Jewel of the Normandy Coast : The picture-perfect French village of Honfleur drew the Impressionists in the 19th Century, but so far has escaped American attention

Here’s my plan. When this life ends, and the authorities ask whose shoes I’d like to fill next, I’ll immediately remember the calm water of this town’s tiny Old Dock, the dignity of its five-story facades, the stylish traffic in its busy boat slips, the 17th-Century bricks and beams that dominate its narrow side streets, and the scenes that emerge when these elements overlap.

Then I’ll give the authorities my answer: Eric Boudet de Dramard.

Eric Boudet de Dramard is a retired Frenchman and oil painter I found on the waterfront at Honfleur, which is a town of 8,000 on France’s Normandy coast, near the mouth of the Seine. It’s where many of the Impressionists came in the 19th Century. And it is one of the most picturesque towns in Western Civilization.

Dramard, 61, has been painting here for about 20 years, on and off. He sets up his easel, steadies his brush hand with his left forearm, and spends hours tracing on canvas the wind-blown sails, the geometry of the harbor, the aged buildings and their rippling mirror images. Every once in a while, a visitor will interrupt him to offer several hundred francs for one of his paintings, which he’ll take. They’ll chat a bit, and then he’ll go back to the canvas, the rippling water, the drying nets . . . .

And then, in the middle of all this, Dramard will complain.

“Seventy galleries now,” he’ll growl, nodding toward the artworks in windows all down the street. “Before, there were ships.” And then he’ll resolve to drive out the next day to gray, industrial Le Havre, where the fishmongers are more genuine.

It wouldn’t be a perfect life, after all, unless you had the satisfaction of complaining.

Maybe, given enough time, I would complain, too. Like San Francisco’s waterfront, Honfleur’s poses at least as much as it works. But that’s why all these wonderful restaurants and galleries have alighted here (though Dramard’s estimate of 70 looked a little high to me). It’s also why the buildings are so well-restored. And in the outer harbor, 20 yards beyond the scores of Channel-crossing English pleasure craft along the Old Dock, there is some honest work getting done. Their ranks may have thinned, but the fishermen of Honfleur still mend nets, paint their hulls in bright purples, reds and yellows, and chug out to sea. Basically, Monsieur Dramard has it made.

I came north from Paris to get here. Since I was too lazy to rent a car, this meant covering the 120 miles by train and bus, drowsing the morning away while monuments of French civilization gradually sunk into the earth and were carpeted over by the rich, green fields of Normandy. Occasionally, a country house would flash past the window, offering a glimpse of green shoots taking root in an old thatched roof. Here, an old stone church. There, a riderless horse tracing circles, trainer at its side. A unfailingly cheerful Tom Bosley look-alike (the father on “Happy Days,” remember?) steered the bus. As fast as we were going, you could still feel the pace of life decelerating outside.

Reaching the coast, we followed Highway D-513 through the resort towns and well-shuttered homes of Deauville (for wealthy French gamblers) and Trouville (for the less wealthy French masses). After another eight miles of climbing, swooping and winding two-lane road, I was in downtown Honfleur, looking out at a football-field-sized rectangle of calm water and idle boats.

All of Honfleur radiates from the Old Dock. In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, exploratory voyages to North America originated here. A governor appointed by the king held court in the Lieutenance building, overlooking the passage to the English Channel. Norman shipbuilders put up houses in the surrounding hills, and a handful of landmark churches arose. By that time, the Hotel du Cheval Blanc was already a longstanding business, having opened in its waterfront location about 1460.

Five centuries and countless renovations later, all those buildings are intact, and the Cheval Blanc is still a hotel. Owner Alain Petit can lead curious strangers to the oldest beams, or to Room 30, where Monet and others are said to have capitalized on its broad, bird’s-eye view of 19th-Century activity on the waterfront.

The Cheval Blanc’s rooms have more character than luxury, but they’re not rooted in the 15th Century. In the course of gradual renovations, Petit and his wife, Elisabeth, have added such modern conveniences as built-in hair dryers to many. (The Cheval Blanc was already booked by the time I called to inquire about rooms, and so I landed at the newish, nondescript Hotel Mercure. The room was affordable and clean, the staff competent. But next time I’ll still try the Cheval Blanc first.)

The other buildings surrounding the Old Dock are similarly venerable. On one side, St. Catherine Quay, they rise to narrow slate-and-timber heights of five to seven stories, housing restaurants or galleries in the ground floors. Reflected in the dock waters, they look even taller. On the facing side, St. Etienne Quay, the facades are stone, and most rise only two stories.

One morning I took an early breakfast under the yellow awning of L’Albatros, a bar and snack shop on St. Catherine Quay, and stared across the dock waters while the first day’s duties were performed. Out among the working boats along the port, engines coughed and hummed. Down among the pleasure boats, someone named Nigel was implored to pull a line in. All around me, workers restocked bars, unstacked patio chairs, unfurled parasols, ran up flags, wiped dew from tables, trundled kegs, brandished baguettes.

The only disquieting detail in the whole scene, to my mind, was at the end of St. Etienne Quay, where somehow Baskin-Robbins has gotten ahold of a storefront. I’m sure the ice cream is wonderful, but I wasn’t in the mood for that familiar American fixture amid these old walls and windows, and I wonder how many Honfleur visitors are.

(Tourism office surveys show that most of Honfleur’s foreign visitors are English, many of them leisure sailors who cross the Channel for weekends here, and that Americans amount to fewer than 10% of the foreign tourists who found Honfleur last year. The same surveys report that July and August are the town’s busiest months. Occupancy rates fall sharply in September, as cool, damp autumn arrives.)

The rest of Honfleur and environs is an elaboration on the Old Dock’s themes: pretty pictures and working sailors. The Eugene Boudin Museum was a logical first stop.

Boudin, born in Honfleur in 1824, was a painter who favored sunlit landscapes. In the 1850s, he took a young Claude Monet under his wing, and led a gaggle of painters with rebellious outdoorsy ideas. They gathered often at the Saint Simeon Inn, on a hillside on the west edge of town, to paint, eat and generally commune.

The result was early Impressionism (so named by a critic who didn’t much care for it), which introduced artists throughout Europe to the idea that an artist’s subjective perception of light and shape could bring just as much to a painter’s work as the objective reality of the scene. On Impressionist canvases, the waters of the Old Dock shimmer in a rainbow of colors, and the beaches near Trouville glow under the rays of a different sun.

Overshadowed by competing institutions in Europe and North America, the Boudin museum has nevertheless managed to gather and hold onto many locally produced works by Boudin, Monet, Camille Corot and others, including a good number that depict scenes still visible around town. Yet in a city graced with so much well-preserved old architecture, the Boudin museum is something of an unfortunate riddle.

The entrance, a few minutes’ walk from the Old Dock, is stark and modern. The first exhibits you see, downstairs, run to furniture and bonnets. Then you step upstairs and find a 40-foot barrel-vaulted ceiling arching over ancient floorboards and walls full of open-air scenes from the 19th Century, tourist posters from the early 20th Century and the results of a grade-school contest in which children made genuinely primitive efforts to copy disingenuously primitive portraits by Picasso, Modigliani and Van Gogh. The place requires a little sorting out, but once that’s done, the works on the walls are worth the trouble.

Out on the west edge of town, meanwhile, the Saint Simeon Inn has evolved into the Ferme Saint Simeon, and remains open for business.

Overlooking the Seine’s headwaters and shaded by hundred-foot trees, Ferme Saint Simeon now offers the 43 most luxurious hotel rooms and the priciest restaurant in Honfleur. It’s very quiet, with immaculate grassy grounds and a hedge that rises just high enough to spare diners the view of LeHavre’s distant smokestacks across the Seine. Michelin gives the restaurant one star. The restaurant gave me an agreeable lunch, for $60 without wine, from a menu heavy in local seafood.

The rooms are intricately decorated, each according to a different scheme. Those I saw featured bold, colorful wall coverings and roomy, modern bathrooms. And the elaborate pool and waterworks in the new spa may lead Californians to thinking about another retreat named for Saint Simeon, much closer to home. In any event, those who do make the hike to Ferme Saint Simeon should recognize that prices have changed plenty since the Impressionists’ day. Rooms start at just under $200 nightly, and the establishment’s exclusive atmosphere does not encourage inspection by casual visitors.

If the casual visitor is lucky, however, he or she will be able to hike back into town and find a temporary exhibit up at the Greniers a Sel in downtown Honfleur.

The Greniers a Sel are a pair of enormous, centrally located, oak-beamed warehouses, built in 1670 to store tax revenues--which at the time were collected in salt. Preserved by the city, the 75-foot-high structures now house temporary exhibits. During my visit in June, the local artists’ society had gathered there a collection of flowers and nudes from three 20th-Century Honfleur natives, Emile Othon Friesz, Paul-Elie Gernez and Jean Dries.

I went in out of a summer squall. With the rain tintinnabulating above and naked ladies and blooming daisies in a riot all around, Honfleur’s history was simultaneously sheltering and entertaining me--for $6 a ticket a fair deal, and a more agreeably striking experience than either the Boudin museum or the Ferme Saint Simeon.

The sailors’ side of Honfleur history turns up most obviously in the Museum of Old Honfleur, which is in a former church on St. Etienne Quay. Inside, curators have gathered models and documents that trace shipbuilding and fishing customs--including a series of documents that deal with the 18th-Century slave trade.

Not far away, but much less obvious, is the St. Catherine Church. Unlike almost every other building in the region, the church is virtually all wood. Looking up to the barrel-vaulted ceiling, you have the sense you are standing beneath the overturned hull of a great ship. Why? Because after the close of the Hundred Years’ War in the mid-15th Century, Normandy’s masons and architects were all too busy with reconstruction projects to undertake the church. Honfleur’s shipbuilders did the job instead, using the only medium they knew.

It is another church, however, that is the foremost local destination for devoutly Catholic sailors. Notre-Dame de Grace is a gem of a chapel built between 1600 and 1615 on a steep hilltop west of town. Quickly, the site became a point of pilgrimage for sailors about to embark on transatlantic journeys. One such sailor-pilgrim, Samuel de Champlain, set sail from Honfleur and founded the colony of Quebec in 1608.

Now shaded by 300-year-old elms, the church includes stained-glass windows, statues and bas-reliefs tracing the usual biblical themes, but alongside them are images and models of elaborately rigged ships from centuries past. (There are also a few pairs of cast-off crutches, leaning in a dark corner, whose stories are not offered.) Pilgrims still arrive for an annual Seaman’s Festival and blessing of the sea each spring.

Honfleur is a town that can be covered in two days but is best absorbed over three or four.

One charm of a place so tiny is that before long, a visitor starts collecting small sparks of recognition, finding patterns in local life. The woman who took your ticket at the art exhibit yesterday lingers over a cigarette at the next table outside L’Albatros the following day. The artist you saw outside City Hall will reappear later this week at the Church of St. Leonard. The English couple you eavesdrop on in Notre-Dame de Grace today will turn up tomorrow morning on the water at the Old Dock, bringing around a boat named Bubbles, preparing to recross the Channel.

Despite the apparently delicate balance of life in town--large numbers of English have started buying up property--I heard no dire speculations about potential effects of the Channel Tunnel’s predicted opening next year. Instead, the transportation project that may change things more is the Pont du Normandie, a massive cable-stayed bridge that dwarfs the Golden Gate and is scheduled for completion next year. It will shave 20 minutes off the trip from Le Havre to Honfleur, potentially adding substantial new French traffic to Honfleur’s narrow streets. The 50th anniversary of the Allied Invasion of Normandy, to be celebrated throughout 1994, is also expected to bring visitors.

Here’s a cause for encouragement, though. Even if traffic troubles do begin to arise more often in these streets, there is the chance that they’ll add something to the Honfleur experience.

On our way out of town, my old friend Tom Bosley the bus driver found himself stuck behind a crawling tractor, with more traffic backing up behind him. Temperatures seemed to be rising.

Then, to the astonishment of those aboard, and to the particular horror of the teen-agers among us, he popped in a cassette tape of old French accordion ballads and began bellowing along. Amid that unabashed, old-fashioned bawling, my picture of old Honfleur slowly shrunk and slipped past in the rear-view mirror.

GUIDEBOOK: Honfleur With a Flourish

Getting there: From Paris, you can rent a car and drive (about 90 minutes), or take a train to Lisieux, followed by a No. 50 bus to Honfleur. I took a slightly less direct route, via a train to Caen (about $50) and a No. 20 bus to Honfleur, which together took a little over three hours and was easy going, even for a non-speaker of French. Buses are clean and relatively cheap ($12 from Caen to Honfleur).

Where to Stay: Local bed taxes in Honfleur add about $1.50 per person per day to the prices quoted below, but overall prices are well below those in Paris. Of two dozen lodgings listed with the local tourist office, only one offers any rooms for more than $150 nightly.

The Ferme Saint Simeon is that one (rue Adolphe-Marais, 14600 Honfleur; from U.S. phones 011-31-89-23-61 or fax 011-31-89- 48-48). Thirty-eight rooms; one-star restaurant. Doubles: $200-$570 nightly. Breakfast: $19.

The waterfront Hotel du Cheval Blanc (2, quai des Passagers, 14600 Honfleur; tel. 011-31-81-65-00, fax 011-31-89-52-80) offers 35 rooms, each with port view, at nightly rates running $85-$110 for a double, breakfast included. Lots of character, location in the heart of things.

The Hotel Mercure (4 rue des Vases, 14600 Honfleur; tel. 011-31-89-50-50, fax 011-31-89- 58-77) includes 56 rooms. Clean and reliable, no character to speak of, a short walk from the Old Dock. Double rooms: $65-$115. Breakfast: $9.

(Note: Guides published in the U.S. tend to include only three or four hotels in Honfleur. For a fuller list, contact the Honfleur tourist office at the address below.)

Where to Eat: Ferme Saint Simeon is the fanciest place in town, with Old World furnishings, stately service, Strauss waltzes in the background, seafood a specialty. Main dishes: $36-$48.

Au Vieux Honfleur (13 quai St. Etienne; local tel. 89-15-31) is located along the waterfront with indoor and patio seats. Main dishes: $17-$33.

L’Ancrage (12 rue Montpensier, Honfleur 14600; tel. 89-00-70) is smallish, with seafood specialties. Often filled with smokers, but so is France. Main courses: $18-$30.

For more information: Contact the French Government Tourist Office (9454 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 303, Beverly Hills 90212; tel. 900-990-0040. Calls cost 50 per minute). Or contact the Honfleur Office of Tourism (Place Arthur-Boudin, B.P. 137 14602 Honfleur Cedex; tel. 011-31-89-23-30 or fax 011-31-89-18-76).