🥀 Within a walk of industrial Boulogne is the little village without hotels or a “season,” left altogether to the fisher families.

🥀 The propriety of the little boy of these fishermen is so great that when he bathes—on Sundays—having no gear for that occasion, he does not enter the sea unless encumbered by an apron of his mother’s, secured round his neck. Nor does he set his feet into the first shallow ripple until he shall have crossed himself with the sea-water. In his own bays, apart, on his own sands untrodden by strangers and out of view, should you follow this coast of Boulogne towards the south, you may surprise him fulfilling thus his modest rites.

🥀 Nothing was ever more uncentralized than the fishing village of the Pas de Calais. Except that Paris eats its fish, and that therefore from Paris must filter down a little narrow gain—how narrow when it reaches the hand that set the sail and drew the net, one must gather from the poverty of these clambering streets—the village is separate, and there is no cord of communication. Does music, for example, travel these few miles, this longer distance made by the bad roads, the smell of fish, and the incommunicable poverty? The boys here do not sing the tunes that run in cities. Does the press cross the boundaries that close that village to the world? A woman, trim and talkative, walks over from Boulogne in the morning with so few newspapers that if the vigour of her race should fail her for once, and she should take the little _diligence_, her profits would be gone at a blow. There is indeed that barrier to literature—a dialect that has to be reckoned with. That dialect is mixed with old and alienated English; surely not because of the small intercourse with our sailors when the fishermen go to Boulogne, but perhaps by reason of old colonizing of a coast which, in our aggressive days, we not only conquered but inhabited. Those colonists were, it is true, so dealt with by the plague that not many of them remained to improve the height and diminish the pelvic breadth of these French people; but language is of more subtle penetration than the influences that command the body; it prevails and clings, persists, outlives, and wears the local accent rather than die.

🥀 The way from Boulogne lies through the quarter devoted to the factories—the _usines_ that call the regiment of very young girls, marching in rows, companies of friends ten strong, linked by the arm, daily to thirteen hours’ labour. The streets of this industrial quarter of Boulogne are old, well-built, high-roofed, shuttered, full of character; but the factory-smoke hangs about them, and between this road and that lie those damaged lands, neither free nor captive, subject to accidents of country and borough, that have everywhere been laid out by the hand that broke down the walls of cities. And then, as you climb the hill, and turn from the factory to the road leading stumblingly to the fishing-village, you are compelled to know that the refuse of a fishing-village is fish.

🥀 Everywhere is woman—thick-set woman, warmly clad and with well-drawn-up stockings—evident and active out of doors. But on Sunday only is the fisherwoman to be seen with her baby out in the sea air. Where, one wonders, does the baby abide all the week by day (he has a clean little home by night with a religious picture over his neat bed) whilst his mother is bent under the burdens, or striding on the errands, or pushing the carts, or hauling the ropes, of the labour of the little port? She is too much and too continually bent, strained, and striving. She is cloudily, though not stormily, grave, so that after one has seen her for six days earning so violently her bare bread, it is almost a surprise to find her long-captive and long-diverted smile set free on Sunday for her child. She suns him, sitting on a stone in front of her own momentous and perpetual sea; and after this brief play he disappears again from the light of sea and sun. The older children have their reunited Sunday also. You may find on the grassy cliff two families and one pack of cards; two fathers, two mothers, and all the children at a game.