Today I walked along the shores known as the Emerald Coast, and they deserve their name as truly as those gemstones deserve theirs, changing color with the hour and the mood of the sky. The light fell there softly, almost Oriental in its quality, and the sea did not roar but murmured at my feet with the resignation of an old servant who has given up complaining. The beaches stretched wide and golden, bordered by houses that no Breton soul would have recognized as its own; they possessed the lofty whiteness and cool elegance of those homes built along the American Atlantic seaboard, where money becomes landscape and opulence adopts the guise of simplicity.

Then there came over me that strange melancholy known to travelers, who recognize their homeland without truly recognizing it, who set foot upon a land whose name they know while remaining ignorant of its soul. France was there, certainly: its clouds, its changeable sky, that wind which still sometimes carries the scent of fishermen. Yet something along this coast seemed to have agreed to be no longer entirely itself, nor entirely something else, clothing itself instead in a borrowed elegance, like an old aristocracy that had sold its family portraits in order to buy Gustav Klimts. In vain I searched for the rugged modesty of the coastlines native to my wife, that poor yet proud grace found in the granite shores of Armorica. Here, in its place, reigned a beauty too carefully arranged, a charm too conscious of itself, much like the one I once knew in the Hamptons.

Yet perhaps that is the destiny of old nations: in the end, they dream of themselves under features that are not quite their own. In these places, France seemed to remember a world it had never lived, to aspire to a grandeur that would come from elsewhere, as though the centuries had wearied its stones and the beaches, after gazing at the horizon for so long, had begun to desire whatever lay on the other side. I departed with the evening, carrying within me this double image: a coast of France that resembled another shore, and a homeland that sometimes seeks itself in the mirror of foreign nations.

FM