Tender is the Night

Description

On the wonderful shore of the French Riviera, somewhere between Marseilles and the Italian outskirt, stands a huge, glad, rosecolored inn. Respectful palms cool its flushed façade, and before it extends a short stunning sea shore. Recently it has become a late spring hotel of eminent and elegant individuals; 10 years prior it was nearly abandoned after its English demographic went north in April. Presently, numerous lodges bunch close to it, however when this story starts just the vaults of twelve old manors decayed like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.

The lodging and its splendid tan supplication carpet of a sea shore were one. In the early morning the removed picture of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortresses, the purple Alp that limited Italy, were projected over the water and lay trembling in the waves and rings sent up via ocean plants through the reasonable shallows. Before eight a man came down to the sea shore in a blue shower robe and with much fundamental application to his individual of the cold water, and much snorting and noisy breathing, wallowed a moment in the ocean. At the point when he had gone, sea shore and inlet hushed up for 60 minutes. Galleons crept toward the west not too far off; table attendants yelled in the lodging court; the dew dried upon the pines. In one more hour the horns of engines started to blow down from the twisting street along the low scope of the Maures, which isolates the littoral from genuine Provençal France.

A mile from the ocean, where pines offer approach to dusty poplars, is a confined railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a lady and her little girl down to Gausse’s Hotel. The mother’s face was of a blurring attractiveness that would before long be tapped with broken veins; her appearance was both …