Étretat is famous for a single silhouette: a chalk arch that Guy de Maupassant likened to an elephant dipping its trunk into the sea. Beside it stands L'Aiguille, a slender 70-metre needle of rock alone in the water. There are three arches in all. The Porte d'Aval sits by the town, the smaller Porte d'Amont lies to the north, and the Manneporte is so wide that Maupassant swore a ship could pass under it in full sail. Storms off the English Channel hollowed all three out of soft white stone. That blinding white against green-turquoise water drew Claude Monet here through the 1880s, and he painted the arches over and over, in fog and low sun and every shifting light.
The scene rewards walking. At low tide you can drop from the cove's pebble beach and pass right under the Porte d'Aval into echoing halls of rock. From down there the wall rises far above your head, and the needle offshore looks taller than it does from the clifftop. Climb instead to the clifftop meadow and the arch, the needle and the little sailors' chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde fall into a single frame. From spring into midsummer the walls fill with nesting seabirds, kittiwakes clinging to the vertical chalk while fulmars ride the updraughts. As the sun drops into the Channel the whole face glows pink-gold above the surf. The chalk is fragile and still crumbling into the sea, so the paths are fenced well back from the edge. The town below fills fast on summer weekends, so come early or late, and outside July and August, to have the arches closer to yourself.