were in one now at Villerville. If Monsieur le cure would let us look at the garden. Monsieur Renard, whom perhaps he remembered "M. Renard! Oh ho! Oh ho! I see it all now," and a deep, mellow laugh smote the air.
To come back to the world, even to a provincial world, after having lived for a time in a corner, is certain to evoke a pleasurable feeling of elation. The streets of Caen were by no means the liveliest we had driven into; nor did the inhabitants, as at Villerville, turn out en masse to welcome us.
Quite near, two sailors were seated, with their arms about each other's shoulders. They also were looking at the moonlight, and one of them was singing to it: "Te souviens-tu, Marie, De notre enfance aux champs? "Te souviens-tu? Le temps que je regrette C'est le temps qui n'est plus." On our return to Villerville we found that the charm of the place, for us, was a broken one.
He pointed out Villerville, Trouville, Houlgate, Luc, Arromanches, the little river of Caen, and the rocks of Calvados which make the coast unsafe as far as Cherbourg. Then he enlarged on the question of the sand-banks in the Seine, which shift at every tide so that even the pilots of Quilleboeuf are at fault if they do not survey the channel every day.
Once out of the narrow Villerville streets, and the pastoral was in full swing. The sea along this coast was not in the least insistant; it allowed the shore to play its full gamut of power. There were no tortured shapes of trees or plants, or barren wastes, to attest the fierce ways of the sea with the land.
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