Of the bathing at Trouville, a book might be written on the costumes alone—­on the suits of motley, the harlequins, the mephistopheles, the spiders, the ‘grasshoppers green,’ and the other eccentric costumes de bain—­culminating in a lady’s dress trimmed with death’s heads, and a gentleman’s, of an indescribable colour, after the pattern of a trail of seaweed.  Strange, costly creatures—­popping in and out of little wooden houses, seated, solitary on artificial rocks, or pacing up and down within the limits prescribed by the keeper of the show—­tell us, ‘Monsieur l’administrateur,’ something about their habits; stick some labels into the sand with their Latin names, tell us how they manage to feather their nests, whether they ‘ruminate’ over their food—­and we shall have added to our store of knowledge at the seaside!

It is all admirably managed (’administered’ is the word), as everything of the kind is in France.  In order to bathe, as the French understand it, you must study costume, and to make a good appearance in the water you must move about with the dexterity and grace required in a ball room; you must remember that you are present at a bal de mer, and that you are not in a tub.  There are water velocipedes, canoes for ladies, and floats for the unskilful; fresh water for the head before bathing, and tubs of hot water afterwards for the feet, on the sands; an appreciating and admiring audience on the shore; a lounge across the sands and through the ‘Etablissement,’ in costumes more scanty than those of Neapolitan fish girls!

Yes, youth and beauty come to Trouville-by-the-sea; French beauty of the dresden china pattern, side by side and hand in hand, with the young English girl of the heavy Clapham type (which elderly Frenchmen adore)—­all in the water together, in the prettiest dresses, ’sweetly trimmed’ and daintily conceived; all joining hands, men and women having a ‘merry go round’ in the water—­some swimming, some diving, shouting, and disporting themselves, and ’playing fantastic tricks before high heaven,’—­to the admiration of a crowded beach.

‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ when English ladies join the party, and write home that ’it is delightful, that there is a refreshing disregard for what people may think at French watering-places, and a charming absence of self-consciousness that disarms criticism’!  What does quiet paterfamilias think about his mermaid daughter, and of that touch about the ‘absence of self-consciousness;’ and would anything induce him to clothe himself in a light-green skin, to put on a pair of ‘human fins,’ or to perch himself on the rocks before a crowd of ladies on the beach, within a few yards of him?  Yes, it is delightful—­the prettiest sight and the brightest life imaginable; but is it quite the thing, we may ask, for English girls to take their tone (ever so little) from the Casino, and from the ‘Guides Conty;’ which they do as surely, as the caterpillar takes its colour from the leaf on which it feeds?