Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces

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 manywindowed

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

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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces

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