I.

Half a league off, at the turning of a road, may be seen a hill of a singular blue: it is the sea. Then you descend, by a winding route, to the village.

A melancholy village, with the taint of hotels, white and regular, cafés and signs, ranged by stages upon the arid coast; for grass, patches of poor starveling turf; for trees, frail tamarisks which cling shivering to the earth; for harbor, a beach and two empty creeks. The smaller conceals in its sandy recess two barks without masts, without sails, to all appearance abandoned.

The waters consume the coast; great pieces of earth and stone, hardened by their shock, fifty feet away from the shore, lift their brown and yellow spine, worn, raked, gnawed, jagged, scooped out {036}by the wave, resembling a troop of stranded whales. The billow barks or bellows in their hollow bowels, in their deep yawning jaws; then, after they have engulfed it, they vomit it forth in jets and foam against the lofty shining waves that forever return to the assault. Shells and polished pebbles are incrusted upon their head. Here furzes have rooted their patient stems and the confusion of their thorns; this hairy mantle is the only one capable of clinging to their flanks, and of standing out against the spray of the sea.

[Illustration: 060]

To the left, a train of ploughed and emaciated rocks stretches out in a promontory as far as an {037}arcade of hardened beach, which the high tides have opened, and whence on three sides the eye looks down upon the ocean. Under the whistling north wind it bristles with violet waves; the passing clouds marble it with still more sombre spots; as far as the eye can reach is a sickly agitation of wan waves, chopping and disjointed, a sort of moving skin that trembles, wrenched by an inward fever; occasionally a streak of foam crossing them marks a more violent shock. Here and there, between the intervals of the clouds, the light cuts out a few sea-green fields upon the uniform plain; their tawny lustre, their unhealthy color, add to the strangeness and to the limits of the horizon. These sinister changing lights, these tin-like reflections upon a leaden swell, these white scoriæ clinging to the rocks, this slimy aspect of the waves suggest a gigantic crucible in which the metal bubbles and gleams.

But toward evening the air clears up and the wind falls. The Spanish coast is visible, and its chain of mountains softened by distance. The long dentation undulates away out of sight, and its misty pyramids at the last vanish in the west, between the sky and the ocean. The sea smiles in its blue robe, fringed with silver, wrinkled by the last puff of the breeze; it trembles still, but with pleasure, and spreads out its lustrous, many-hued silk, {038}with voluptuous caprices beneath the sun that warms it. Meanwhile a few serene clouds poise above it their down of snow; the transparency of the air bathes them in angelic glory, and their motionless flight suggests the souls in Dante stayed in ecstasy at the entrance of paradise.

It is night; I have come up to a solitary esplanade where is a cross, and whence is visible the sea and the coast. The coast, black, sprinkled with lights, sinks and rises in indistinct hillocks. The sea mutters and rolls with hollow voice. Occasionally, in the midst of this threatening breathing comes a hoarse hiccough, as if the slumbering wild beast were waking up; you cannot make it out, but from a nameless something that is sombre and moving, you divine a monstrous, palpitating back; in its presence man is like a child before the lair of a leviathan. Who assures us that it will continue to tolerate us to-morrow? On land we feel ourselves master; there our hand finds everywhere its traces; it has transformed everything and put everything to its service; the soil now-a-days is a kitchen-garden, the forests a grove, the rivers trenches, Nature is a nurse and a servant. But here still exists something ferocious and untamable. The ocean has preserved its liberty and its omnipotence; one of its billows would drown our hive; over there in America its bed lifts itself; it will {039}crush us without a thought; it has done it and will do it again; just now it slumbers, and we live clinging to its flank without dreaming that it sometimes wants to turn itself about.

[Illustration: 063]

II. {040}

There is a light-house to the north of the village, an esplanade of beach and prickly plants. Vegetation here is as rough as the ocean.

[Illustration: 064]

Do not look to the left; the pickets of soldiers, the huts of the bathers, the ennuyés, the children, the invalids, the drying linen, it is all as melancholy as a caserne and a hospital. But at the foot of the light-house the beautiful green waves hollow themselves and scale the rocks, scattering upon the wind their plume of foam; the billows come up to the assault and mount one upon another, as agile and hardy as charging horsemen; the caverns rumble; the breeze whispers with a happy sound; it enters the breast and expands the muscles; you fill your lungs with the invigorating saltness of the sea. {041}Farther on, ascending towards the north, are paths creeping along the cliffs. At the bottom of the last, solitude opens out; everything human has disappeared; neither houses, nor culture, nor verdure. It is here as in the first ages, at a time when man had not yet appeared, and when the water, the stone, and the sand were the sole inhabitants of the universe. The coast stretches into the vapor its long strip of polished sand; the gilded beach undulates softly and opens its hollows to the ripples of the sea. Each ripple comes up foamy at first, then insensibly smooths itself, leaves behind it the flocks of its white fleece, and goes to sleep upon the shore it has kissed. Meanwhile another approaches, and beyond that again a new one, then a whole troop, striping the bluish water with embroidery of silver. They whisper low, and you scarcely hear them under the outcry of the distant billows; nowhere is the beach so sweet, so smiling--the land softens its embrace the better to receive and caress those darling creatures, which are, as it were, the little children of the sea.