During the nineteenth century, an ‘irresistible awakening of a collective desire for the shore’ took hold among well-heeled Parisians. Fashionable seaside resorts such as Deauville first sprang up under Napoleon iii, who drove a railway network through France in the 1860s. Seaside visits became an annual fixture for the rich Belle Époque bourgeoisie for whom remaining in Paris in July and August was, in any case, unthinkable. While Jacques’ mother, Marie Lartigue, enthused about ‘le bon air’ outside Paris, Docteur Variot, the family physician, believed there was nothing better to relieve the headaches that plagued her younger son: ‘Happy migraines, thanks to which I’m so often allowed to swap “dull ramblings about the past” in my history lessons with a marvellous reality, filled with the unknown, with light, with the future…’, remembered Jacques, who baulked at having his liberty curtailed by timetables. The seaside, in particular, caught his imagination: ‘The beach is the most enormous place in the world. You can run there “without limit”, and no one shouts at you to be careful. Nothing hinders my eyes from roaming, drifting endlessly into the distance, any more.’
The Lartigue family travelled to the coast by train or, later, in Henri’s series of open-topped motor cars, including a red 24 hp Panhard et Levassor he purchased in 1906. Uncles, aunts and cousins joined them. The family first visited Ambleteuse in 1897, a village between Calais and Boulogne then popular with visitors from Paris eager for the cold, turbulent seawater, deemed beneficial to the health, as well as fresh oysters from local beds built to enhance the bourgeois ambience. ‘Ambleteuse. The sea! Despite my travelling shoes, which prevent me from running into the water, I go quickly, quickly to see the beach before anyone stops me…’ Henri Lartigue and his wife’s cousin, Marcel van Weers, accompanied the children to the rocks at low tide, where pools of water with waving seaweed reflected the sky: ‘When the sun comes out from behind a cloud, it illuminates the bottom of a pool, and you can even surprise a fish…which swims off at the speed of lightning to hide in the crevices of rocks or under plants.’