A Drama on the Seashore | Page 6

"But see," I said, "how the winds from the sea bend or destroy
everything. There are no trees. Fragments of wreckage or old vessels
that are broken up are sold to those who can afford to buy; for costs of
transportation are too heavy to allow them to use the firewood with
which Brittany abounds. This region is fine for none but noble souls;
persons without sentiments could never live here; poets and barnacles
alone should inhabit it. All that ever brought a population to this rock
were the salt-marshes and the factory which prepares the salt. On one
side the sea; on the other, sand; above, illimitable space."
We had now passed the town, and had reached the species of desert
which separates Croisic from the village of Batz. Imagine, my dear
uncle, a barren track of miles covered with the glittering sand of the
seashore. Here and there a few rocks lifted their heads; you might have
thought them gigantic animals couchant on the dunes. Along the coast
were reefs, around which the water foamed and sparkled, giving them
the appearance of great white roses, floating on the liquid surface or
resting on the shore. Seeing this barren tract with the ocean on one side,
and on the other the arm of the sea which runs up between Croisic and
the rocky shore of Guerande, at the base of which lay the salt marshes,

denuded of vegetation, I looked at Pauline and asked her if she felt the
courage to face the burning sun and the strength to walk through sand.
"I have boots," she said. "Let us go," and she pointed to the tower of
Batz, which arrested the eye by its immense pile placed there like a
pyramid; but a slender, delicately outlined pyramid, a pyramid so
poetically ornate that the imagination figured in it the earliest ruin of a
great Asiatic city.
We advanced a few steps and sat down upon the portion of a large rock
which was still in the shade. But it was now eleven o'clock, and the
shadow, which ceased at our feet, was disappearing rapidly.
"How beautiful this silence!" she said to me; "and how the depth of it is
deepened by the rhythmic quiver of the wave upon the shore."
"If you will give your understanding to the three immensities which
surround us, the water, the air, and the sands, and listen exclusively to
the repeating sounds of flux and reflux," I answered her, "you will not
be able to endure their speech; you will think it is uttering a thought
which will annihilate you. Last evening, at sunset, I had that sensation;
and it exhausted me."
"Oh! let us talk, let us talk," she said, after a long pause. "I understand
it. No orator was ever more terrible. I think," she continued, presently,
"that I perceive the causes of the harmonies which surround us. This
landscape, which has but three marked colors, --the brilliant yellow of
the sands, the blue of the sky, the even green of the sea,--is grand
without being savage; it is immense, yet not a desert; it is monotonous,
but it does not weary; it has only three elements, and yet it is varied."
"Women alone know how to render such impressions," I said. "You
would be the despair of a poet, dear soul that I divine so well!"
"The extreme heat of mid-day casts into those three expressions of the
infinite an all-powerful color," said Pauline, smiling. "I can here
conceive the poesy and the passion of the East."
"And I can perceive its despair."
"Yes," she said, "this dune is a cloister,--a sublime cloister."
We now heard the hurried steps of our guide; he had put on his Sunday
clothes. We addressed a few ordinary words to him; he seemed to think
that our mood had changed, and with that reserve that comes of misery,
he kept silence. Though from time to time we pressed each other's
hands that we might feel the mutual flow of our ideas and impressions,

we walked along for half an hour in silence, either because we were
oppressed by the heat which rose in waves from the burning sands, or
because the difficulty of walking absorbed our attention. Like children,
we held each other's hands; in fact, we could hardly have made a dozen
steps had we walked arm in arm. The path which led to Batz was not so
much as traced. A gust of wind was enough to efface all tracks left by
the hoofs of horses or the wheels of carts; but the practised eye of our
guide could recognize by scraps of mud or the dung of cattle the road
that crossed that desert, now descending towards the sea, then rising
landward according to