SEASIDE MUSEUM.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 306, 25 November 1937, Page 9

SEASIDE MUSEUM.

An original museum lias been inaugurated at the popular French seaside resort of Trouville. This museum is devoted to the history of sea-bath-ing. Numbers of costumes in which our grandmothers hid their shapely limbs when they went bathing form a part of the collection. All that was left to indiscreet eyes was the neck, the hands and the feet, everything else being carefully covered. Numbers of police notices bear witness to the care with which morals were guarded on the beach, and engravings show how bathing used to be decorously indulged in under the Second Empire. On one occasion, when a foreign princess visited Trouville and decided she would take a dip the perplexed chief of police of the town walked into the sea fully dressed, with his top hat on, and gendarmes lined the shore ready to keep away intruders or to dash to the rescue of the royal bather.

The collection of pictures of Trouville and its surroundings in the past is very interesting, with open coaches replacing the motor cars of to-day. There is a fine portrait of Empress Eugene by Winterhalter donated to the new-museum by the Duchess of Talleyrand-Perigord (nee Anna Gould). It was from Trouville, when the Second Empire fell, that the Empress escaped on board the yacht the Gazelle, belonging to Sir John Burgoyne, on the very night when the captain foundered with five hundred .hands, commanded by Sir Hugh Burgoyne, his cousin.