When I reached Havre I went in search of a place where I could spend a month or six weeks; I wanted but a village, a corner, a hole, provided it was close to the sea, and I was recommended to go to Sainte-Adresse and Trouville. For a moment I wavered between the two districts, which were both equally unknown to me; but, upon pursuing my inquiries further, and having learnt that Trouville was even more isolated and hidden and solitary than Sainte-Adresse, I decided upon Trouville. Then I recollected, as one does in a dream, that my good friend Huet, the landscape painter, a painter of marshes and beaches, had told me of a charming village by the sea, where he had been nearly choked with a fish bone, and that the village was called Trouville. But he had forgotten to tell me how to get to it. I therefore had to make inquiries. There were infinitely more opportunities for getting from Havre to Rio-de-Janeiro, Sydney or the coast of Coromandel than there were to Trouville. Its latitude and longitude were, at that time, almost as little known as those of Robinson Crusoe's island. Sailors, going from Honfleur to Cherbourg, had pointed out Trouville in the distance, as a little settlement of fishermen, which, no doubt, traded with la Délivrande and Pont-l'Évêque, its nearest neighbours; but that was all they knew about it. As to the tongue those fisherfolk talked they were completely ignorant, the only relations they had hitherto had with them had been held from afar and by signs. I have always had a passion for discoveries and explorations; I thereupon decided, if not exactly to discover Trouville, at least to explore it, and to do for the river de la Touque what Levaillant, the beloved traveller of my childhood, had done for the Elephant River. That resolution taken, I jumped into the boat for Honfleur, where fresh directions as to the route I should follow would be given me. We arrived at Honfleur. During that two hours' crossing at flood-tide, everybody was seasick, except a beautiful consumptive English lady, with long streaming hair and cheeks like a peach and a rose, who battled against the scourge with large glasses of brandy! I have never seen a sadder sight than that lovely figure standing up, walking about the deck of the boat, whilst everybody else was either seated or lying down; she, doomed to death, with every appearance of good health, whilst all the other passengers, who looked at the point of death, regained their strength directly they touched the shore again, like many another Antæus before them. If there are spirits, they must walk and look and smile just as that beautiful English woman walked and looked and smiled. When we landed at Honfleur, just as the boat stopped, her mother and a young brother, as fair and as rosy as she seemed, rose up as though from a battlefield and rejoined her with dragging steps. She, on the contrary, whilst we were sorting out our boxes and portmanteaux, lightly cleared the drawbridge