This is the season for penguins.
From April to the end of May, before the Parisian visitors arrive, one sees, all at once, on
the little beach at Etretat several old gentlemen, booted and belted in shooting costume.
They spend four or five days at the Hotel Hauville, disappear, and return again three
weeks later. Then, after a fresh sojourn, they go away altogether.
One sees them again the following spring.
These are the last penguin hunters, what remain of the old set. There were about twenty
enthusiasts thirty or forty years ago; now there are only a few of the enthusiastic
sportsmen.
The penguin is a very rare bird of passage, with peculiar habits. It lives the greater part of
the year in the latitude of Newfoundland and the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. But
in the breeding season a flight of emigrants crosses the ocean and comes every year to the
same spot to lay their eggs, to the Penguins' Rock near Etretat. They are found nowhere
else, only there. They have always come there, have always been chased away, but return
again, and will always return. As soon as the young birds are grown they all fly away,
and disappear for a year.
Why do they not go elsewhere? Why not choose some other spot on the long white,
unending cliff that extends from the Pas-de-Calais to Havre? What force, what invincible
instinct, what custom of centuries impels these birds to come back to this place? What
first migration, what tempest, possibly, once cast their ancestors on this rock? And why
do the children, the grandchildren, all the descendants of the first parents always return
here?
There are not many of them, a hundred at most, as if one single family, maintaining the
tradition, made this annual pilgrimage.
And each spring, as soon as the little wandering tribe has taken up its abode an the rock,
the same sportsmen also reappear in the village. One knew them formerly when they
were young; now they are old, but constant to the regular appointment which they have
kept for thirty or forty years. They would not miss it for anything in the world.
It was an April evening in one of the later years. Three of the old sportsmen had arrived;
one was missing--M. d'Arnelles.
He had written to no one, given no account of himself. But he was not dead, like so many
of the rest; they would have heard of it. At length, tired of waiting for him, the other three
sat down to table. Dinner was almost over when a carriage drove into the yard of the
hotel, and the late corner presently entered the dining room.
