it is no wonder
that one expects all this beauty to lead up to a climax. But what a
disappointment Dinard is to one's enthusiastic anticipations! This
famous watering-place has to my mind not one solitary redeeming
feature. It has no excuse for being famous. It has not even one happy
accident about it as a peg to hang its fame upon, like some writers'
first novels. Dinard simply goes on being famous, nobody knows why.
And to go there, after reading pages about it in the papers and
hearing people speak of Dinard as Mohammedans whisper sacredly of
Mecca, is like meeting celebrities. You wonder what under the
sun--what in the world--how in the name of Heaven such ugly, stupid,
uninteresting, heavy, dull, and insufferably ordinary persons are
allowed to become famous by an overruling and beneficent Providence! I
have met many celebrities, and I have been to Dinard. I have had my
share of disappointments.

To begin with, Dinard is not sufficiently picturesque. There are but
one or two pretty vistas and three or four points of view. Then it is
not typically French. It is inhabited partly by English families who
cross the Channel yearly from Southampton and Portsmouth, and who take
with them their nine uninteresting daughters, with long front teeth
and ill-hanging duck skirts, and partly by Americans who go to Dinard
as they go to the Eiffel Tower; not that either is particularly
interesting, but they had heard of these places before they came over.
The only really interesting thing within five miles of Dinard is that,
off St. Malo, on the island of Grand Be, Chateaubriand is buried. But
as this really belongs more to the attractions of St. Malo than to
Dinard, and nobody who spends summers at Dinard ever mentioned
Chateaubriand in my presence, or honored his tomb by a visit, it is
pure charity on my part to ascribe this solitary point of real
interest to Dinard. For, after all, Chateaubriand does not belong to
it. Which logic reminds me forcibly of the plea entered by the defence
in a suit for borrowing a kettle: "In the first place, I never
borrowed his kettle; in the second place, it was whole when I returned
it; and, in the third place, it was cracked when I got it."

So with Chateaubriand and Dinard. Then Dinard has none of the dash and
go of other watering-places. There is nothing to do except to bathe
mornings and watch the people win or lose two francs at _petits
chevaux_ in the evenings. Not wildly exciting, that.