Do you take your dog with you into the sea when you go swimming? Or does he or she take you? Now that the crowds have vanished from the beach, you can see things that escaped you earlier. At about 7.45 in the morning, with the sun just over the horizon, a woman comes striding along the sea edge, behind her Alsatian dog. He leads her on shore and into the water, swimming at her pace, too. Some mornings he turns around and comes back before she does. Once, on return, he became impatient and swam out and around her to lead her back to land.
And even before the sun came up, the shore fishermen were there, backs turned to the land their rods implanted and not often seen bending to a catch. Unless you are also an angler of this discipline, you don't cheerily ask them if they've had any luck. You could, perhaps, offer the comment that in your stretch of shore it's still a bit warm for the bass, or whatever. One woman who regularly patrolled the shoreline for shells and suitable small stones for her work in mosaics did stop and was given a friendly reply, being apparently known to the regulars as "Ia dame aux coquillages." Next time she stopped, a wife turned up suddenly from the hinterland.
Not only is the beach bare of its sunbathing crowds, but the bins which the local authority provided to the extend of one every forty yards are thinned out to half, and then removed entirely. Every night through the height of the season they had been emptied by a crew in a lorry, which also levelled the sand and cleansed it with a special disinfectant or similar substance. Every night.
Shops and stalls in the nearby streets and squares close.
One manager, obviously talking to her boss on the phone, said. "No, we needn't close yet, yesterday we took in two thousand six hundred francs."
The beautiful pines, mostly umbrella or stone pines (pinus pinea), remind you that this resort grew out of a wood. It was a good summer for them. They are brilliantly green, and there is grass where usually all is brown underfoot. Unfortunately, the awful Mediterranean palm is bying seen more and more in public places and gardens. Nearly as bad as monkey puzzle.
But the wooded hills look down impassively and in the distance the Canigou, the holy mountain you could say, on which snow fell the other day, lifts your heart. The Roussillon, the Pyrenees forever.