We continued our journey on the following day and arrived at sunset at Toulon, where we had to wait patiently for the train, which left for Biarritz at four o’clock in the morning, in a bare room at the station, where we had the privilege of dozing on hard horse-hair chairs given us. Our travelling companions lay curled up in uncomfortable armchairs, nevertheless their noses very soon emitted trumpet-sounds. I drowsed also, all in a lump on my chair and was chilled to the bone. When we arrived at Lourdes on the following afternoon, we saw the platform crowded with pilgrims, crippled and impotent, who come here from all parts of the world in the hope of a miraculous cure. The road from Lourdes to Bayonne has a desolate look, without any vegetation whatever, only groups of trees here and there. We saw labourers in the fields tilling the ground with oxen harnessed to ploughs, just as we do in Russia. During the twenty minutes’ run from Bayonne to Biarritz two very prim, stately old ladies entered our compartment. They looked extremely haughty and unapproachable, and gave no outward signs of wishing to enter into conversation. But their manner changed instantly, when they found out that we were Russians; they became amiability itself, and expressed their great sympathy for our country. We put up at Biarritz at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, and had to be satisfied with a small room at the very top. Our windows looked seawards and showed the wide expanse of the Atlantic and the agglomeration of rocks of the most fantastic forms named The Chaos. From below we heard the thunder of mighty waves dashing on the cliffs with a sound like the booming of many guns. In the night the noise of the ocean hindered our sleep, and we decided to move to the Villa Gaston, a comfortable boarding-house, where we paid five francs a day for an apartment of two rooms. Above our heads two pupils of the Conservatory of Moscow played and sang all day long, practising their scales and vocal exercises not less than fifty times in succession. It was enough to make you hate music.