# Baedeker Fibbed

Extracted from Harper's magazine, v150 1924-25, pp. 176–187. Illustrations by
BAEDEKER FIBBED
Adventures in Cherbourg
BY CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
"I RESOLVED to renew at Cherbourg the marvels of Egypt," says the inscription on the statue of Napoleon, where the plump little emperor sits on a horse whose antic would probably have unseated him in real life. He does not specifically say which of Egypt's portents he proposed to revive; though by his gesture we gather that he means the vast stone breakwater on which shines the star of Baedeker, guiding pilgrims from afar. Myself, I was inclined to believe that a certain Swiss concierge (himself a true Bonaparte in physique) was a reincarnation of the asp. But nowadays, when we are more wonted to great engineering projects, the real astonishment of Cherbourg is the endless caravan of Americans who flit feverishly through the town without halting to draw breath. The Swiss concierge, in his field-marshal's uniform, harries them a little, inflicts a few cicatrices on the right-hand trouser; but most of them escape.
In the summer season the big liners come in from New York two or three a day. Every few hours you see the long strings of railway cars marked État lining up along the quay to take the passengers to Paris. Our fellow-countrymen come shuffling down the steep gang-plank from the tender—perhaps the tender Nomadic, or the Traffic, or the Lotharingia, or the Welcome—names so much less imaginative than the Sir Richard Grenville at Plymouth. After a brief frenzy in that little blue-and-white-striped shed of the douane where the whiskered, cloaked, and sworded apéritif officials look so much fiercer than they really are, they climb into the train. At once they fill the restaurant cars and order wine; or you see them sitting patiently in the first-class carriages watching the dusty quay and throwing their money to the ragged urchins who frequent the gare maritime. The lovely little town that lies across the basin is hidden from them by the shed. And after all, hasn't Baedeker told them that Cherbourg is "comparatively uninteresting". So, unless the ship happens to arrive in the evening, they all buzz straight on to Paris. If they land late they go to the Hôtel du Casino, one of those amusing nodes in the great network of travel where sooner or later you inevitably encounter someone you know. There M. Minden, the courteous manager, will greet them with his dark, melancholy, and secretly humorous gaze; and eventually teach them that the first syllable of the town's name is not without significance. Sometimes, coming downstairs toward nine or ten in the evening, you'll find the quiet little lobby suddenly buzzing with a new lot. The Berengaria is in, or the Olympic, or the President Harding. You'll see them sitting in the bar-parlor having a snack before retiring, or looking hopefully for a new copy of the New York Tribune. The only French client I ever saw at the Casino was a luckless lady just in from the States who had been abroad so long she had forgotten how to order wine. She came into the bar breathing exultation at her escape from the régime sec. Then, as the expectant garçon waited for some order expressing the soul and talent of a connoisseuse, her face drooped. She couldn't think of anything ... and ordered a grenadine—which creates in a French bartender about the same enthusiasm as asking a Liggett soda-twister for a beaker of lukewarm goat's milk.
But by the time you come down to breakfast you'll find that the overnight batch of Americans has already sped onward. Cherbourg has resigned itself to this state of affairs: so much so that if you tell them you intend to stay there awhile they'll hardly believe you, and unless you watch your baggage piece by piece they shove it on the Paris train anyhow. (Crede experto.) Those Americans who are still in the hotel when you enter the dining room are perhaps making themselves obnoxious to the head waiter because there aren't any hot-breads. As I was sitting happily with my café complet I could hear one elderly gentleman crying bitterly, "Hot rolls, hot rolls. I want 'em red hot!" Why do our friends go abroad at all if they expect everything to be exactly as at home? It is these creatures who account for that deeply submerged glitter in the manager's eye, and make travel so much more expensive for the rest of us. At any rate, Cherbourg is not such a bad place to study one's fellow citizens, for you see them at a moment of crisis when they are very keenly conscious of their nationality. With an almost defiant air they insist on talking English to the employees as though to prove and ram home the fact that there really is such a language.
AMERICANS FLIT THROUGH CHERBOURG WITHOUT HALTING
I shall never forget the thrill and charm of that late arrival. It was one of those long June twilights when the Lancastria dropped anchor inside Napoleon's Egyptian digue. On the tender, anxiously attempting to gather into one corner his various baggages, paterfamilias was naturally too troubled to have a chance to enjoy the view of the harbor that lay so lilac in the evening light though there was, subconsciously, as one's eye noticed that long solid line of stone houses which fronts the sea, the odd realization that foreign countries are real after all, which quaintly surprises one anew at every visit. By the time we had got through the customs, rescuing all our pieces (save one, containing of course the baby's most urgent affairs) from being "expedited" to Paris, it was close on eleven o'clock. The Cherbourg douaniers and porters work like demons at that time of night, "expediting" one to Paris, for not unnaturally they are anxious to get home and to bed. And when the boat train, with a wild scream, had left, and there was a chance for the rest of us to be chalk-marked, all hotel omnibuses had gone for the night. Nothing remained but a baggage camion on the front seat of which, together with the chauffeur, the Swiss Napoleon, the nurse, and the four children, Titania and I rode triumphantly round the corner to the Casino. Shortly afterward, piloted by a chambermaid, we again found ourselves in open air, under stars, crossing a gravelly courtyard. Quite a surprisingly long journey it seemed. Up a winding stair, in a distant annex, we found some very clean little rooms with a jovial aroma of chlorides and windows opening above the beach. With magical rapidity a tray of hot chocolate and bread and butter was "made mount" from the kitchen, and it fell to me to administer these delights to two small damsels (aged five-and-a-half and three-and-a-half) who had been hastily thrust into one large bed. They gargled down some of the chocolate, inquired eagerly "Is this France?" and fell into nescience. So I finished the chocolate and the crackly bread with plenty of curly whorls of pale unsalted butter. At about the same time, in the dining room downstairs, one of our fellow passengers was saying, "Some of that doughy French bread? No thank you!"
I am always for arrivals late at night. You can't see your surroundings, and the next day you wake into a new world. From my bedroom window eight hours later I looked out upon the sunny courtyard of the hotel and an ancient in a blue apron cutting grass with a scythe.
The Casino—where we stayed two weeks—is perhaps a little symbol of the whole matter. There is one wing of the establishment which is the hotel proper, devoted mostly to the one-night ravishment of Americans. But then you pass through a little door into the casino itself, and are in France. A terrace with blue tables fronts the harbor and the pebble beach; behind this is a dance hall where a very gay and violent little orchestra gives an "apéritif-concert" every afternoon. The tiny Citroëns and other queer boat-shaped miniature automobiles keep driving through the courtyard, and the bons bourgeois of Cherbourg drop in afternoons and evenings for dancing and petits chevaux and even (twice a week) a Paramount film shown on a very minute screen. The operator was very proud of his Paramount films, and assured me that America had produced some very great film artists, such as "Bébé Danyelss" and "Guillaume Ar." It took me an appreciable ponder before recognizing the name of the latter. At the apéritif-concerts, where you sit with your Raphael-citron or your café-cognac watching the dancing, you enjoy the cheerful French habit of taking the whole family along for an afternoon sip—grandmother, babies, and the dog. It would be nice to believe that the young men are all poets, for those broad-brimmed black hats and something odd about the shape of their trousers certainly suggest it. But all this gay and harmless life of the casino goes on quite apart from the hotel which the tourists see. It is always like that: there is a little door which divides the France that is exposed for the traveler from the France that goes placably about its own concerns.
:A TOWN THAT GOES PLACIDLY ABOUT ITS CONCERNS
But of course the real life of the town is across the revolving bridge, past the upper basin where the Polish square-rigged corvette Lwow is lying, past the docks where the English tramp steamers are taking daily the endless stream of crates of new potatoes. Across the bridge you find the taxicabs drawn up, a compact little squadron, and among them, if you are fortunate, perhaps you'll find Lucien Le Cornu, kindest of guides to the enchanting old towns near Cherbourg. His only sorrow in life is that a hundred and fifty Americans have gone touring in his car and taken photos of him, but have never sent him a print. This has now been rectified. If you don't find Le Cornu at his station at the bridge-end, the thing to do is to go to the Café Continental near by where they'll give him a "coup de téléphone." M. Le Cornu was a godsend to us; he is friendly, reasonable, a keen enthusiast for the old architectures of Normandy, and his French has a special clarity and penetration into the unaccustomed transatlantic ear. He has a delightful humor too. Our first week or so at the Casino, we, with four urchins, were somewhat the oddity of the establishment; but then arrived a very wealthy New Yorker with six children, several maids, five cases of Walker-Gordon milk, and occupied most of the ground floor of the hotel. The next morning, before he departed for the château he had rented at Dinard, I saw him musing pensively among his mountains of impediment which filled the lobby. This is where M. Le Cornu enters the anecdote, for a fleet of seven limousines was deployed in the courtyard to transport the party. Four of these were loaded with the baggage, and of this freight squadron Le Cornu was commodore. While the passenger detachment sped to Granville for lunch, Le Cornu halted his heavy quartet at Lessay for a brief déjeuner. The four thirsty chauffeurs sat down at the scrubbed wooden tables of the little Hôtel Félix; the natives crowded round to inquire the meaning of these four vehicles packed inside and out with trunks, baby carriages, golf bags, and what not. It must have looked ominously like another flight of King Louis Philippe; and indeed on that very day President Millerand was vacating the Elysée. What is it, what is it? cried the troubled Normans; for the French are always subconsciously prepared for some sort of crise or coup. Lucien took a long pull at his cider. "Well," he replied gravely, "you've heard of the American kings—the cattle kings, copper kings, petrol kings. This is le roi des bagages.""
Excellent Lucien! I still seem to hear the clear yelp of his rubber-bulb horn as he twirls through those Norman villages, taking us to Barfleur, or Valognes loved by Barbey d'Aurevilly, to Greville where Millet was born, or past de Tocqueville's château near Cherbourg, which surely ought to be a place of pilgrimage for Americans; or to Bricquebec, whose Trappist cheese you'll do well to sample, and to the Nez de Jobourg, that fine rocky beak blown by the Atlantic wind. Well named Le Cornu: you know the canorous double note of those French motor-horns, the exhale and the in.
But we were crossing the bridge and entering the town itself. Perhaps it would tempt the ladies to linger awhile in Cherbourg if I confided, on Titania's authority, that they'll find in the rue du Bassin one of the world's best coiffeurs; and not to make it too easy I'll only give the translation of his name, Mr. Burningfire. More frequented by me was the little photograph shop across the way, where I see good Mme. Vaslot's face of almost agonized intensity as she listens wildly to my French, wondering what unforgivable syntax is coming next. Then, with a sudden radiation of light she grasps my intention. I had seen, in her window, a printed placard remarking how many "situations presque inénarrables" can be preserved with a camera. "Mais, madame," I tell her, "toute la vie, c'est une situation presque inénarrable." She applauds. This leads us on to discuss a small dog that is in the shop, who has had his tail cut off flush with his rump. He is trying, in spite of this—can we say handicap?—to express his pleasure in the good society where he finds himself. I attempt to carry on my argument. "Voici, madame, encore une autre situation presque inénarrable. C'est bien cruel à couper comme ça, le petit chien se trouve embarassé parce que la queue c'est l'organe des émotions chez les chiens, son organe de sensibilité'." With a rush of syllables she and Mr. Vaslot approve this doctrine, and hasten to explain that it is not their animal but a neighbor's. Their pretty young daughter, embroidering behind the caisse, is politely trying to smother her grins.
After a round of the bookstores—where perhaps you may be disconcerted to find Tarzan des Singes in the window, flanked by Rip, l'Homme Qui Dormit Vingt Ans; and where you buy your Petit Larousse, that heavy but indispensable little traveling university—it may well be that you stop in at the American Express office to say hullo to the agent, Mr. White, and change some money. If you happen to be interested in books and plays, Mr. White is just the man to gossip with, for he used to be chauffeur to Mrs. Deland and also to Winthrop Ames. Mr. Ames used to have him read play MSS. now and then, and I was tempted to get his opinion on a script of my own that was in my trunk; but he was giving me nineteen and a half francs to the dollar, and I didn't want to do anything to lower the rate. Or perhaps Titania lures you into the Grands Magasins L. Ratti (Mr. Ratti is the Wanamaker of Cherbourg) to buy a waist for the urchin. Here the hilarity is extreme when it is discovered that French urchins wear a kind of webbed corset with which their smallclothes are kept aloft; there was great grievance in the urchin's bosom when he was made acquainted with this garment. I have promised it shall be quietly dropped overboard before we lift Sandy Hook again. A little quiet study of the wine merchants' windows provides good suggestions of new vintages to ask for. Vin d'Anjou, for instance, which costs two francs twenty-five per bottle in the town, though it rises to five or seven at the hotel. (At hotels where they cater to Americans it is hard to get them to serve you vin ordinaire. The little man with the green apron comes for your order, and unless you are very stiff with him he'll send you something with a label on it.)
FRANCE SHIPS FROM CHERBOURG HER PRODUCTS TO ALL THE WORLD
To be perfectly fair all round, Titania and I went one evening to a meeting, presided over by the Mayor, held by the Ligue Nationale contre L'Alcoolisme, followed by an uproariously bad movie, "The Double Life of Dr. Moraud." But the film kept breaking and finally they quit with it unfinished, just at the point where the luckless Dr. Moraud, eminent surgeon and secret helot of eau de vie, is about to trepan the fractured skull of his son's fiancée; but on the way to the hospital, while his motor was having a pneu changed, he has dodged into a groggery to indulge himself. He totters to the operating table with palsied hand ... here the celluloid snapped again, and the Mayor got up and said that the operator had had such trouble with the machine that they would have to call it off. Without any of the ironical booing we should have expected, the large audience rose calmly and sifted out. The French take their movies very tranquilly and, odd as it may seem, on a warm clear summer evening they prefer sitting outdoors and watching the sunset, fishing along the docks, or sipping the Raphaël-citron that is the favorite bourgeois apértif.
In fact the "light sane joy of life," as Kipling said in his famous poem, is very evident. It seems based on a certain calm acceptance of necessary facts of living, a simple and hardy jocularity in plain pleasures that is sedative to those who have too long accustomed themselves to the Broadway temperament. The stone hamlets of the Cotentin, original home of so many of our race, are now as gray and lichened as Jobourg's Nose itself. There is something very pitiful about those rude thatched dwellings taking shelter under the pent of a gorse-gemmed hill. Life is reduced almost to its animal rudiments; the ruddy old women jogging back from Cherbourg market in their high-wheeled carts have an almost speechless tranquillity, lulled into a warm doze of the wits by the lyric humming of thin little telephonc wires in the breeze. The dusty byways are patterned with the nailprints of their frugally bossed footgear; on the very soil one reads the mark of their pious and necessary thrift. Larks, little mounting flutters of song, keep earnestly pushing up the sky for fear it will tumble. By the village churches are the washing pools, always with a cross or sacred effigy to bless the wholesome work; the women kneel to paddle the linen just as they would kneel to pray, and hardly know one from the other; nor does it greatly matter. Surely the great clerics need not be alarmed at the government's withdrawing its embassy from the Vatican: the church's share in French life is not pillared upon embassies. And if they all wear black when they approach the church, what race has more reason to? See the little war monument at Barfleur, where the names of seven Renoufs of one family are written on the stone. It makes one wamble a bit to think of the million villages of Europe, all those frugal people going about their hard and harmless concerns, cutting their hay and arranging their local fêtes with the children riding on a petit manége (or merry-go-round) turned by hand, and meanwhile the pride and stupidity and harassment of politicians can slide the whole thing toward fiendish catastrophe. Then one can understand better the grimness of the Communist placards, pasted on the stone walls of country barns, calling on the ouvrier and paysan to throw out their bourgeois deputies, and hallooing generals in the Chamber as "assassins."
CHERBOURG IS JUSTLY PROUD OF HER HARBOR
We spent one long sunny and windy afternoon at the Pentecost horse-races, to which all Cherbourg turns out, from the neighborhood aristocrats with silk hats and field glasses to the old gray-eyed peasant women in their lace-and-linen coifs, and hundreds of the colored Senegalese troops in their scarlet bell-hop caps. These amiable savages are so absurdly like the American elevator-boy that it seems grotesque to hear them jabbering French. I suppose they make in a year about what a New York hat-checker pockets on a Saturday night;—but I don't know that they're less happy. One consoling feature of human life is that wherever you go you find the people quite innocently certain that to be where they are and to do what they are doing is the normal and sensible thing.
But as agreeably revealing evidence of the French enjoyment of simple pleasures I clipped a little piece from the Cherbourg paper, describing how La Musique of Hainneville, a sort of singing society in the suburbs, made its first picnic of the season. I please myself by translating with faithful literalness:
At 1 hour 30 the musicians, assembled on the Place de la Mairie, announced by the execution of a morsel the approaching departure for Urville; then, in the name of all the members of La Musique, a magnificent object of art was offered to the leader, M. Henri Avoine, on the occasion of this first expedition. Very much touched by this gesture of sympathy, M. Avoine renewed his promise to do all his possible to develop and lead to worthiness the work undertaken.
At the issue of this little manifestation, La Musique put itself on the road, followed by about 120 persons, whose number continued to augment all the length of the traject, attaining approximately 450 near Querqueville, and that in spite of the storm, menacing more and more.
All went well as far as Urville, where the excursionists arrived toward 4 hours.
Unfortunately the storm, which burst out almost at once, hindered all the world from taking its diversions, whether on the beach or in the various quarters of the coquettish little town of Urville, and one had to content himself, after the crust-breaking, by making a ball in the interior of the spacious restaurant Renard, when it might otherwise have taken place in the open air, in the superb shrubbery of this establishment.
The return effectuated itself in some excellent conditions and without the least incident, the rain having completely ceased to fall and the gayety not having ceased to prevail during the whole traject. Toward 8 hours 30 La Musique re-entered triumphantly into Hainneville, having been acclaimed everywhere on its course, going and coming.
Wherever you wander, through the astoundingly ancient crooked lanes of the town, sometimes among smells that explain the French passion for perfumery, you find yourself led back toward the harbor. To me, since childhood, docks and railway sidings have always been the most fascinating places to prowl; at Cherbourg you have them both in one. Along the digue beyond the gare maritime one can study the constant movement of the harbor: pilot boats coming in and out, the fishing fleet with amber sails, and also see the restaurant cars cleaning and getting ready to cater to more Americans. Apparently the stewardesses of those cars live in them and cook their own meals, for you'll see them, bare-legged, early in the morning, washing down the woodwork, a little waver of smoke coming from the kitchen stovepipe. If it's one of those bright mornings of early June, as blue as an alcohol flame, the railway men who are off duty will be down on the shingle, paddling. Frenchmen always seem to be able to take a few hours off during the day to go wading. Very likely they are picking up kindling; for when the urchin and I wanted a billet of wood to make a toy boat, we scoured the beach and environs for many furlongs without finding a single scrap. Finally we had to go to the boatyard and beg a small piece left over from the fishing smack Bienheureuse Therèse, which they were building. But if you don't find any bits of wood lying idle on a French beach, neither do you find any housekeeping refuse. Some of our American seaside towns might well be named Cannes.
Cherbourg is justly proud of her harbor and proud of her shipyards. When the Mauretania was overhauled there lately, on account of a strike in the English yards, there was great exultation in the town. Then, on her first succeeding voyage, a propeller dropped off. This elicited an editorial in the Cherbourg Eclair, pointing out that no work had been done on the propellers while the Mauretania was in the chantiers of Cherbourg. In fact, said the editor, perhaps it was exactly the fact that our Cherbourg workmen hadn't overhauled the hèlices that caused one of them to falter under the excessive strain of the hitherto-unheard-of celerity at which the vast vessel was marching after the invigorating repairs made to the machine by our expert mechanicians. Local pride, happily, is the same ah the world round.
Titania would never quite agree with me as to the fun of patrolling the railway sidings, reading the étiquettes on the freight cars. But that is how I learn my French, such as it is. The study of posters, advertisements, municipal notices, all sorts of random affiches I find more useful than a phrase book. I didn't begin to get the hang of the subjunctive until I found it on the label of my matchbox. "Ne jetez jamais vos allumettes avant qu'elles soient entièrement éteintes." And sometimes the bills-of-lading pasted on the sides of freight cars will tell you more truth about what's going on than the daily paper. While some of the journals were expressing alarm that the first thing M. Herriot and his "bolshevik" government would do would be to evacuate the Ruhr, I found freight cars loaded with gun carriages marked for l'Armée sur Rhin. For the most part, though, I found those quaint little wagons (with their famous legend Hommes 4O Chevaux 8) loaded with matters more to my pacific taste: potatoes and carrots from the Farmers' Syndicate of Barfleur, or officers' horses from Saint Lô coming to take part in the races.
THE OLD BARRACKS GATE WAS A TRIUMPHAL ARCH DURING THE WAR
Meditation along these docksides gave me excellent opportunity to fortify my verbal resources. Amply provided with nouns of all sorts, my methods of putting them together in trains of speech are as primitive as the French way of shunting freight cars with an elderly horse. It was on the sidings of Cherbourg that I invented my trick to avoid the embarrassment of genders—always use all nouns in the plural and without qualifying adjectives. Do not say, for instance, I love this old church, for then you've got to know whether "church" is male or female. Say rather One loves churches. This lends a plain and even a quite lofty flavor to one's style, full of an eighteenth-century tincture, a Ben Franklin aphoristic and moralizing touch that must be soothing to the French ear. And indeed one is perpetually charmed by the infinite courtesy with which they hear us mangle their pronunciations. I was trying to imagine what would be the English phonetic equivalent for some of my utterances. When I ask the way to a village church it probably sounds to the native as though some one said to me, at home, "Ow wass it pleeze pozeable for locating ze sharsh?" These diflSculties, and one's necessary limitations to the simplest formulaæ (avoiding all situations presque inénarrables) have their charms, however; particularly for one whose trade is to deal in language. One uses one's own tongue so glibly, the words arriving in the mouth almost unconsciously, that it is an enormous advantage to study seriously, at a mature age, the actual hooks and couplings by which a foreign speech is put together—how, to pursue my railway metaphor, these little baggage trucks of nouns and adjectives are made into trains, conjunctioned to the engine of a verb, and puffed off to carry their cargo to some destination. You find yourself looking (with a new respect) at an English sentence to remind yourself just how it is done. Was not one of the secrets of Mr. Conrad's rich appeal that he always dealt with English in the tenderness of one to whom it came not by birthright but as a long arduous acquisition? So you go about your rounds in the town, picking up a phrase here and there, sticking in a subjunctive now and then for good measure, acquiring the dainty technic of shopping, and blundering in and out of places that look for all the world like square-meal restaurants but which serve only liquids. "Don't the French ever eat anything?" cried Titania in despair, one evening when we had tried three or four cafés looking for some supper, but could find nothing but apéritifs and music. Of course one learns the stunts in time; just as the pipe smoker can even learn to inure himself to that Scaferlati tobacco; but at first the instinct of the foreigner leads him with unerring certainty to do the wrong thing.
Our dallying in Cherbourg was not mere indolence, nor due entirely to the picturesqueness of the town. There we were, solidly based on two of the very few bathtubs in the Cotentin—a great advantage to travelers with small children—and these large china receptacles constituted our G.H.Q. while prospecting for a summer home farther down the coast. That was why we covered so much country with M. Le Cornu, and as an introduction to French ways of living and thinking I urge househunting. You see innumerable domestic interiors of all sorts, and you learn, away from the life of hotels, how wrong are those travelers who insist on thinking of the French as rapacious. I recall one of our early expeditions when we passed a traveling coffee vendor, sitting on his little cart which was being pulled through the dust and hot sunshine by two hardy mongrels. His dogs were both so like an animal I was once greatly attached to, a certain Mr. Gissing, that I couldn't resist asking him if it would "dérange" him if I took a photo. He was quite pleased, cried his dogs to a smart trot, and came gayly along while I snapped the lens. In the subsequent palaver he spoke very fast and with a difficult accent, saying several times that it was very warm, and something about a "bistro" a little farther along the road. This I didn't quite grasp, but supposed he was suggesting that having taken his picture I might now stand him a drink. But when I began to haul out some money I was embarrassed to find that he had been offering to treat me; and this though we had spun past him in a car and probably looked to him like millionaires. The situation was painful but we got by it all right and he accepted, after some protest, a five-franc note. He said it was too much money for a drink, but I insisted that the dogs also should have one. And at this moment the urchiness created a diversion by falling into a deep ditch of water hidden in the long grass at the roadside. When we left him our friend was sitting happily at the bistro, enjoying—if the sign was to be trusted—Consommations du Premier Choix.
By now, of course, settled householders in a Norman village, Titania and I know the essentials of rustic technic. We know how to bicycle into a strange hamlet, pick out the most promising café, and take our lunch sitting at a bare table in the kitchen, looking into the mouth of an enormous fireplace where a kettle of sausages is simmering over a charcoal fire; where the bare table is spread with knives and a huge haunch of bread, and you get your share of the great platter of vegetables that goes round to the teamsters and others who are on the adjoining bench. And you see the copper utensils on the wall, the war helmet in the place of honor over the hearth, and the mother-of-pearl clock. The two-franc pourboire you leave behind must not be given as a tip but as a gift to the small girl who watches shyly from the corner. These delicacies of deportment were beyond us in our early days in Cherbourg; but it I was M. Le Cornu, I think, who set us on the right road. If you will note what are the hostelries approved by Baedeker, then you can find us at the opposite end of the town. Never, unless you introduce the topic, will your hostess admit that she knows you are foreigners. But she gives away her awareness by one invariable sign. She'll ask you if you would like to have tea with your meal.
And now, as I look back at my memories of Cherbourg, it is evening, that soft gradual dusk; and though it may be drizzling a bit you stroll along the docks. Across the bridge, now out of use while the lock gates are open, the special train for Paris, crammed with the Berengaria's passengers, is just pulling out. Waiting for the bridge to reopen is a whole cross-section of the French provinces: the tiny trolley car with two girls as conductor and driver; the workman with his string-bag carrying home two bottles of wine; the market-cart with the dog underneath doing his best to help pull; small boys in black pinafores; a woman in sabots with a fishing pole; a little Citroen (like a yacht's dinghy on wheels) with a little man in it, equally minute and dapper, on his way to dance and game at the Casino. Those delightful little Citroens! Even the name sounds fragrant, and I feel sure they ought to smell not of gasoline but of perfumery. Nothing is so precious as those first impressions of a foreign soil; never again are your eyes quite so sharply alert to the valuable comedies of contrast. And those passengers whom I see now, rolling in their lighted compartments toward Paris, may perhaps be right in hastening so wildly toward the capital. But I have a strange feeling that all the breath and essence of France may not necessarily be in Paris; and sometimes one wants to do one's devotions singly, not among other thousands.
And so when the time came to leave Cherbourg it was with the surprised feeling, not at all anticipated, that one had made a new friend, a friend who could not henceforth be omitted from one's happy memories. On that last evening, smoking a pipe along the quay, I met a young man from the real-estate agency who had joined some of our excursions and had been specially patient with our absurdities. We had a stroll together, and his English being about on a level with my French, we promised to correspond each in the other's language. His letter happens to be in reach of my hand, for I have been using it to prop up one leg of my typewriter, the table in the thatched cottage where I am now writing being a bit uneven. I take the liberty of copying a bit of it, as I can think of no better testimony in honor of French friendliness.
Do you remember, (he writes), of the nice evening passed in Jobourg? A evening like that one was too short. Yes, because it is always very tedious to leave some nice people. I think the little Christopher (he means the urchin) is pleased to pass her holidays in the beautiful country of the France. I want he must be enjoying of the France and of the French people for he must be latter a friend of the France. I think, dear sir, that you can manage with your French. I think so because you speak already very well. May be after your stay in France it shall be impossible for you to speak English. It must not.
I am pleased to send you this little letter and be sure if you may be I am a friend for you.
I think that the typewriter will march very steadily with that little wad of affectionate simplicity for a support. A common phrase in France nowadays is "Plutarch a menti"—"Plutarch lied." You see the book of that title in all the bookshops. And, as far as Cherbourg is concerned, Baedeker lied too.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1957, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 67 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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