The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provençal France.Ī mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse’s Hotel. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon bus boys shouted in the hotel court the dew dried upon the pines. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.

Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

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