‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’

                                                     William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
 
I’m standing on the jetty at Arcachon, waiting for the ferry that will take me and the bike and a dozen other passengers across to Cap Ferret. Today, putting all other thoughts behind me, I begin the journey again, with the thrill of crossing the bay by boat and looking back at the land from the sea for the first time on this trip.
To pass the time, I’m breaking my vow to avoid using my phone yet again, and looking up news reports of the wildfires. I found a photo that shows the exact spot where I’m standing now, and the sheer scale of the smoke wreath from only a few weeks ago, and it looks like a war zone.
Whilst I’ve been here, there’s been a heat wave. Temperatures that were averaging thirty to thirty-two are more like thirty-six to thirty seven. I’ve felt no incentive to cycle in that kind of weather.
Somehow, three days have passed quickly in this seaside resort made famous by its nineteenth century villas, strange and colourful gothic creations that pepper the Ville d’Hiver. An eclectic mix of influences from the Moorish to the Colonial, and some as if Switzerland had come to France, are mashed together in breath taking combinations that are part theme park, part monument to bourgeois living and the Belle Époque, all in a style that has become known as Mode Pittoresque. Turrets and outrageous hammer beams with showy wood traceries support pantiled roofs that cantilever over elaborate balconies, many enclosed by painted glass screens, each grander than the next, four and five stories high with walls of brick in stripes of red and white, and around every corner is another competitor in the race to impress.
With an old casino modelled on The Alhambra in Spain, and four districts to the town, each named after the seasons, this is a place for le flâneur, the ‘stroller’ or ‘lounger’, a man who walks the streets preoccupied perhaps with literary matters, maybe nursing a consumptive constitution, but actually hoping for a brief encounter, an interlude to break life’s ennui with a flirtation. Arcachon is the setting I imagine for Chekhov’s Lady with the Lapdog, an affair that will go nowhere, but will pass the time. Thomas Mann could have set Death in Venice here, and one of my favourite painters, Pierre Bonnard, painted here at least once. Toulouse Lautrec had a house on the seafront and Alexandre Dumas lived here for a while, but this town was born as one the first expressions of mass tourism in the 1870s. Trains opened up this coastline, not just to the Bordelaise coming from the city an hour away, but also to Parisians looking to take the waters and enjoy the sea air in an age when tuberculosis still had no cure.
Maybe I shouldn’t have lingered so long, but it was not just the weather that influenced my decision. The architecture and the genteel atmosphere of the promenades fascinated me. After so long amongst the pines and dunes, such a concentration of ‘civilisation’ in one small resort has been like a luxury vacation, and a step back in time. I could almost imagine myself a latter day flâneur, bumping into Guy de Maupassant and stopping for a coffee to gossip about those around us, before going back to our hotels to work on short stories about our day.
My prolonged stay in Arcachon has also given me time to plan ahead, and I have made a radical decision, so radical that as we troop down the gangplank to board the ferry, I have the odd sense that people might guess my destination. I settle myself in a seat open to the air with my bike propped against the gunwales. The lines are cast off and we reverse away from the piles of the jetty and turn towards the far shore.