And the sky above the Alps is an almost white blue itself, as if the snow had coloured off on to it; a few silver clouds float just above the pale peaks; and at the other side of the bay, Nice, lying at the edge of the water, stretches like a white thread between sea and mountain. Two large three-cornered sails, driven before a strong breeze, seemed to run over the waves. Filled with wonder; I looked at it all.
It was a sight so fair, so divine, so rare that it made itself a place in your heart, as unforgettable as remembered joys. It is through the eyes that we live and think and suffer and are moved. The man who can feel through his eyes enjoys, in the contemplation of things and human beings, the same deep, sharp, subtle joy as the man whose heart is ravished by the music striking on a delicate sensitive ear.
I said to my companion, M. Martini, a true Southerner:
“That is really one of the rarest sights it has ever been my good fortune to admire.
“I have seen the monstrous granite jewel of Mont Saint-Michel rise from its sands at dawn.
“I have seen in the Sahara the lake of Raïanechergui, fifty miles long, gleaming under a moon as brilliant as our suns, with a white wraith of mist like a milky vapour rising from it to the moon.
“I have seen, in the Lipari Islands, the fantastic sulphur crater of Volcanello, a giant flower that smokes and flames, a monstrous yellow flower blossoming in the middle of the sea, with a volcano for a stem.
“And after all I’ve seen nothing more marvellous than Antibes outlined against the Alps at sunset.
“I don’t know why my mind is haunted by echoes of old tales: lines of Homer are ringing in my head: it’s an old Eastern town, a town from the Odyssey, it’s Troy, although Troy was not on the sea.”
M. Martini drew his Sarty guide from his pocket and read:
“The town had its beginnings in a colony founded by the Phoenicians from Marseilles, towards 340 BC. They gave it the Greek name of Antipolis, that is to say, ‘Against-town,’ a town facing another, because it did actually face Nice, another Marseilles colony.
“After the conquest of Gaul the Romans made Antibes a city; its inhabitants enjoyed the rights of Roman citizenship.
“We know, by one of Martial’s epigrams, that in his time …”
He was going on. I interrupted him: “I don’t care what it was. I tell you that I am looking down at a town from the Odyssey. Asiatic or European coast, the coasts of both are alike; and the coast on the other side of the Mediterranean is not the one that stirs in me, as this one does, a dream of old heroic days.”
A sound made me turn round; a woman, a tall, dark-skinned woman, was walking along the road that runs beside the sea towards the headland.
M. Martini murmured, sounding the final sibilants of the name: “That’s Mme. Parisse, you know.”
No, I didn’t know, but the chance sound of this name, the name of the Trojan shepherd, deepened my illusion.
“Who is this Mme. Parisse?” I asked, however.
He seemed amazed that I did not know the story.
I swore that I didn’t know it; and I looked at the woman who walked dreamily past without seeing us, walking gravely and slowly as the women of the old world must have walked. She must have been about thirty-five years old and she was still beautiful, very beautiful, although a little stout.
And this is the story that M. Martini told me.
II
Mme. Parisse, a young girl of the Combelombe family, had married, one year before the war of 1870, a Government official called M. Parisse. She was then a beautiful young girl, as slender and merry as she was now stout and sad.
She had reluctantly accepted M. Parisse, who was one of those potbellied, short-legged little men who mince along in trousers that are always cut too wide.
After the war, Antibes was occupied by a single infantry regiment commanded by M. Jean de Carmelin, a young officer who had been decorated during the campaign and who had just become a major.
As he was bored to death in this fortress, in this stifling molehill shut in between its double rampart of enormous walls, the major formed the habit of walking on the headland, a sort of park or pine wood lashed by all the sea winds.
He met Mme. Parisse there; she too came, on summer evenings, for a breath of fresh air under the trees. How did they fall in love? Who could say? They met, they looked at each other, and out of each other’s sight doubtless they thought of one another. The image of the young woman, brown eyed, black-haired, pale-skinned, the beautiful glowing Southern woman who showed her teeth when she smiled, hovered before the eyes of the officer as he continued his walk, chewing his cigar instead of smoking it; and the image of the major in his tight-fitting tunic, scarlet-trousered and covered with gold lace, his fair moustache curling above his lip, must have flitted past the eyes of Mme. Parisse in the evening when her husband, badly shaven and badly dressed, short-limbed and paunchy, came home to supper.
Perhaps they smiled, seeing each other again, meeting so often; and seeing each other so often, they began to fancy that they knew each other. He must have saluted her. She was surprised and bowed, ever so slightly, just enough not to seem discourteous. But at the end of a fortnight she was returning his greeting from afar, before ever they had drawn near each other.
He spoke to her! Of what? Probably of the sunset. And they admired it together, looking into each other’s eyes oftener than at the horizon. And every evening for a fortnight
