he wanted to marry her. He would use the peach to induce their tête-à-tête; and besides, it would be a pretty frame, a pretty place for speaking of love, feet in a pool, of limpid water, watching as the long beards of the shrimps fled under the bladder-wrack. When they reached the end of the little valley on the edge of the abyss, they noticed a little path which went down along the cliff, and below them, between the sea and the foot of the mountain, about half way up the slope, a surprising chaos of huge rocks, collapsed, turned upside down, piled together, one on another in a sort of turbulent grassy plain which ran as far as the eye could see towards the south, formed by old landslides. On that long strip of undergrowth and shaken turf, one might have said by the stirring of a volcano, the fallen rocks looked like the ruins of a great vanished city which once looked out onto the ocean, itself dominated by the white, endless wall of the cliff. Inland: the plateau Guy de Maupassant admirably describes the rural feeling of the Pays de Caux in his novels. For example: drawn from Miss Harriet, published in Le Gaulois of 9 July 1883, under the title Miss Hastings, then, in the compendium Miss Harriet; Maupassant describes a journey by public coach from Etretat to Tancarville: It was Autumn. From the two sides of the way the stripped fields extended, yellowed by the short stubble of the harvested oats and wheat which covered the ground like an ill-shaven beard. The misty land seemed to be smoking. The skylarks were singing in the air, other birds piped in the bushes. The sun finally rose before us, all red on the edge of the horizon; and as it climbed, lighter from minute to minute, the countryside seemed to be waking, to smile, shake itself and throw off, like a girl rising from her bed, its shift of white vapour. The Comte d'Etraille, on the seat, cried; "Look, a hare" pointing to the left towards a patch of clover. The animal darted away, almost hidden in the field, showing only its long ears; then it bolted over some plough-land, stopped, set off again in a mad race, changed direction, stopped again, troubled, listening for any danger, undecided which way to go; then started to run again