In the afternoon we wander down to the sands.  The tide is low.  The long billows of the Bay of Biscay roll smugly in, hypocritical and placid, with nothing to betray the unenviable reputation they sustain in mediis aquis.  The broad, smooth beach is not notably different in kind from other beaches; but we instantly see the peculiar charm of its location.  The shore sweeps off in a long, lazy crescent, rounding up, a mile or two to the northward, with the light-house near Bayonne.  Southward we cannot follow it from where we stand, for the near irregularities of cliff cut it off from sight.  Back from the beach rises the bluff, curving northward with the crescent; at our left it comes boldly down toward the water, partitioning the beach and breaking up at the edge into strange, gaunt capes and peninsulas.  Black masses of rock, large and small, are crouching out among the waves, tortured by storms into misshapen forms and anguished attitudes, patted and petted into fantastic humps and contortions.  The strata dip at an angle of about twenty-five degrees, and the stone is friable and defenceless.  Soothingly now the water is running over and around these rocks, or whitens their outlines with foam; granting their piteous torsos, in merciful caprice, a day’s brief respite from the agony of its scourgings.

The afternoon sun shines brightly against the bathing pavilion, irradiating its red and yellow brick.  Along the narrow; sheltered platform at its front, sit matronly French dowagers, holding their daughters, as it were, in leash, and talking of women and things, and affairs of state.  Though early in the season, the beach is well sprinkled with people.  A few attempt the bathing again, but the rest saunter here and there or enjoy beach-chairs at a stipulated rental.  The elderly French gentleman, a dapper and interesting, specimen rarely paralleled at home, strolls about contentedly on the asphalt promenade back from the beach, smoking a cigar and fingering a light bamboo.  Younger men, also well-dressed, pass in couples, or walk with a mother and daughter,—­never with the daughter alone.  Boatmen and candy-peddlers ramble in and out, a Basque fisherman or two linger about the scene, and dogs, a pony and a captive monkey, add an element of animal life.

Despite its sunny holiday temperament, Biarritz was one of certain Biscayan villages once denounced as “given up to the worship of the devil,”—­thus denounced by Henry IV’s bloodthirsty inquisitor, Pierre de Lancre, a veritable French Jeffreys, and the same who in 1609 put to death no less than eight hundred persons on the ground of sorcery.  “He tells us that the devils and malignant spirits banished from Japan and the Indies took refuge here in the mountains of Labourd.  Above all, he asserts that the young girls of Biarritz, always celebrated for their beauty, ‘have in their left eye a mark impressed by the devil.’”

Happily we have no devil in this nineteenth century, and in the clear glance of these Biarritz peasants loitering on the sands, we find that his brand-marks have disappeared with him.