If you travel on the highroad which skirts the cliff-bound coast of Normandy you may come to a board bearing the legend “Hottetot-sur-Mer” and a hand pointing down a narrow gorge.  If you follow the direction and descend for half a mile you come to a couple of villas, a humble cafe, some fishermen’s cottages, one of which is also a general shop and a debit de tabac, a view of a triangle of sea, and eventually to a patch of shingly beach between two great bastions of cliffs.  The beach itself contains a diminutive jetty, a tiny fleet of fishing smacks, some nets, three bathing machines joined together by ropes on which hang a few towels and bathing costumes, a dog, a child or so with spade and bucket, two English maiden ladies writing picture post-cards, a Frenchman in black, reading a Rouen newspaper under a gray umbrella, his wife and daughter, and a stall of mussels presided over by an old woman with skin like seaweed.  Just above the beach, on one side of the road leading up the gorge, is a miniature barn with a red cupola, which is the Casino, and, on the other, a long, narrow, blue-washed building with the words written in great black letters across the facade, “Hotel de la Plage.”

As soon as Emmy could travel, she implored Septimus to find her a quiet spot by the sea whither the fashionable do not resort.  Septimus naturally consulted Hegisippe Cruchot.  Hegisippe asked for time to consult his comrades.  He returned with news of an ideal spot.  It was a village in the Pyrenees about six thousand feet up in the air and forty miles from a railway station.  They could shoot bears all day long.  When Emmy explained that a village on the top of the Pyrenees was not by the seaside, and that neither she nor his aunt, Madame Bolivard, took any interest in the destruction of bears, he retired somewhat crestfallen and went with his difficulties to Angelique, the young lady in the wine shop in the Rue des Francs-Bouchers.  Angelique informed him that a brave sailor on leave from his torpedo boat was in the habit of visiting the wine shop every evening.  He ought to know something of the sea.  A meeting was arranged by Angelique between Hegisippe, Septimus and the brave sailor, much to Emmy’s skeptical amusement; and the brave sailor, after absorbing prodigious quantities of alcohol and reviewing all the places on the earth’s coastline from Yokohama to Paris-Plage, declared that the veritable Eden by the Sea was none other than his native village of Hottetot-sur-Mer.  He made a plan of it on the table, two square packets of tobacco representing the cliffs, a pipe stem the road leading up the gorge, some tobacco dust the beach, and some coffee slops applied with the finger the English Channel.

Septimus came back to Emmy.  “I have found the place.  It is Hottetot-sur-Mer.  It has one hotel.  You can catch shrimps, and its mussels are famous all over the world.”

After consultation of a guide to Normandy, on which Emmy’s prudence insisted, they found the brave sailor’s facts mainly correct, and decided on Hottetot-sur-Mer.