the night public-houses, drank ‘arfanarf’ in every one at his
expense, and finally fled, leaving him shipwrecked at Cleefeeway,
which we apprehend to be Ratcliffe Highway – but heavier losses
than that. Long ago a family of children and a mother were left in
one of his houses without money, a whole year. M. Loyal – anything
but as rich as we wish he had been – had not the heart to say ‘you
must go;’ so they stayed on and stayed on, and paying-tenants who
would have come in couldn’t come in, and at last they managed to
get helped home across the water; and M. Loyal kissed the whole
group, and said, ‘Adieu, my poor infants!’ and sat down in their
deserted salon and smoked his pipe of peace. – ‘The rent, M.
Loyal?’ ‘Eh! well! The rent!’ M. Loyal shakes his head. ‘Le bon
Dieu,’ says M. Loyal presently, ‘will recompense me,’ and he laughs
and smokes his pipe of peace. May he smoke it on the Property, and
not be recompensed, these fifty years!
There are public amusements in our French watering-place, or it
would not be French. They are very popular, and very cheap. The
sea-bathing – which may rank as the most favoured daylight
entertainment, inasmuch as the French visitors bathe all day long,
and seldom appear to think of remaining less than an hour at a time
in the water – is astoundingly cheap. Omnibuses convey you, if you
please, from a convenient part of the town to the beach and back
again; you have a clean and comfortable bathing-machine, dress,
linen, and all appliances; and the charge for the whole is half-afranc,
or fivepence. On the pier, there is usually a guitar, which
seems presumptuously enough to set its tinkling against the deep
hoarseness of the sea, and there is always some boy or woman who
sings, without any voice, little songs without any tune: the strain
we have most frequently heard being an appeal to ‘the sportsman’
not to bag that choicest of game, the swallow. For bathing
purposes, we have also a subscription establishment with an
esplanade, where people lounge about with telescopes, and seem to
get a good deal of weariness for their money; and we have also an
association of individual machine proprietors combined against this
formidable rival. M. Feroce, our own particular friend in the
bathing line, is one of these. How he ever came by his name we
cannot imagine. He is as gentle and polite a man as M. Loyal
Devasseur himself; immensely stout withal; and of a beaming aspect.
M. Feroce has saved so many people from drowning, and has been
decorated with so many medals in consequence, that his stoutness
seems a special dispensation of Providence to enable him to wear
them; if his girth were the girth of an ordinary man, he could
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never hang them on, all at once. It is only on very great
occasions that M. Feroce displays his shining honours. At other
times they lie by, with rolls of manuscript testifying to the
causes of their presentation, in a huge glass case in the redsofa’d
salon of his private residence on the beach, where M. Feroce
also keeps his family pictures, his portraits of himself as he
appears both in bathing life and in private life, his little boats
that rock by clockwork, and his other ornamental possessions.
Then, we have a commodious and gay Theatre – or had, for it is
burned down now – where the opera was always preceded by a
vaudeville, in which (as usual) everybody, down to the little old
man with the large hat and the little cane and tassel, who always
played either my Uncle or my Papa, suddenly broke out of the
dialogue into the mildest vocal snatches, to the great perplexity
of unaccustomed strangers from Great Britain, who never could make
out when they were singing and when they were talking – and indeed
it was pretty much the same. But, the caterers in the way of
entertainment to whom we are most beholden, are the Society of
Welldoing, who are active all the summer, and give the proceeds of