Our French Watering-Place

"Our French Watering-Place" is a travelogue by Charles Dickens, published in 1851. The work captures Dickens’ observations and experiences during his visit to the French seaside town of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Through vivid descriptions and sharp wit, he explores the local culture, the social dynamics of the British expatriate community, and the customs of the French. The book reflects Dickens' keen eye for detail and his ability to blend humor with social commentary, making it a delightful read for those interested in the nuances of 19th-century travel and society.

• Short story

								
HAVING earned, by many years of fidelity, the right to be sometimes
inconstant to our English watering-place, we have dallied for two or
three seasons with a French watering-place: once solely known to us as a
town with a very long street, beginning with an abattoir and ending with
a steam-boat, which it seemed our fate to behold only at daybreak on
winter mornings, when (in the days before continental railroads), just
sufficiently awake to know that we were most uncomfortably asleep, it was
our destiny always to clatter through it, in the coupé of the diligence
from Paris, with a sea of mud behind us, and a sea of tumbling waves
before.  In relation to which latter monster, our mind’s eye now recalls
a worthy Frenchman in a seal-skin cap with a braided hood over it, once
our travelling companion in the coupé aforesaid, who, waking up with a
pale and crumpled visage, and looking ruefully out at the grim row of
breakers enjoying themselves fanatically on an instrument of torture
called ‘the Bar,’ inquired of us whether we were ever sick at sea?  Both
to prepare his mind for the abject creature we were presently to become,
and also to afford him consolation, we replied, ‘Sir, your servant is
always sick when it is possible to be so.’  He returned, altogether
uncheered by the bright example, ‘Ah, Heaven, but I am always sick, even
when it is impossible to be so.’

The means of communication between the French capital and our French
watering-place are wholly changed since those days; but, the Channel
remains unbridged as yet, and the old floundering and knocking about go
on there.  It must be confessed that saving in reasonable (and therefore
rare) sea-weather, the act of arrival at our French watering-place from
England is difficult to be achieved with dignity.  Several little
circumstances combine to render the visitor an object of humiliation.  In
the first place, the steamer no sooner touches the port, than all the
passengers fall into captivity: being boarded by an overpowering force of
Custom-house officers, and marched into a gloomy dungeon.  In the second
place, the road to this dungeon is fenced off with ropes breast-high, and
outside those ropes all the English in the place who have lately been
sea-sick and are now well, assemble in their best clothes to enjoy the
degradation of their dilapidated fellow-creatures.  ‘Oh, my gracious! how
ill this one has been!’  ‘Here’s a damp one coming next!’  ‘Here’s a pale
one!’  ‘Oh!  Ain’t he green in the face, this next one!’  Even we ourself
(not deficient in natural dignity) have a lively remembrance of
staggering up this detested lane one September day in a gale of wind,
when we were received like an irresistible comic actor, with a burst of
laughter and applause, occasioned by the extreme imbecility of our legs.

We were coming to the third place.  In the third place, the captives,
being shut up in the gloomy dungeon, are strained, two or three at a
time, into an inner cell, to be examined as to passports; and across the
doorway of communication, stands a military creature making a bar of his
arm.  Two ideas are generally present to the British mind during these
ceremonies; first, that it is necessary to make for the cell with violent
struggles, as if it were a life-boat and the dungeon a ship going down;
secondly, that the military creature’s arm is a national affront, which
the government at home ought instantly to ‘take up.’  The British mind
and body becoming heated by these fantasies, delirious answers are made
to inquiries, and extravagant actions performed.  Thus, Johnson persists
in giving Johnson as his baptismal name, and substituting for his
ancestral designation the national ‘Dam!’  Neither can he by any means be
brought to recognise the distinction between a portmanteau-key and a
passport, but will obstinately persevere in tendering the one when asked
for the other.  This brings him to the fourth place, in a state of mere
idiotcy; and when he is, in the fourth place, cast out at a little door
into a howling wilderness of touters, he becomes a lunatic with wild eyes
and floating hair until rescued and soothed.  If friendless and
unrescued, he is generally put into a railway omnibus and taken to Paris.

But, our French watering-place, when it is once got into, is a very
enjoyable place.  It has a varied and beautiful country around it, and
many characteristic and agreeable things within it.  To be sure, it might
have fewer bad smells and less decaying refuse, and it might be better
drained, and much cleaner in many parts, and therefore infinitely more
healthy.  Still, it is a bright, airy, pleasant, cheerful town; and if
you were to walk down either of its three well-paved main streets,
towards five o’clock in the afternoon, when delicate odours of cookery
fill the air, and its hotel windows (it is full of hotels) give glimpses
of long tables set out for dinner, and made to look sumptuous by the aid
of napkins folded fan-wise, you would rightly judge it to be an
uncommonly good town to eat and drink in.

We have an old walled town, rich in cool public wells of water, on the
top of a hill within and above the present business-town; and if it were
some hundreds of miles further from England, instead of being, on a clear
day, within sight of the grass growing in the crevices of the
chalk-cliffs of Dover, you would long ago have been bored to death about
that town.  It is more picturesque and quaint than half the innocent
places which tourists, following their leader like sheep, have made
impostors of.  To say nothing of its houses with grave courtyards, its
queer by-corners, and its many-windowed streets white and quiet in the
sunlight, there is an ancient belfry in it that would have been in all
the Annuals and Albums, going and gone, these hundred years if it had but
been more expensive to get at.  Happily it has escaped so well, being
only in our French watering-place, that you may like it of your own
accord in a natural manner, without being required to go into convulsions
about it.  We regard it as one of the later blessings of our life, that
BILKINS, the only authority on Taste, never took any notice that we can
find out, of our French watering-place.  Bilkins never wrote about it,
never pointed out anything to be seen in it, never measured anything in
it, always left it alone.  For which relief, Heaven bless the town and
the memory of the immortal Bilkins likewise!

There is a charming walk, arched and shaded by trees, on the old walls
that form the four sides of this High Town, whence you get glimpses of
the streets below, and changing views of the other town and of the river,
and of the hills and of the sea.  It is made more agreeable and peculiar
by some of the solemn houses that are rooted in the deep streets below,
bursting into a fresher existence a-top, and having doors and windows,
and even gardens, on these ramparts.  A child going in at the courtyard
gate of one of these houses, climbing up the many stairs, and coming out

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