But what a
disappointment Dinard is to one's enthusiastic anticipations! This
famous watering-place has to my mind not one solitary redeeming
feature. It has no excuse for being famous. It has not even one happy
accident about it as a peg to hang its fame upon, like some writers'
first novels. Dinard simply goes on being famous, nobody knows why.
And to go there, after reading pages about it in the papers and
hearing people speak of Dinard as Mohammedans whisper sacredly of
Mecca, is like meeting celebrities. You wonder what under the
sun--what in the world--how in the name of Heaven such ugly, stupid,
uninteresting, heavy, dull, and insufferably ordinary persons are
allowed to become famous by an overruling and beneficent Providence! I
have met many celebrities, and I have been to Dinard. I have had my
share of disappointments.
To begin with, Dinard is not sufficiently picturesque. There are but
one or two pretty vistas and three or four points of view. Then it is
not typically French. It is inhabited partly by English families who
cross the Channel yearly from Southampton and Portsmouth, and who take
with them their nine uninteresting daughters, with long front teeth
and ill-hanging duck skirts, and partly by Americans who go to Dinard
as they go to the Eiffel Tower; not that either is particularly
interesting, but they had heard of these places before they came over.
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