wants not abundant resource of cheerfulness, hope, and lusty
encouragement. And since I have been idling at the window here,
the tide has risen. The boats are dancing on the bubbling water;
the colliers are afloat again; the white-bordered waves rush in;
the children
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back;
the radiant sails are gliding past the shore, and shining on the
far horizon; all the sea is sparkling, heaving, swelling up with
life and beauty, this bright morning.
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)
Page 20
Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
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,