s-battery, with a
singing sentry. This hill or rock would be an island did not a low
tongue of land connect it with the mainland. This tongue of land
separates two inlets from each other, so you get towards the north a
distant view of the sea from the citadel, towards the east and west a
view of both inlets, like two Swiss lakes, and towards the south of
the tongue of land, with the town on it, and behind it, landward,
mountains as high as the heavens. I wish I could paint you a picture
of it, and if we both were fifteen years younger then we would take a
trip here together. Tomorrow, or day after, I go back to Bayonne. * * * I
am very much sunburned, and should have liked best to float on the
ocean for an hour today; the water bears me up like a piece of wood.
It is still just cool enough to be pleasant. By the time one gets to
the dressing-room one is almost dry, and I put on my hat, only, and
take a walk in my peignoir. The ladies bathe fifty paces away--custom
of the country. * * * I do not like the Spaniards so well as I like
their country; they are not polite, talk too loud, and the conditions
are in many ways behind those in Russia. Custom-houses and passport
annoyances without end, an incredible number of turnpike tolls, four
francs for one hour's drive, or else I should stay here still longer,
instead of bathing in Biarritz, where a bathing-suit is necessary.
Love to our dear parents and children. Farewell, my angel.

Your v.B.

Biarritz, August 4, '62.

* * * I am sitting in a corner room of the Hotel de l'Europe, with a
charming lookout over the blue sea, which drives its white foam
between wonderful cliffs and against the light-house. I have a bad
conscience, seeing so many beautiful things without you. If one could
only bring you hither through the air, I would go right back again to
San Sebastian. Imagine the Siebengebirge with the Drachenfels placed
by the sea; next to it Ehrenbreitstein, and between the two an arm of
the sea, somewhat wider than the Rhine, forcing its way into the land,
and forming a round bay behind the mountains. In this you bathe in
water transparently clear, and so heavy and salty that you can lie
easily right on top of it and can look through the wide gate of rocks
to the sea, or landward, where the mountain chains tower up one after
another ever higher and ever bluer. The women of the middle and lower
classes are strikingly pretty, sometimes beautiful; the men surly and
impol