At St. Jouin, which is almost a suburb of Etretat, is the Hôtel de Paris, whose chatelaine was, in the days of the elder Dumas, known as “La belle Ernestine.” In 1865, Dumas fashioned the following portrait of her in verse, which, to say the least, seems rather free speech:

Dumas fils followed with:

Finally, Wallon, the Minister of Public Instruction, wrote ten years later:

The town itself is but a little fishing village of a thousand or more inhabitants, but luncheon in the dining-room of Madame Ernestine Aubourg’s little inn is to enjoy a feast for the eyes and mind as well as the inner man. The walls are hung with paintings, sketches, and autograph letters. Among the latter are those of Isabella II., Queen of Spain, Castelar, Offenbach, Suzanne Brohau, and Dumas. The paintings are by Lambert, Picou Hamon, Maurice Courant, Corot, Yvon, Becon, Olivié, Landelle père, and many others.

The history of Etretat points to the fact that it was once the most famous resort on the north coast of Europe; but it is now surpassed by Trouville-Deauville and Ostend, which have been taken up by society, to the financial, though not artistic, detriment of Etretat.

The first bathers, the local chronicles will tell one, arrived 1803. In 1844 the old Maréchal de Grouchy came to Etretat, and Alphonse Karr contributed to the popularity of the place at about the same time by laying there the scene of his romances, “Vendredi Soir” and “Le Chemin le Plus Court.” Karr really was responsible for the great popularity which Etretat had as a watering-place at one time. He wrote further in its praises thus:

“Etretat is a new province which either I or the painters Le Pottevin and Isabey have discovered. I am as Americus Vespucius to Christopher Columbus or Daguerre to Niepèce. I nearly called it by my own name.... I talked so much about Etretat that I made it the mode, ... but to-day it has become merely a branch of Asnières.”

From all this one might think that Etretat was essentially modern in all respects; but it existed in the epoque romain, and its name appeared, in a charter of 1024 given to the abbey of St. Wandrille, as Estrutat.

The chief attraction of Etretat, outside its delightful situation and its conventional amusements, is its fine Church of Notre Dame of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries; really a delightful old edifice, which, taken in conjunction with the gaieties of the summer life of the town, seems sadly out of place.

The whole neighbourhood round about abounds in delicious wooded hills and valleys running through openings in the cliff to the sea, often with a tiny, transparent rivulet clasped closely in its embrace.

Here is Guy de Maupassant’s charming description of one of these delightful Norman valleys, which for fidelity and picturesqueness of phrasing could hardly be improved upon:

“I have passed a summer here in one of these ravines which faced the sea, lodged at the house of a peasant. From my windows I could see a vast triangle of blue framed by the green sides of the valley, dotted now and then with white sails glittering brilliantly in the sunlight.”

There is a very considerable portion of the Normandy coast (and that of Brittany as well) which has just this aspect. The rivers, curiously enough, with the exception of the Seine, are not navigable. They are simply little rivers which carry off a certain amount of surplus water from the table-land above. Some of these have gone dry; hence the gorges or ravines which exist so very numerously along the Norman coast. They are truly delightful, and by no means have they become tourist-worn or denuded of idyllic charm.

In the middle ages the belief that the relic of the Precious Blood of the Saviour had been brought here by a mysterious craft, and landed on the coast at the ancient settlement which bore the Latin name of Fiscamnum, was the cause from which grew up the ancient monastery for women founded by St. Waneng in 660. In time this establishment became an abbey for men, through the means of the monk Guillaume of Dijon.

To this abbey was attached a great and flourishing school which endured until the thirteenth century.

The Maison Morillon in the Quartier de l’Hospice is built up of relics from the old abbey demolished in 1802, and the Abbaye de la Trinity, with its church dating from 1125-75, is indeed of quite the first rank, though modern restorations have vulgarized it almost beyond belief.

The name Fécamp is also familiar to lovers of Bénédictine, that subtle liqueur invented by the monk Wincelli.

The market is one of the most lively in all the Pays de Caux, and is frequented by large numbers of folk from the country-side and neighbouring towns.

On the coast are Grandes and Petites Dalles, small places where the bathing is the chief attraction of the visitor. They are surrounded, however, by the most beautifully rustic woodland country it is possible to imagine.

St. Valery-en-Caux is a veritable metropolis for these parts. It contains, perhaps, four thousand souls, and has grown up from an ancient settlement which surrounded a monastery founded here by St. Valery, who also erected another similar establishment, some leagues up the coast at the mouth of the Somme in Picardy, known as St. Valery-sur-Somme.

Both the ancient fishing port, which was also established here, and the town which hugged the old monastery in its grasp, grew to some considerable prominence, but were stunted by the wars of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, only recovering their prosperity by the aggrandizement caused by the accession of the fisherfolk of Veules, who had been driven away from their own homes by the encroachments of the sea.

Of late years the usual watering-place tendencies have developed; and a casino has sprung up which draws a floating summer population of some hundreds of strangers from June to September.

The Maison Henri IV. (1549), so called because of having been the lodging-place of that turncoat monarch, is perhaps the other chief architectural curiosity. It is a typical Renaissance house with some finely sculptured woodwork. In the quarter known as the town is a Renaissance cross and a slate roofing over the ruins of the priory founded, perhaps, by St. Valery.

On the road to Dieppe, beyond St. Valery, is Veules-les-Roses, most picturesquely and euphoniously named. It has but 760 inhabitants, many of its fisherfolk having removed to Dieppe, where they settled in the quarter known to-day as Petit Veules.

Dieppe all cross-channel travellers well know. It is a great port of entry, a watering-place, a fishing port, and a city of shops and industries, all of considerable magnitude. Its attractions for all classes are many and varied, and no attempt is made to catalogue them here. To the eastward of the town the great promontory which juts out into the channel is strongly fortified; and at all times since the days of Philippe-Auguste, the town and its environs have been considered of great strategic value.

Names of Dieppois famous to those who know the early discoverers and explorers of the new world are Jean Ango, the armateur (1480-1551), Jean Cousin, the pilot of Columbus, who discovered the Brazilian coast (1488), the Admiral Duquesne, one of the glories of the reign of Louis XIV. (1610-88), and many others.

Dieppe’s two great churches, St. Jacques and St. Remi, are wonderfully preserved monuments of their respective classes, and are rich in those accessories and details which make a great church truly beautiful. The chapel of St. Yves in St. Jacques served as the oratory of Jean Ango, Vicomte de Dieppe, the benefactor of the church.

The town hall is of modern construction, but it houses a library of twenty-five thousand volumes, including many rare works and maps and plans of the coasts of Europe.

Dieppe, with its casino and its lawns, and the whole establishment devoted to baths and open air and indoor pleasures, places the town quite in the first rank of watering-places, though by no means is its situation as grand as that of Etretat; nor is it so greatly in vogue as Trouville-Deauville.

The château is a picturesque edifice high on the hillside, overlooking the shore, with four great towers, a donjon, and a pont-levis. It was built in 1435, but has been disfigured by various additions. To-day it forms the Ruffin barracks, and accordingly may not be visited by the curious.

Near Dieppe is Arques-la-Bataille and the forest of Arques.

It was held successively, after its builder’s time, by the Conqueror, Stephen, Geoffrey Plantagenet, Cœur de Lion, Philippe-Auguste, and Jean-Sans-Terre. Finally it reverted to the French Crown. Louis XIV. visited the château of Arques in 1648; but the Bernardine monks took from it in the seventeenth century much material for the construction of their convent, at which time it became practically a vast quarry of stone. In 1793 the ruins were sold for 8,300 livres; but in 1869 it again became the property of the state, and a guardian was installed to prevent further ravage.

The sixteenth-century church of Arques-la-Bataille is an elaborate building, far more grand than one usually expects to find in a town of eleven hundred inhabitants; but, after all, the town’s chief attraction is the great rectangular donjon, practically all that remains of the old château.

The very beautiful pigeon-house is quite the most elaborate of its kind anywhere to be seen.

Near Dieppe, also, is Puys, a sort of suburban watering-place for Dieppe itself. It owes its popular existence to Dumas fils, who made his residence there in summer. It was here that the elder romancer died in 1870; for which reason Puys may be said to be a true literary shrine.

“Monte Cristo” has something to say of the charms of Normandy. Addressing his companion, Bertuccio, Dantes says:

“I am desirous of having an estate by the seaside in Normandy, for instance, between Havre and Boulogne. You see I give you a wide range. It will be absolutely necessary that the place you select shall have a small harbour, creek, or bay, into which my vessel can enter and remain at anchor.”

Eastward toward the boundary of Normandy and Picardy, one passes Varengeville-sur-Mer, Sainte Marguerite and Quiberville, all delightful little seaside towns with a touch of the beau-monde in summer, and a dull, quiet, but none the less entrancing, life in winter, when the natives gossip about their last season’s visitors, and speculate as to what the harvest may be the coming year, meantime catching a few fish and going weekly to the nearest market-town.

Tréport and Mers are the last two resorts on the Norman coast.

There are the usual summer attractions, of course, but there is much more also, and the life of the fisherfolk of Tréport and Mers forms a pleasant antidote to the observer of men and things who may become tired of watching bathers and red umbrellas.

Tréport was the Ulterior Portus of the Romans; but it came to no great importance until well along in the middle ages. Robert I., Comte d’Eu, founded here in 1059 an abbey of the order of St. Benoit; and Robert Courte Heuse garnered his forces here to set out in battle against Henri Beau Clerc, King of England.

The Church of St. Jacques dates from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries; and, though reconstructed in the Renaissance period, has many attractive and beautiful details. The ancient presbytery is a charming Renaissance building with a façade of sculptured wood.

Mers, on the opposite bank of the Bresle, is usually linked with Tréport, and is of itself a seaside resort of no mean pretensions.

Next, perhaps, to the Château d’Anet, Normandy’s most celebrated Renaissance château is that of Eu in the Department of the Lower Seine, just south of Tréport on the river Bresle. Eu itself is a town of considerable rank; and has, besides its historic château, a remarkable church,—St. Laurent’s. It is an ancient collegiate church and one of the most beautiful in all Normandy.

The church was built 1186-1230 and reconstructed in the fifteenth century, but it ranks with the cathedral at Rouen, St. Maclou, and the choir of La Trinité of Fécamp as one of the greatest and most typical of the florid Gothic church edifices of Normandy.

In its actual state the Château d’Eu is of modern construction; but its souvenirs of the middle ages are numerous, nevertheless, and the names of its counts are not without honour in the annals of Normandy. The precise period of its foundation is unknown, but it dates perhaps from the period which preceded the arrival of the Normans into the Comté d’Eu, when it was probably simply a feudal fortress.

The hereditary Counts of Eu do not date back before the eleventh century. The first who bore the title was Guillaume, son of Richard Sans Peur, Duc de Normandie, and grandson of Rollon. When he died, in 996, he left the estates to his son, Richard le Bon, whose reign was apparently a troublous one, beset on all sides by turbulent seigneurs, who envied his security of tenure and wanted it for themselves, as was the way in those days.

Guillaume, the next heritor, had nothing of the good qualities and abilities of his father, and was “of an unquiet spirit and a pusillanimous heart,” as the annalist has it. His mauvais passions inspired him to ill deeds; and altogether he was an unpopular sort of a person.

Jean de Bourgogne, Comte d’Eu, promised to deliver up the château to Edward IV., the English king, but Louis XI. ordered its destruction instead.

From a document of the time one reads the following, written in the picturesque old French of the time:

“Dix-huictiesme jour de juillet, an mille quatre cent soixante et quinze, environ neuf heures du matin fut la ville de Eu et chastel ars et bruslés par les gens de guerre, par le commandement et ordonnance du roi.”

The sixteenth-century château was begun after the marriage of Catherine of Clèves, Comtesse d’Eu, with Henri de Guise (Le Balafré). It was never wholly completed as planned, but the notorious De Guise (or famous, if one chooses to think so) spent some time here, “always absorbed and preoccupied.”

Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, and son of Henri de Guise, inherited the title, but never visited his château or the town.

On June 26, 1641, Louis XIII., returning from Dieppe, stayed at the château; and his successor, Louis XIV., and the famous Montpensier sojourned there for a time; of which circumstance one may read at some length in that lady’s “Mémoires.” Shortly after she became Countess of Eu herself.

In 1660 Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orleans came into possession. The Duc du Maine came in turn to occupy the estates, but, though he sent a deputation to take formal possession, he himself never inhabited the château.

On the little river Bresle just south of Tréport and Eu are Aumale and Blagny. The former possesses a remarkable sixteenth-century church, with a tower attributed, somewhat doubtfully, to Jean Goujon. Blagny has the Church of Notre Dame of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries; and near by, at Séry, are the remains of a Premonstratensian abbey, founded toward 1120.

Neuchâtel-en-Bray, across country toward Yvetôt and Bolbec, is in the very midst of one of the richest pasture-lands of Normandy. The town dates from Merovingian times, and was called Driencourt before the construction of its château in 1106 by Henri I., Duke of Normandy and King of England. Thus its importance was early established.

An ancient abbey of the Bernardine monks is now occupied by the town hall, library, Board of Trade, and school.

The library contains many rare works, among them a manuscript Bible of the thirteenth century, a polyglot Bible from the old Abbey of Foncarmont, a collection of ancient royal bells, dating from their origin, and a fine silver seal and contre scel belonging to Louis II., who was Duc de Longueville and Comte de Dunois.

Situated in so rich a pasture-land, Neuchâtel is famous for its butter and cheese, as is Gourney, its neighbour on the west. The Suisse cheese of Neuchâtel is also a variety of light, sweet cream cheeses, and is often confounded with Neuchâtel in Switzerland, which really originated here in the midst of these Norman pastures.

The history of Yvetôt does not offer anything of remarkable interest except the memory of the Kings of Yvetôt, which Béranger’s satire so well recalls.

The title of “Roi” was given to the seigneurs from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and was first popularized—perhaps in a vein of cynicism, too—by Henri IV.

Dumazet traced the succession of the title down to 1688, when it belonged to the illustrious family of Albon of Lyonnaise, the head of which was the Marquis d’Albon.

Tradition has preserved a certain style of buildings which crops out occasionally here. When the houses are not of wood, they are frequently built, or at least decorated, with little square cakes of quarried stone, in much the same manner as the Romans made use of decorative brick. Some of the old-time houses of Caux are indeed reminiscent of the Roman, with horizontal bands of stone or brick running across the façades in three or four rows.

Weaving is an important industry at Yvetôt, and it employs about a thousand workmen and women.

WESTWARD of the mouth of the Seine is a little strip of coast-line which in a restricted sense may be said to be the resort of the Parisian world of fashion during the summer months. Trouville-Deauville, Beuzeval-Houlgate, Dives-Cabourg, and Arromanches have their own especial attractions and their own clientèles; but they are all much alike, and it is only in the old towns, such as Honfleur, Pont l’Evêque, Ouistreham, Ruys, or Port-en-Bessin, that one sees anything at all characteristically Norman.

All this is true as far as a reminiscence of Honfleur’s former glory is concerned; but its commerce to-day is fishing and the tourist’s trade, and no deep-sea ships frequent its crumbling quays. Instead of casks and bales and other evidences of traffic beyond the seas, you will find white umbrellas and artists’ easels set about on the wharves, with their owners all trying to catch the fleeting picturesqueness of the old town, which has heretofore been successfully done by Eugène Boudin and his fellows in art of a half-century or more ago. The name of this great painter is much revered in France, and it stands for much that is best in the modern French school of painting. Boudin’s work forms the bridge which links the romantic style with the frankly impressionistic. Monet was one of Boudin’s pupils; but he did not continue simply a preacher of his master’s tenets, but ran riot with colour in a way which Boudin himself could never have conceived.

Through the generosity of his brother, M. Louis Boudin,—still a dweller on the Norman shore,—the important art museum of Havre has lately been endowed with over two hundred of Boudin’s brilliant sketches; and at the smaller gallery of Honfleur (where Boudin, the son of a sailor, with the sea in his blood, was born) there are more than a dozen of his characteristic paintings.

One reason why the art of Boudin is specially to be enjoyed at Havre and Honfleur (though, indeed, the public galleries of those places contain nothing of his that is so important individually as the great “Port de Bordeaux” in the Luxembourg) is that there, within sight of its windows, are the elements, in depicting which with poetic realism Boudin won his title to fame. His are the fishing-boats riding the restless sea, his the infinite variety of the rolling waters and the changeful sky.

To-day one reaches Honfleur from Havre after much the same procedure as did the old-century traveller, whose description of the voyage might well apply even now, except that one makes the journey by steam-packet in a considerably less time. The latter part of the old account is, however, only too true. The mouth of the Seine is almost a replica of the boisterous Straits of Dover; but it is the only way to get to the decayed old port, Honfleur, from Havre without going thirty miles or more around and crossing the ferry at Quillebeuf.

Honfleur, the seat of a departed commercial glory, is to-day all the more attractive because of its dry-as-dust decrepitude; and the contrast with the busy metropolis of Havre, across the Seine, does not exaggerate this, it only emphasizes it.

It was the ancient town of Honfleur that once held the bulk of the trade with New France in America; but its real commercial glory is now gone, stolen by its more opulent and successful neighbour. The activity on its quays to-day among passengers, stevedores, and fishermen is but a comic-opera travesty on the more magnificent activities which once obtained.

The beauties of Honfleur are to be found in its curiously appealing ensembles. All that remains of its thirteenth-century ramparts is the Quai Beaulieu, whence the boat for Havre leaves. Porte de Caen the ancient harbour was first called, and later La Lieutenance. Eastward lie the quartiers, as they exist to-day; and, though they are but a mimicry of their former selves, they are still characteristic of the olden time.

Honfleur has, in its Cours de la République, a sort of miniature Cannebière which fronts upon the old harbour. On the Quai St. Etienne is the old Church of St. Etienne, the most ancient in the city, though to-day it has been converted into a sort of local pantheon, which was commendable as an act of civic pride, but does not appeal to the outsider.

From Honfleur, by the Trouville road, Puits is reached, one of the most extraordinary and most lovable of all the little towns in Normandy. Here is the Church of St. Leonard, an isolated church surrounded by a sea of flagstones. It is not strictly beautiful as old churches go, though it is undeniably picturesque. On the other hand, all its charms are negatived by the heavy, meaningless tower or cupola which caps its façade.

The church is separated from the tower by a narrow street, on which faces a most ungainly and ugly Renaissance portico. The main building dates from the fifteenth century, and its rare and mellow timbered side-walls have worn well. These enclose the aisles, which have curious little square windows with small leaded lights; while above rises a row of clerestory windows, also squared, but with good flamboyant mullions which would be the pride of many a more substantial and grander edifice.

More daintily environed than any other of Honfleur’s churches is the little sailor’s chapel of Notre Dame de Grâce, on the Côte de Grâce, on the west side of the harbour. There is nothing very splendid about its surroundings or its appointments; but on a day of pilgrimage, when the sailors and their wives, their sweet-hearts and their daughters, flock hither, it presents a sight comparable only with the pardons of Brittany. Indeed, after its sailors and artists, Honfleur would seem to be noted for religious processions.

A half-dozen or more kilometres from Honfleur is a little stream, not marked on many maps, known as the Risle. On its banks, about the same distance from its juncture with the Seine, is Pont Audemer, another beautiful town, given over, however, to industrialism. Its tanneries and cider-presses give employment and sustenance to several thousand people.

The Parisian calls Pont Audemer the capital of the “royaume de chicane,” and goes on to say that this district comprises nearly all Normandy. This is manifestly an exaggeration and unfair; but it is claimed further that the municipal court-house at Pont Audemer is the most frequented of all its buildings, and that to be a notary, a lawyer, or a sheriff here is to become immediately rich.

The town is picturesquely disposed on the banks of the Risle, which furnishes an abundant supply of water to the tanneries which line its banks.

Between Pont Audemer and the juncture of the Eure with the Seine one comes upon one of the most lively and interesting parts of agricultural Normandy. Here the fields are literally covered with apple-trees, planted more closely than elsewhere, to the number of a hundred to the acre, but the trees thrive exceedingly. The peasant cultivates his trees with great regard for their well-being, and is quite as deft and painstaking as his brother of the vineyards farther south. There are no vineyards which are celebrated north of a line drawn from the mouth of the Loire to where the Oise joins the Seine, just south of the confines of Normandy.

The Norman grower of cider-apples is assiduous in his devotion to his work. To gain an advantage of his competitor he will rent more ground, economize and borrow to buy other land, and wait patiently, working meanwhile early and late for the fifteen years to pass before he may gather a maximum crop.

None the less assiduously do the growers of cider apples in the north tend their harvest than the vine-dressers of the south; and the white or blond nectar of Normandy is as highly valued in its own land as are the ruby vintages of the south.

Savants have before now attempted to trace the origin of the apple-trees which so plentifully besprinkle Normandy, but they have generally fallen back upon the old excuse, “L’origine s’en perd dans la nuit des temps.” Some, again, have claimed that the first trees were brought from Italy by a Gauloise legion, a part of which penetrated into the north and settled in the land between Evreux and Caen; while still others of the older writers have said that the first apple-trees came from the north of Spain, in the time of Charlemagne.

The actual making of cider in Normandy is a sort of a home occupation. One does not take his apples to an established press in some centre of population, if he has not one of his own, but arranges for a sort of travelling brewer to come to his own house. The various disjointed elements of a press, differing only in details from the usual form known throughout the world, are brought up on a cart, unloaded and dumped down in the courtyard at an early morning hour.

There is very little variation in the process, though often it is carried out on a larger scale; and one progressive patron of an ambulating cider-mill has ingeniously attached a petrol motor by a simple system of shafting, which completes the preliminary process of mashing the apples in an astonishingly short while.

There is another method somewhat in vogue, and, though it is not so commonly practised, it is supposed to produce finer cider.

Beyond Pont Audemer is Touques, a most ancient town of about 1,200 souls; possessing, in its Church of St. Thomas, the first stone of which was laid by Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, a shrine which no English tourist should omit from his itinerary of Normandy. In the middle ages Touques enjoyed a great and growing importance until the Revolution stunted its growth.

Between Pont Audemer and the Seine, at Quillebeuf, is a patch of morass, like nothing so much as the polders of Holland. Here it is known as the Marais Vernier; but it has a real, genuine Low Country dike encompassing it, known as the “Digue des Hollandaise.” An artist can here paint black and white spotted cows, windmills, houses on stilts, and most of the local colour of Holland without leaving the Seine valley.

At Beuzeville is a fine public square surrounded by quaint old houses, with a church in the ogival style of the thirteenth century, and a charming market-house which, undoubtedly, if transferred to canvas with the proper amount of skill, would make a picture worth buying.

Bons vivants will revere Pont l’Evêque for its cheeses. Situated in the midst of the District of Auge, its pastures are very fertile, and accordingly its milk products are justly celebrated. Rich pasturage and great orchard enclosures, with hedges of willow so thick as to form a barrier as impassable as barbed wire, indicate the source of prosperity round about, with here and there a modest château half-hidden by the trees.

In the neighbouring Château of Bonneville William the Conqueror frequently resided.

In the Touques forest, which is an exceedingly fashionable driveway in summer for the gay folk of Trouville, is the Château d’Agnesseau, which dates from the reign of Louis XIII. At the cross-roads of Croix-Sonnet one comes to a vast plateau set out with orchards and fruit-gardens, while the forest itself, as one enters it by road from Trouville, offers thirty or more kilometres of beautiful tree-lined roadways, which must be refreshing to those dulled and jaded with the stone pavements and hot sands of Trouville-Deauville.

At the St. Philibert is a statue framed with verdure, erected by the wood-choppers of the forest to Notre Dame des Bois.

One makes his way from Honfleur to Trouville by a corniche road, which is a marvel among all similar roads in the north of Europe.

The Hôtel St. Simon and its ancient farm and cour, which has been so often painted by artists (immortalized, one may say, by Monet), is passed on the right, and for a half-dozen kilometres or more one is within sight and sound of the sea and its sands.

The only town of any magnitude whatever passed is Cricquebœuf, which has a celebrated vine-grown church dating from the twelfth century, and an old manor-house which is unusually pretentious.

From this point, on by Villerville, one reaches Trouville via the Jetée Promenade and the Terrasse which faces the square, below the dominating hills which run inland to the woods of Touques.

Trouville is principally the resort for society, for millionaire yachtsmen and horsemen; but, for all that, it is, in a way, a typical Norman fishing village.

Trouville is also the scene of another of Dumas’s little-known tales, “Pauline.” Dumas’s own description of the little fishing village, as it then was, has a semblance of a likeness even to-day, when rococo villas, great hotels, electric-cars, and golf links have added an air of modernity to it which is anything but peaceful.

“You know the little town,” said he, “with its population of fisherfolk. It is one of the most picturesque in Normandy. I stayed there a few days exploring the neighbourhood, and in the evening I used to sit in the chimney-corner with my worthy hostess.... There I heard strange tales of adventures which had been enacted in Calvados and the Manche.”

Dumas also describes, though more or less superficially, many another quaint historic Norman town: Caen, Lisieux, Falaise, blessed with the memory of “the Conqueror’s birth,” Pont Audemer, Havre, and Alençon.

The town hall is a modern structure, but it has two fine landscapes by Charles Mozin and Isabey hung in its board-room.

The public square is of course the rendez-vous of Trouville’s fashionable element, and, if they are not “five o’clocking” at the neighbouring tea-shops à l’Anglais, they may be found strolling on the boulevard which flanks the sands “quatre à six,” as the local expression goes.

It is impossible to catalogue society’s attractions here; nothing is missing; and those who are looking for the distractions of a modern watering-place will find them all.

Deauville is Trouville’s more exclusive and aristocratic neighbour, and has its polo field, golf links, tennis-courts, and automobile race-course. It is an impossible place for the man of moderate means, and is as Parisian as the boulevards themselves.

Villers-sur-Mer and Beuzeval-Houlgate each possess, in a minor way, the villa attractions of Trouville-Deauville.

From Villers to Houlgate extends a line of sombre cliffs called the “Vaches Noires,” from which fishermen may fish in June and July with almost invariable good luck. Its seaweed-strewn rocks are covered with mussels and other less edible shell-fish.

Dives-Cabourg is another of those hyphenated resorts of the Calvados shores which possess delightful aspects of sea and sky.