It was the Empress of the French who distilled the life-elixir for the quiet little resort.  As a maiden, she had spent long summers by its shore, and when she was become the first lady in the land, she turned still to Biarritz, and the midsummer tide of fashion followed after her.  Across the downs, on the bluff, stands the Villa Eugenie, the handsel of Biarritz’s prosperity; and here about us is the town that grew up to make her court.

Fair France lost as well as gained when the burning walls of the Tuileries crashed in.  In these days of the plain French Republic,—­of its sober, unornamental, business government,—­the contrast is vivid with the glitter and “go” of Louis Napoleon’s regime.  And the nation feels it, and involuntarily grieves over it.  The twenty years have far from sufficed to smother that certain inborn Gallic joy in monarchy,—­autocratic rule, a brilliant court, leadership in fashion, and all the pomp and pageantry which the French love so well.

Little more than a century ago, stable governments seemed at last to be ruling the world; civilization had come to believe itself finally at peace; war, it was complacently said, had finished its work; the coming cycles would prove so far tamed as to have outgrown fightings and revolutions.  Cultured modern history, like Nature, would refuse to proceed per saltum.  Yet the hundred years since gone by have brought wars as fierce, “leaps” of government as tremendous, as any century in the past.  It is this same fair France that has contributed more than her share of them, and the Fall of the Second Empire was one of the most dramatic.  The world is not, after all, so securely merged from the darkness of the Dark Ages.  Within that short century, in Paris itself, the very capital of cultured Europe, there has twice uprisen a human savagery immeasurably exceeding all the tales we are to tell of the fierce past of the Pyrenees.

It needs an effort to-day to picture the social power of France and Eugenie twenty years ago.  The mantle has not fallen to England and Alexandra.  Only a people like the French can endue fashion with absolutism.

So it was, that when the Empress came to Biarritz, “all the world” came also.  From the building of her villa dates the true origin of Biarritz.  From that time its growth was progressive and sound.  When the empire finally fell, this creature of its making had already passed the danger-point, and so stood unshaken; Biarritz had become too popular, its clientele too devoted, to part company.  Even in the winter it has its increasing colony; in summer its vogue is beyond caprice.  The sparkle of the royal occupation has gone, and the royal villa is tenantless; but the place no longer needs a helping hand, for it is abundantly able to walk alone.

[Illustration:  Beach and villa Eugenie at biarritz.]

II.