a certain uncomfortable crookedness in his
position. He lives like a laborer, and yet he is treated like a
gentleman. The latter character must seem to him sometimes a rather
heavy irony on the other. But to the ideal cure, of course, all
characters are equal; he thinks neither too ill of his bad breakfasts,
nor too well of his good ones. I won't say that the excellent man I
speak of is the ideal cure, but I suspect he is an approach to it; he
has a grain of epicureanism to an ounce of stoicism. In the garden path,
beside the moat, while he puffed his cigarette, he told me how he had
held up his head to the Prussians; for, hard as it seemed to believe it,
that pastoral valley had been occupied by ravaging Teutons. According to
this recital, he had spoken his mind civilly, but most distinctly, to
the group of officers who had made themselves at home in his
dwelling--had informed them that it grieved him profoundly that he was
obliged to meet them standing there in his cassock, and not out in the
fields with a musket in his hands and a dozen congenial spirits at his
side. The scene must have been picturesque. The first of the officers
got up from table and asked for the privilege of shaking his hand. "M.
le Cure," he said, "j'estime hautement votre caractere."

Six miles away--or nearer, by a charming shaded walk along a canal--was
an ancient town with a legend--a legend which, as a child, I read in my
lesson-book at school, marvelling at the wood-cut above it, in which a
ferocious dog was tearing a strange man to pieces, while the king and
his courtiers sat by as if they were at the circus. I allude to it
chiefly in order to mention the name of one of its promenades, which is
the stateliest, beyond all comparison, in the world; the name, I mean,
not the street. The latter is called Les Belles Manieres. Could
anything be finer than that? With what a sweep gentlemen must once have
taken off their hats there; how ladies must once have curtsied,
regardless of gutters, and how people must have turned up their toes as
they walked!

VI.

My next impressions were gathered on the margin of a southern sea--if
the Bay of Biscay indeed deserves so soft-sounding a name. We generally
have a mental image beforehand of a place we think of going to, and I
supposed I had a tolerably vivid prevision of Biarritz. I don't know
why, but I had a singular sense of having been there; the name always
seemed to me expressive. I saw the