the company of an artist. I know not why it is, but it has always
seemed to me that the man who lives only to copy life appears to get
far more out of it than those who make a point of seeing nothing in it
save themselves.

Renard, meanwhile, was taking pains to assure us that in less than a
month the Villerville beaches would be crowded; only the artists of the
brushes were here now; the artists of high life would scarcely be found
deserting the Avenue des Acacias before June.

"French people are always coming to the seashore, you know--or trying
to come. It's a part of their emotional religion to worship the sea.
'La mer! la mer!' they cry, with eyes all whites; then they go into
little swoons of rapture--I can see them now, attitudinizing in salons
and at tables-d'hote!" To which comment we could find no more original
rejoinder than our laughter.

It was a day when laughter was good; it put one in closer relations
with the universal smiling. There are certain days when nature seems to
laugh aloud; in this hour of noon the entire universe, all we could see
of it, was on a broad grin. Everything moved, or danced, or sang; the
leaves were each alive, trembling, quivering, shaking; the insect hum
was like a Wagnerian chorus, deafening to the ear; there was a brisk,
light breeze stirring--a breeze that moved the higher branches of the
trees as if it had been an arm; that rippled the grass; that tossed the
wavelets of the sea into such foam that they seemed over-running with
laughter; and such was still its unspent energy that it sent the Seine
with a bound up through its shores, its waters clanging like a sheet
of mail armor worn by some lusty warrior. We were walking in the narrow
lane that edged the cliff; it was a lane that was guarded with a