CHAPTER II.

CHOICE OF COAST.

Earth is her own doctor; every climate has its own remedy. More and more will Medicine lie in Emigration. But it must be an Emigration of foresight, not one of those mad-cap, rapid, and most mischievous journeys in which the patient rushes from one extreme of climate to another, but prudently calculated to the obtaining of those vivifying aids which nature every where holds in store for those who know how to profit by them. The youth, that is yet to be born, depends upon these two things--the _Science of Emigration_ and the _Art of Acclimatization_. Hitherto, man has remained a prisoner like an oyster on its rock. If he occasionally emigrates to some small distance from his temperate zone, he, for the most part, goes to die. He will only become free, really brave, when the science and art of Emigration and Climatization shall make him free of the whole globe.

Few diseases are cured in the place and under the circumstances which have given rise to them; they hold to certain habits which the localities perpetuate and render unconquerable. There is no Reform, physical or moral, for those who persist in the originating vice.

Medicine, guided by the auxiliary sciences, directs us in the new road to the desired end. Our emigrations must be made prudently and gradually. Can we, safely, without preparation, without alteration of diet and of habits, be suddenly removed from an inland to a maritime abode? Can we prudently take to the sea-bath until the sea breeze shall have trained our physical frame? Can we suddenly and without preparation encounter the severe shock, the horripilation of the really tremendous shock of the cold water bath in the cold open air? These questions we are glad to say are more and more being put and answered by our physicians.

The extreme rapidity of our railroad journeys is very mischievous even to the strong;--in many cases fatal to the ailing. To pass, as so many do, from Paris to the Mediterranean in twenty-four hours, passing at every hour into a different climate, is as perilous a thing as a nervous person can do. You arrive agitated, giddy. When Madame de Sevigné took a whole month to travel from Brittany to Provence, she proceeded by slow and calculated degrees from one climate to another, and its opposite. She proceeded, by slow degrees, from the maritime climate of the West into the inland climate of Burgundy. Then, travelling slowly by the upper Rhone into Dauphiny, she, with the greater safety and comfort, braved the free winds of Valence and of Avignon; then, halting awhile, and resting at Aix, in the interior of Provence, far from the Rhone and from its shores, she made herself Provençal in lungs.

France has the enviable advantage of being between two seas, and thence the facility of alternating, as the disease may require, between the saline tonicity of the Mediterranean and the moister and--except in case of tempest--the far milder air of the Ocean.

On each of the two coasts there is a graduated scale of stations, more or less mild, more or less strengthening. It is very interesting to observe, and very useful to follow, this double scale,--proceeding, as a general thing, from weaker to stronger.

The climate of the Ocean parting from the strong, rough, ever-heaving waters of the channel, becomes extremely mild at the South of Brittany, milder still in the Gironde, and mildest of all in the land-locked basin of Arcachon.

The air of the Mediterranean, which we may call circular, has its highest note in the dry, though keen, climate of Provence and Genoa, becomes more mild as you approach Pisa, milder and less variable in Sicily, and at Algiers attains a wonderful mildness and regularity. And on your return be sure of a balmy air at Majorca and the little ports of the Rousillon, so well sheltered from the harsh north wind.

The Mediterranean commands our admiration by two characteristics; the beauty of its shores and the brilliant purity of its sky and atmosphere. Very salt, very bitter is that sea; but what a glorious blue sky is above it! It gives out by evaporation about thrice as much water as it receives from all its tributary rivers. It would become all salt, like that terrible Dead Sea, but for the lower currents, the under-tow, like that from Gibraltar, for instance, were not constantly tempering it with the waters of the Ocean.

All that I have seen of its shores are beautiful, though somewhat stern. Nothing common-place about those shores. The volcanic, the lurid bale fires of the lower earth, have everywhere made their mark upon the upper earth; those dark Plutonic rocks are never tiresome like the marshy sands of other shores. If the famous Orange woods sometimes seem somewhat monotonous, they compensate you when here and there, a sheltered spot, you find the true African vegetation, the Aloe and the Cactus, the hedge of Myrtle and Jessamine, and the wild and perfumed landes. Above, it is true, bald and frowning mountains loom, and their long offshoots run even into the very sea.

"It seemed to me," said a traveller, "that I was between two atmospheres; the air above, and the air below." He describes the varied world of plants and animals which were reflected by the crystal mirror of that deep blue sea of Sicily. I was less fortunate off Genoa, where, gazing into the depths, I saw nothing but a desert. The dry and sterile rocks, the volcanic framing of the shores, dark as midnight, or of a still sadder and more ghastly and ghostlike white, showed me nothing but antique sarcophagi--reversed churches, reminding one, at times, of the cathedrals of Florence, or the leaning tower of Pisa. Sometimes, also, I seemed to see "strange monsters of the deep." Whales? Elephants? I do not know; but of real life not a trace.

Such, however, as that beautiful sea is, it admirably nerves and hardens the dwellers on its shores, and the sailors on its bosom; it makes at once the most fiery and the most solid of races. Our giants of the North, are, perhaps, stronger, but certainly are not more enduring, and, as certainly, they do not so readily, or so safely acclimatise, as the seamen of Genoa, of Calabria, or of Greece, bronzed as they are, not by an accident of the skin, but by the permeation, the imbibation of the Sun's rays. A friend of mine, a learned physician, sends his pale patients from Paris or Lyons to take their Sun-baths in the South, and himself lies nude on the rocks, for hours together. He has only his head covered; as to all the rest of his person, he is bronzed as an African.

The really sick will go to Sicily, to Algiers, to Madeira, in search of health. But the restorative of the pale, worn populations of our great cities, is best to be found in the more varied and more strengthening climates of the country which has given to Earth its most iron humanity, its heroes by sea and by land, and in the council chamber--that truly iron race of the Columbuses, the Dorias, the Massenas,--and the Garibaldis.

Our extreme Northern ports, Dunkirk, Boulogne and Dieppe, where the winds and waters of the Channel meet, are also a great nursery of renewed life, and restored strength. That great breeze and that great sea, might recall one from the grave. You may see there perfectly incredible recoveries. Go there without any real and vital wound, and you recover on the instant. The whole human machine acts strongly; digests well, breathes freely. You need not even strive for health when there, for nature says to you, as Tully said to Atticus, _Jubeo valere_,--_I command you to be well_. The sturdy vegetation that flourishes upon the very margin of the sea, seems to rebuke our weakness. Each of the little ports which pierce our Norman coast, is swept by the nor' westerly wind, which strengthens and revives us; but grows less violent, though not less salubrious, at the mouth of the Seine, beneath the fruitful orchards of Honfleur and Trouville. The good river, sweeping away to the left, carries with it a softer and gentler air. Higher up, you meet the strong, the sometimes really terrible, sea of Granville, Saint-Maloes, and Cancale, about the best of naval schools for young folks, a school which will make the strong still stronger.

But if, on the contrary, we have to deal with some weakling, some young child, born to weakness, or some young mother, made weak by too frequent parturition, we must select some milder shelter. And such a warm and always calm shelter, you will find, without going further South, among the sleepy little isles and peninsulæ of Morbihan. These isles form a labyrinth more perplexed than that in which the English king sheltered his fair Rosamond. Entrust your own treasure to that shelter, and none shall know of her save the Druidic rocks and the handful of fishermen who inhabit those at once wild and gentle shores. Does some gentle patient ask us on what people live, in those marine solitudes? We reply, upon Fish, Fish--still Fish! It is not far from St. Gildas, where the Bretons assure you that Heloise sought her Abelard. They contrive to live there as cheaply and as well as Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday.

Places more civilized and attractive are to be found farther South, such as Pornice, Royan, Saint George, Arcachon, &c.

I spoke elsewhere of Saint George's, bordered by many a bitter and precious plant; and Arcachon, too, is as attractive, with its resinous and wholesomely pleasant odor of its pine woods. But for the worldly rush from that great and Wealthy Bordeaux, but for that flood of health seekers, which pours into it at certain seasons, it is at Arcachon that we would shelter the dearly beloved patient, that dear and delicate creature for whom we fear the rush and crush of the hard working day world. That place, as long as we contemplate it only within the inner basin, offers the contrast of an absolute and very deep calm with a terribly rough sea close by. Beyond the lighthouse is the terrible Gascon sea, within the bay a lazy tide, so lazy that you cannot hear its murmurs, as low, as light, as the quiet tread of lady's gentle footstep on the sea-weed carpet of that strand.

In an intermediate climate which is neither North nor South, neither Brittany nor Vendëe, I have visited again and again, and always with pleasure, the pretty and staid shelter of Ponice, with its frank seamen and its pretty girls, with their conical hats. It is a pretty quiet little place, which, protected as it is by the island (rather the peninsula) of Noirmantiers, receives only a slanting and exceedingly well behaved sea; that enters silken in its softness. And in that bay of several leagues, these creeks, with sloping shores, made, as it would seem, on purpose for baths for women and children, they are so sheltered and so safe. Those nice sandy beaches, parted by such sheltering rocks, conceal so much, and yet reveal so much of the sea life, the plain, blunt, yet ever kindly and courteous life of the seaman! But if those sheltering rocks do much good, they also do no little injury. The sheltered creek and safe haven, keeps out the Tempest;--but, it also keeps out the fishes. By little and little, but very regularly, the grand rush and the grand murmur of the sea are kept out, and yet, that half silence has a very great charm. No where else have I so much welcomed, or so richly enjoyed, that great luxury of the undisturbed Day-dreaming.