FullReads

2

Biarritz still retained its quiddity in those days. Dusty blackberry bushes and weedy terrains àvendrebordered the road that led to our villa. the Carlton was still being built. Some thirty-six years had to elapse before Brigadier General Samuel McCroskey would occupy the royal suite of the Hotel du Palais, which stands on the site of a former palace, where, in the sixties, that incredibly agile medium, Daniel Home, is said to have been caught stroking with his bare foot (in imitation of a ghost hand) the kind, trustful face of Empress Eugènie. On the promenade near the Casino, an elderly flower girl, with carbon eyebrows and a painted smile, nimbly slipped the plump torus of a carnation into the but ton hole of an intercepted stroller whose left jowl accentuated its royal fold as he glanced down sideways at the coy insertion of the flower.

Along the back line of the plage, various seaside chairs and stools supported the parents of straw-hatted children who were playing in front on the s and . I could be seen on my knees trying to set a found comb aflame by means of a magnifying glass. Men sported white trousers that to the eye of today would look as if they had comically shrunk in the washing; ladies wore, that particular season, light coats with silk-faced lapels, hats with big crowns and wide brims, dense embroidered white veils, frill-fronted blouses, frills at their wrists, frills on their parasols. the breeze salted one’s lips. At a tremendous pace a stray golden-orange butterfly came dashing across the palpitating plage.

Additional movement and sound were provided by vendors hawking cacahuètes, sugared violets, pistachio ice cream of a heavenly green, cachou pellets, and huge convex pieces of dry, gritty, wafer-like stuff that came from a red barrel. with a distinctness that no later superpositions have dimmed, I see that waffle man stomp along through deep mealy s and, with the heavy cask on his bent back. When called, he would sling it off his shoulder by a twist of its strap, bang it down on the s and in a Tower of Pisa position, wipe his face with his sleeve, and proceed to manipulate a kind of arrow-and-dial arrangement with numbers on the lid of the cask. the arrow rasped and whirred around. Luck was supposed to fix the size of a sou’s worth of wafer. the bigger the piece, the more I was sorry for him.

the process of bathing took place on another part of the beach. Professional bathers, burly Basques in black bathing suits, were there to help ladies and children enjoy the terrors of the surf such a baigneurwould place you with your back to the incoming wave and hold you by the h and as the rising, rotating mass of foamy, green water violently descended upon you from behind, knocking you off your feet with one mighty wallop. after a dozen of these tumbles, the baigneur, glistening like a seal, would lead his panting, shivering, moistly snuffling charge l and ward, to the flat foreshore, where an unforgettable old woman with gray hairs on her chin promptly chose a bathing robe from several hanging on a clothesline. In the security of a little cabin, one would be helped by yet another attendant to peel off one’s soggy, sand-heavy bathing suit. It would plop onto the boards, and, still shivering, one would step out of it and trample on its bluish, diffuse stripes. the cabin smelled of pine. the attendant, a hunchback with beaming wrinkles, brought a basin of steaming -hot water, in which one immersed one’s feet. From him I learned, and have preserved ever since in a glass cell of my memory, that “butterfly” in the Basque language is misericoletea—or at least it sounded so (among the seven words I have found in dictionaries the closest approach is micheletea).