That is the chief amusement of watering-places. One goes to dinner to inspect each day’s new arrivals, to guess what they are, what they do and what they think. We all have a vague wish to meet pleasant people, to make agreeable acquaintances, even to meet with a love adventure. In this jostling life, neighbours, strangers, assume considerable importance. Curiosity is aroused, sympathy awaits its opportunity, and the desire to make friends is always alert.
We cherish dislikes for a week and friendship for a month; people are seen with different eyes when viewed through the medium of a meeting at a watering-place. After an hour’s chat in the evening after dinner, under the trees of the park where the healing spring bubbles, superior intelligence and outstanding merits are suddenly discovered in human beings, but a month later we have completely forgotten the new friends we found so charming at the first meeting.
Permanent and serious ties are also formed there sooner than elsewhere. You meet every day and soon get to know one another, and growing affection is mingled with the pleasure and unrestraint of long-standing intimacy. You never forget the sweetness and compassion of early friendship, the first conversations which end in the discovery of a soul, the first glances charged with questions and replies, and secret thoughts not yet uttered by human lips, or the first heartfelt confidence, the delightful feeling of opening our hearts to those who seem to open theirs to us in return.
And the sadness of watering-places, the monotony of days all alike, make this blossoming of affection all the more complete.
Well, that evening, as on every other evening, we were waiting for the arrival of newcomers.
Only two arrived, a man and woman—father and daughter—but they looked very unusual. They immediately reminded me of some of Edgar Poe’s characters; and yet they had a charm, the charm of unhappiness; and I imagined them as the victims of fate. The man was tall and thin, rather bent, with hair that was too white for his age; his bearing and his person betrayed the grave, austere manners peculiar to Protestants. The daughter, aged about twenty-four or five, was short, very thin, very pale, and seemed worn out, tired, and overwrought. Occasionally you meet people who seem too weak for the tasks and needs of daily life, too weak to move about, to walk, to do any of the daily round. The young thing was rather pretty, with a transparent, spiritual beauty. She ate extremely slowly as if she could hardly move her arms.
It was surely she who had come to take the waters.
They sat facing me, on the other side of the table, and I noticed at once that the father had a very curious nervous contraction. Every time he wanted to reach anything, his hand made a rapid hook-like movement, a kind of wild zigzag, before it could get hold of what it wanted. After a few minutes this twitching tired me to such an extent that I turned my head away so as not to see it.
I also noticed that the young girl kept a glove on her left hand, during meals.
After dinner I went for a stroll in the grounds of the bathing establishment. We were in the little Auvergne village of Châtel-Guyon, hidden in a gorge at the foot of the high range from which so many boiling springs flow, arising from the deep bed of extinct volcanoes. Over there, above our heads, the cones, extinct craters, raised their stunted heads above the rest of the long mountainous chain, for Châtel-Guyon lies at the beginning of the land of the Dôme.
Farther away lies the country of the peaks, and farther still the country of the Plombs.
The Puy-de-Dôme is the highest of the volcanic ones, the Pic of Sancy the highest of the rocky peaks, and the Plomb de Cantal is the highest point of the gigantic mass of Cantal.
It was a very warm evening. I was walking up and down the shady raised path that overlooked the grounds and listening to the music of the casino when I caught sight of the father and daughter slowly coming in my direction. I bowed as one bows to one’s hotel companions at a watering-place; and the man, stopping, asked me:
“Could you suggest a short walk, sir, pleasant and, if possible, not hilly? Forgive me for bothering you.”
I offered to take them to the valley through which the little river flows, a deep valley forming a narrow gorge between two steep, craggy, wooded slopes. They accepted my offer.
And, of course, we talked of the virtue of the waters.
“Oh,” he said, “my daughter has a curious illness whose origin is a mystery. She suffers from unaccountable nervous attacks. Sometimes she is supposed to be suffering from heart disease, sometimes from a liver attack, and sometimes from disease of the spine. Now this complicated malady with its numerous forms and numerous modes of attack, is placed in the stomach, the great centre and great regulator of the body. That’s why we are here. For my part, I think it is nervous trouble. In any case, it is very sad.”
Immediately I remembered the violent twitching of his hand and asked him:
“But is it not due to heredity? Are you not suffering from your nerves?”
He replied quietly: “Me? … Certainly not … my nerves have always been very steady. …”
Then suddenly, after a pause, he continued:
“Ah! you mean the contraction of my hand every time I want to take hold of anything? That is the result of a terrible experience I had. Just imagine, this child has been buried alive!”
I could only utter an “ah,” full of surprise and emotion.
He continued:
“This is the story, a quite simple one. For some time Juliette had suffered from severe heart attacks. We believed that her heart was diseased, and
