The Emigrants

In mid September 1991, when I travelled from England to Deauville during a dreadful drought, the season was long over, and even the Festival du Cinéma Américain, with which they tried to extend the more lucrative summer months a little, had come to its end. I cannot say whether I was expecting Deauville to have something special to offer — some remnant of the past, green avenues, beach promenades, or even a stylish or scandalous clientèle; whatever my notions may have been, it was immediately apparent that the once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one visits now, regardless of the country or continent, was hopelessly run down and ruined by traffic, shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction. The villas built in the latter half of the nineteenth century, neo-Gothic castles with turrets and battlements, Swiss chalets, and even mock-oriental residences, were almost without exception a picture of neglect and desolation. If one pauses for a while before one of these seemingly unoccupied houses, as I did a number of times on my first morning walk through the streets of Deauville, one of the closed window shutters on the parterre or bel étage or the top floor, strange to relate, will open slightly, and a hand will appear and shake out a duster, fearfully slowly, so that soon one inevitably concludes that the whole of Deauville consists of gloomy interiors where womenfolk, condemned to perpetual invisibility and eternal dusting, move soundlessly about, waiting for the moment when they can signal with their dusters to some passer-by who has happened to stop outside their prison and stand gazing up. Almost everything, in fact, was shut, both in Deauville and across the river in Trouville — the Musée Montebello, the town archives in the town hall, the library (which I had planned to look around in), and even the children's day nursery de l'enfant Jesus, established through the generosity of

the long-deceased Madame la Baronne d'Erlanger, as I was informed by a commemorative plaque placed on the fa$ade of the building by the grateful citizens of Deauville. Nor was the Grand Hotel des Roches Noires open any more, a gigantic brick palace where American multimillionaires, English aristocrats, French high financiers and German industrialists basked in each other's company at the turn of the century. The Roches Noires, as far as I was able to

discover, had closed its doors in the Fifties or Sixties and was converted into apartments, though only those that had a sea view sold well. Now what was once the most luxurious hotel on the coast of Normandy is a monumental monstrosity half sunk in the sand. Most of the flats have long been empty, their owners having departed this life. But there are still some indestructible ladies who come every summer and haunt the immense edifice. They pull the white dustsheets off the furniture for a few weeks and at night, silent on their biers, they lie in the empty midst of it. They wander along the broad passageways, cross the huge reception rooms, climb and descend the echoing stairs, carefully placing one foot before the other, and in the early mornings they walk their ulcerous poodles and pekes on the promenade. In contrast to the Roches Noires, which is gradually falling down, the Hotel Normandy at the other end of Trouville-Deauville, completed in 1912, is still an establishment of the finest class. Built around a number of courtyards in half-timber that looks at