This Walk
Has The Top Of The Old Town-Wall, Toward The Sea, For
A Parapet On One Side, And Is Bordered On The Other
With Decent But Irregular Little Tenements Of Fishermen,
Where Brown Old Women, Whose Caps Are As White As
If They Were Painted, Seem Chiefly In Possession.
In
this direction there is a very pretty stretch of shore,
out of the town, through the fortifications (which are
Vauban's, by the way); through, also, a diminutive
public garden or straggling shrubbery, which edges
the water and carries its stunted verdure as far as a
big Etablissernent des Bains.
It was too late in the
year to bathe, and the Etablissement had the bank-
rupt aspect which belongs to such places out of the
season; so I turned my back upon it, and gained, by
a circuit in the course of which there were sundry
water-side items to observe, the other side of the
cheery little port, where there is a long breakwater
and a still longer sea-wall, on which I walked awhile,
to inhale the strong, salt breath of the Bay of Biscay.
La Rochelle serves, in the months of July and August,
as a _station de bains_ for a modest provincial society;
and, putting aside the question of inns, it must be
charming on summer afternoons.
XVII.
It is an injustice to Poitiers to approach her by
night, as I did some three hours after leaving La
Rochelle; for what Poitiers has of best, as they would
say at Poitiers, is the appearance she presents to the
arriving stranger who puts his head out of the window
of the train. I gazed into the gloom from such an
aperture before we got into the station, for I re-
membered the impression received on another occa-
sion; but I saw nothing save the universal night,
spotted here and there with an ugly railway lamp.
It was only as I departed, the following day, that I
assured myself that Poitiers still makes something of
the figure she ought on the summit of her consider-
able bill. I have a kindness for any little group of
towers, any cluster of roofs and chimneys, that lift
themselves from an eminence over which a long road
ascends in zigzags; such a picture creates for the mo-
ment a presumption that you are in Italy, and even
leads you to believe that if you mount the winding
road you will come to an old town-wall, an expanse
of creviced brownness, and pass under a gateway sur-
mounted by the arms of a mediaeval despot. Why
I should find it a pleasure, in France, to imagine my-
self in Italy, is more than I can say; the illusion has
never lasted long enough to be analyzed. From the
bottom of its perch Poitiers looks large and high;
and indeed, the evening I reached it, the interminiable
climb of the omnibus of the hotel I had selected,
which I found at the station, gave me the measure of
its commanding position.
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