past of associations, no landmarks to be guarded. Vandalism in the form
of the modern rebuilder can here work more good than harm. Save for its
location at the edge of the wild Basque country, and what it has seen,
itself sheltered by obscurity, of the forays of that restless people,
the place has little to tell. It is a watering-place, pure and simple,
buoyed entirely by the prospering ebb and flow of modern fashion. Let us
take it as of to-day, not of yesterday, content to seek its charms under
that aspect alone, enjoying it for itself, not for its pedigree.

Biarritz is a prerogative instance of the magnetism of royalty,--of the
social power of the court as an institution. It was a watering-place, in
a small way, before Eugénie's advent; but there was not a tithe of its
present size and popularity. In 1840, it numbered in all not more than
fifty houses, a few of them lodgings or humble cafés, but the greater
part staid little whitewashed summer-dwellings with green verandas and
occasional roof-balconies; set down irregularly, without street or
system, along the sunny slopes of the bluff. Murray's _Handbook_ for
1848 gives it passing notice, and disrespectfully styles it the dullest
place upon earth for one having no resources of friends upon the spot.
But in the modern edition of forty years later, the same manual has come
to describe the place in a very different strain; assigns it a
population of nearly 6,000; details, with respect, its fashionable rank,
its villas and increasing hotels, its graded streets and driveways; and
among other things adds the simple remark that "about twenty-one
thousand strangers now visit Biarritz every year." Evidently there has
been some advance within the span.

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