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