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    Tender Is The Night - Fitzgerald
    Tender Is The Night - Fitzgerald
    Tender Is The Night - Fitzgerald
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    Tender Is The Night - Fitzgerald

    By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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    "Tender is the Night" is F. Scott Fitzgerald's fourth and final completed novel, narrating the tragic story of Dick Diver, a young and brilliant psychiatrist whose career is interrupted when he marries the wealthy Nicole Warren, one of his patients. In this work, Fitzgerald addresses themes such as alcoholism, human depravity, psychoanalysis, loneliness, adultery, among others. "Tender is the Night" is considered by Scott Fitzgerald as his best literary work, and in 1998, the Modern Library ranked it 28th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

     
     
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLebooks Editora
    Release dateMar 14, 2024
    ISBN9786558943310
    Tender Is The Night - Fitzgerald
    Author

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term which he popularized. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he temporarily achieved popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald only received wide critical and popular acclaim after his death. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

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      Book preview

      Tender Is The Night - Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald

      cover.jpg

       F. Scott Fitzgerald

      TENDER IS THE NIGHT

      First Edition

      img1.jpg

      Contents

      INTRODUCTION

      BOOK 1

      BOOK 2

      BOOK 3

      INTRODUCTION

      img2.jpg

      Francis Fitzgerald

      1896 – 1940

      Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, born in Saint Paul in 1896 and passed away in Hollywood in 1940, was an American writer considered the foremost literary interpreter of the so-called Jazz Age of the 1920s in his country. He grew up in an Irish Catholic family, studied at Princeton University without graduating, and later enlisted in the army to participate in World War I.

      With his initial novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald gained great popularity, allowing him to publish his short stories in prestigious magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, and become one of the most representative figures of the American Dream of the 1920s. He moved to France with his wife, Zelda Sayre, a fundamental character for Fitzgerald, both in happiness and misery, as she was his inspiration and companion during the glorious decade they lived, and the focus of his concerns from 1930 onwards, when he sank into alcoholism and she into dementia (she died in the fire of the clinic where she was confined in 1948), and both had to face the consequences of failure and poverty.

      In France, he finished writing what is considered his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), the story of the success and subsequent decline of a bootlegger during Prohibition, who fabricates an aristocratic identity and from there lives as a ghost in a mansion, dedicating all his strength and money to winning the woman he loves. Fitzgerald described in its pages an archetype that was emerging at that time in the United States: the individual of low class and moral stature who uses any means at his disposal to succeed.

      However, despite his stature, the character is haloed by a romantic aura, as often happens with the author's protagonists and even with his literary style, as his prose is both realistic and direct but does not renounce the subtleties of an elegant construction. He also cultivated the short story genre, and some of his stories are considered anthological within English literature: certain tales can be classified in the horror genre, reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, and in others, he directs his sarcastic efficiency against the powerful class.

      F. Scott Fitzgerald also wrote two other great novels, Tender Is the Night (1934), which he considered the culmination of his work, and the posthumous and unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941), where he recounts the most miserable aspects of the Hollywood scene, which he knew so well, since in the years of ruin that preceded his death, he worked as an anonymous screenwriter for the film industry.

      His equally posthumous and testimonial book, The Crack-Up (published in 1945 by Edmund Wilson), is the chilling and beautifully unhappy chronicle of his disintegration as a man and writer, where he revisits himself and the abyssal causes that led to his downfall. The first sentence of this essay-story is so clear that it stands as a manifesto: All life is a process of demolition.

      About the book

      Tender Is the Night is Fitzgerald's most humane and complex novel, as well as the closest to the reading public, as it deals with crucial life issues. It tells the story of Dick and Nicole Diver, a young American couple, in the glamorous setting of the French Riviera, the epicenter of the roaring twenties' glamour.

      Those who encounter the couple, fascinated by their charm, try to follow in their footsteps, impressed by the aura of satisfaction and modernity they exude. Dick Diver is a brilliant psychiatrist who marries his patient, Nicole, a wealthy and attractive young woman. Suddenly, Dick finds himself caught in a complicated relationship with his wife and meets Rosemary, a younger actress, whom he falls in love with, making her his lover. However, Dick cannot avoid the decline of that initial charm with which he once shone. From then on, his life will spiral down a slope marked by small miseries that tarnish both his personal relationships and love.

      Fitzgerald recreated in Tender Is the Night the bitter experiences that took him eight years to write. His wife Zelda's institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital and the descent into hell of what was then the most fashionable couple, who had everything to be happy, accelerated his self-destructive urges.

      Through his character Dick Diver, Fitzgerald attempts to understand the nuances of life: the intrusion of a lover into a renowned marriage, his destructive relationships with money and alcohol, and the impossible pursuit of emotional balance. For Fitzgerald, once the line between lucidity and madness is crossed, anything can happen, even roles can be reversed, and balance can end in pure emotional bankruptcy. In the words of Zelda Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night is a portrait of destructive opulence and thwarted idealism.

      TENDER IS THE NIGHT

      BOOK 1

      1

      On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. 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. 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.

      The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. 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. 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. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. 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.

      A 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. 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. However, one's eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood — she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

      As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line the mother said:

      Something tells me we're not going to like this place.

      I want to go home anyhow, the girl answered.

      They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact — moreover, just any direction would not do. They wanted high excitement, not from the necessity of stimulating jaded nerves but with the avidity of prize-winning schoolchildren who deserved their vacations.

      We'll stay three days and then go home. I'll wire right away for steamer tickets.

      At the hotel the girl made the reservation in idiomatic but rather flat French, like something remembered. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked into the glare of the French windows and out a few steps onto the stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel. When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer, not slumped down on her hips but held up in the small of her back. Out there the hot light clipped close her shadow and she retreated — it was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine; below the balustrade a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive.

      Indeed, of all the region only the beach stirred with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation; closer to the sea a dozen persons kept house under striped umbrellas, while their dozen children pursued unintimidated fish through the shallows or lay naked and glistening with coconut oil out in the sun.

      As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea with exultant cries. Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed. She floated face down for a few yards and finding it shallow staggered to her feet and plodded forward, dragging slim legs like weights against the resistance of the water. When it was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her attentively. As Rosemary returned the gaze the man dislodged the monocle, which went into hiding amid the facetious whiskers of his chest and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.

      Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam a choppy little four-beat crawl out to the raft. The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it. Reaching the raft she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore. The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out.

      I say — they have sharks out behind the raft. He was of indeterminate nationality but spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl. Yesterday they devoured two British sailors from the flotte at Golfe Juan.

      Heavens! exclaimed Rosemary.

      They come in for the refuse from the flotte.

      Glazing his eyes to indicate that he had only spoken in order to warn her, he minced off two steps and poured himself another drink.

      Not unpleasantly self-conscious, since there had been a slight sway of attention toward her during this conversation, Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously, each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back and forth—the atmosphere of a community upon which it would be presumptuous to intrude. Farther up, where the beach was strewn with pebbles and dead sea-weed, sat a group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously less indigenous to the place. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand.

      Lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet skirt her body and their shapes pass between the sun and herself. The breath of an inquisitive dog blew warm and nervous on her neck; she could feel her skin broiling a little in the heat and hear the small exhausted wa-waa of the expiring waves. Presently her ear distinguished individual voices and she became aware that someone referred to scornfully as that North guy had kidnapped a waiter from a café in Cannes last night in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously a relic of the previous evening, for a tiara still clung to her head and a discouraged orchid expired from her shoulder. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her and her companions, turned away.

      Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a list of things from a book open on the sand. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful. Her eyes met Rosemary's but did not see her. Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the raft, and who looked back at her, seeing her; then a man with a long face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights and no hat, talking very seriously to an unmistakably Latin young man in black tights, both of them picking at little pieces of seaweed in the sand. She thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known of late.

      After a while she realized that the man in the jockey cap was giving a quiet little performance for this group; he moved gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension by his grave face. Its faintest ramification had become hilarious, until whatever he said released a burst of laughter. Even those who, like herself, were too far away to hear, sent out antennae of attention until the only person on the beach not caught up in it was the young woman with the string of pearls. Perhaps from modesty of possession she responded to each salvo of amusement by bending closer over her list.

      The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.

      You are a ripping swimmer.

      She demurred.

      Jolly good. My name is Campion. Here is a lady who says she saw you in Sorrento last week and knows who you are and would so like to meet you.

      Glancing around with concealed annoyance Rosemary saw the untanned people were waiting. Reluctantly she got up and went over to them.

      "Mrs. Abrams — Mrs. McKisco — Mr. McKisco — Mr. Dumphry—

      We know who you are, spoke up the woman in evening dress. You're Rosemary Hoyt and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you're perfectly marvelous and we want to know why you're not back in America making another marvelous moving picture.

      They made a superfluous gesture of moving over for her. The woman who had recognized her was not a Jewess, despite her name. She was one of those elderly good sports preserved by an imperviousness to experience and a good digestion into another generation.

      We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day, she continued cheerily, because your skin is important, but there seems to be so darn much formality on this beach that we didn't know whether you'd mind.

      2

      We thought maybe you were in the plot, said Mrs. McKisco. She was a shabby-eyed, pretty young woman with a disheartening intensity. We don't know who's in the plot and who isn't. One man my husband had been particularly nice to turned out to be a chief character — practically the assistant hero.

      The plot? inquired Rosemary, half understanding. Is there a plot?

      My dear, we don't know, said Mrs. Abrams, with a convulsive, stout woman's chuckle. We're not in it. We're the gallery.

      Mr. Dumphry, a tow-headed effeminate young man, remarked: Mama Abrams is a plot in herself, and Campion shook his monocle at him, saying: Now, Royal, don't be too ghastly for words. Rosemary looked at them all uncomfortably, wishing her mother had come down here with her. She did not like these people, especially in her immediate comparison of them with those who had interested her at the other end of the beach. Her mother's modest but compact social gift got them out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly. But Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months, and sometimes the French manners of her early adolescence and the democratic manners of America, these latter superimposed, made a certain confusion and let her in for just such things.

      Mr. McKisco, a scrawny, freckle-and-red man of thirty, did not find the topic of the plot amusing. He had been staring at the sea—now after a swift glance at his wife he turned to Rosemary and demanded aggressively:

      Been here long?

      Only a day.

      Oh.

      Evidently feeling that the subject had been thoroughly changed, he looked in turn at the others.

      Going to stay all summer? asked Mrs. McKisco, innocently. If you do you can watch the plot unfold.

      For God's sake, Violet, drop the subject! exploded her husband. Get a new joke, for God's sake!

      Mrs. McKisco swayed toward Mrs. Abrams and breathed audibly:

      He's nervous.

      I'm not nervous, disagreed McKisco. It just happens I'm not nervous at all.

      He was burning visibly—a grayish flush had spread over his face, dissolving all his expressions into a vast ineffectuality. Suddenly remotely conscious of his condition he got up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and seizing the opportunity Rosemary followed.

      Mr. McKisco drew a long breath, flung himself into the shallows and began a stiff-armed batting of the Mediterranean, obviously intended to suggest a crawl—his breath exhausted he arose and looked around with an expression of surprise that he was still in sight of shore.

      I haven't learned to breathe yet. I never quite understood how they breathed. He looked at Rosemary inquiringly.

      I think you breathe out under water, she explained. And every fourth beat you roll your head over for air.

      The breathing's the hardest part for me. Shall we go to the raft?

      The man with the leonine head lay stretched out upon the raft, which tipped back and forth with the motion of the water. As Mrs. McKisco reached for it a sudden tilt struck her arm up roughly, whereupon the man started up and pulled her on board.

      I was afraid it hit you. His voice was slow and shy; he had one of the saddest faces Rosemary had ever seen, the high cheekbones of an Indian, a long upper lip, and enormous deep-set dark golden eyes. He had spoken out of the side of his mouth, as if he hoped his words would reach Mrs. McKisco by a circuitous and unobtrusive route; in a minute he had shoved off into the water and his long body lay motionless toward shore.

      Rosemary and Mrs. McKisco watched him. When he had exhausted his momentum, he abruptly bent double, his thin thighs rose above the surface, and he disappeared totally, leaving scarcely a fleck of foam behind.

      He's a good swimmer, Rosemary said.

      Mrs. McKisco's answer came with surprising violence.

      Well, he's a rotten musician. She turned to her husband, who after two unsuccessful attempts had managed to climb on the raft, and having attained his balance was trying to make some kind of compensatory flourish, achieving only an extra stagger. I was just saying that Abe North may be a good swimmer but he's a rotten musician.

      Yes, agreed McKisco, grudgingly. Obviously, he had created his wife's world, and allowed her few liberties in it.

      Antheil's my man. Mrs. McKisco turned challengingly to Rosemary, Anthiel and Joyce. I don't suppose you ever hear much about those sorts of people in Hollywood, but my husband wrote the first criticism of Ulysses that ever appeared in America.

      I wish I had a cigarette, said McKisco calmly. That's more important to me just now.

      He's got insides — don't you think so, Albert?

      Her voice faded off suddenly. The woman of the pearls had joined her two children in the water, and now Abe North came up under one of them like a volcanic island, raising him on his shoulders. The child yelled with fear and delight and the woman watched with a lovely peace, without a smile.

      Is that his wife? Rosemary asked.

      No, that's Mrs. Diver. They're not at the hotel. Her eyes, photographic, did not move from the woman's face. After a moment she turned vehemently to Rosemary.

      Have you been abroad before?

      Yes — I went to school in Paris.

      Oh! Well then you probably know that if you want to enjoy yourself here the thing is to get to know some real French families. What do these people get out of it? She pointed her left shoulder toward shore. They just stick around with each other in little cliques. Of course, we had letters of introduction and met all the best French artists and writers in Paris. That made it very nice.

      I should think so.

      My husband is finishing his first novel, you see.

      Rosemary said: Oh, he is? She was not thinking anything special, except wondering whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.

      It's on the idea of Ulysses, continued Mrs. McKisco. Only instead of taking twenty-four hours my husband takes a hundred years. He takes a decayed old French aristocrat and puts him in contrast with the mechanical age

      Oh, for God's sake, Violet, don't go telling everybody the idea, protested McKisco. I don't want it to get all around before the book's published.

      Rosemary swam back to the shore, where she threw her peignoir over her already sore shoulders and lay down again in the sun. The man with the jockey cap was now going from umbrella to umbrella carrying a bottle and little glasses in his hands; presently he and his friends grew livelier and closer together and now they were all under a single assemblage of umbrellas — she gathered that someone was leaving and that this was a last drink on the beach. Even the children knew that excitement was generating under that umbrella and turned toward it — and it seemed to Rosemary that it all came from the man in the jockey cap.

      Noon dominated sea and sky — even the white line of Cannes, five miles off, had faded to a mirage of what was fresh and cool; a robin-breasted sailing boat pulled in behind it a strand from the outer, darker sea. It seemed that there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast except under the filtered sunlight of those umbrellas, where something went on amid the color and the murmur.

      Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep; then she half-opened them and watched two dim, blurred pillars that were legs. The man tried to edge his way into a sand-colored cloud, but the cloud floated off into the vast hot sky. Rosemary fell really asleep.

      She awoke drenched with sweat to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jockey cap, who was folding a last umbrella. As Rosemary lay blinking, he walked nearer and said:

      I was going to wake you before I left. It's not good to get too burned right away.

      Thank you. Rosemary looked down at her crimson legs.

      Heavens!

      She laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk, but Dick Diver was already carrying a tent and a beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went into the water to wash off the sweat. He came back and gathering up a rake, a shovel, and a sieve, stowed them in a crevice of a rock. He glanced up and down the beach to see if he had left anything.

      Do you know what time it is? Rosemary asked.

      It's about half-past one.

      They faced the seascape together momentarily.

      It's not a bad time, said Dick Diver. It's not one of worst times of the day.

      He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. Then he shouldered his last piece of junk and went up to his car, and Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her peignoir and walked up to the hotel.

      3

      It was almost two when they went into the dining-room. Back and forth over the deserted tables a heavy pattern of beams and shadows swayed with the motion of the pines outside. Two waiters, piling plates and talking loud Italian, fell silent when they came in and brought them a tired version of the table d'hôte luncheon.

      I fell in love on the beach, said Rosemary.

      Who with?

      First with a whole lot of people who looked nice. Then with one man.

      Did you talk to him?

      Just a little. Very handsome. With reddish hair. She was eating, ravenously. He's married though — it's usually the way.

      Her mother was her best friend and had put every last possibility into the guiding of her, not so rare a thing in the theatrical profession, but rather special in that Mrs. Elsie Speers was not recompensing herself for a defeat of her own. She had no personal bitterness or resentments about life—twice satisfactorily married and twice widowed, her cheerful stoicism had each time deepened. One of her husbands had been a cavalry officer and one an army doctor, and they both left something to her that she tried to present intact to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had made her hard—by not sparing her own labor and devotion she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, which at present was directed toward herself and saw the world through her eyes. So that while Rosemary was a simple child she was protected by a double sheath of her mother's armor and her own — she had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar. However, with Rosemary's sudden success in pictures Mrs. Speers felt that it was time she were spiritually weaned; it would please rather than pain her if this somewhat bouncing, breathless and exigent idealism would focus on something except herself.

      Then you like it here? she asked.

      It might be fun if we knew those people. There were some other people, but they weren't nice. They recognized me — no matter where we go everybody's seen 'Daddy's Girl.'

      Mrs. Speers waited for the glow of egotism to subside; then she said in a matter-of-fact way: That reminds me, when are you going to see Earl Brady?

      I thought we might go this afternoon — if you're rested.

      You go — I'm not going.

      We'll wait till to-morrow then.

      I want you to go alone. It's only a short way — It isn't as if you didn't speak French.

      Mother — aren't there some things I don't have to do?

      Oh, well then go later — but some day before we leave.

      All right, Mother.

      After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travelers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.

      Let's only stay three days, Mother, Rosemary said when they were back in their rooms. Outside a light wind blew the heat around, straining it through the trees and sending little hot gusts through the shutters.

      How about the man you fell in love with on the beach?

      I don't love anybody but you, Mother, darling.

      Rosemary stopped in the lobby and spoke to Gausse père about trains. The concierge, lounging in light-brown khaki by the desk, stared at her rigidly, then suddenly remembered the manners of his métier. She took the bus and rode with a pair of obsequious waiters to the station, embarrassed by their deferential silence, wanting to urge them: Go on, talk, enjoy yourselves. It doesn't bother me.

      The first-class compartment was stifling; the vivid advertising cards of the railroad companies — The Pont du Gard at Arles, the Amphitheatre at Orange, winter sports at Chamonix — were fresher than the long motionless sea outside. Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.

      A dozen cabbies slept in their hacks outside the Cannes station. Over on the promenade the Casino, the smart shops, and the great hotels turned blank iron masks to the summer sea. It was unbelievable that there could ever have been a season, and Rosemary, half in the grip of fashion, became a little self-conscious, as though she were displaying an unhealthy taste for the moribund; as though people were wondering why she was here in the lull between the gaiety of last winter and next winter, while up north the true world thundered by.

      *

      As she came out of a drug store with a bottle of coconut oil, a woman, whom she recognized as Mrs. Diver, crossed her path with arms full of sofa cushions, and went to a car parked down the street. A long, low black dog barked at her, a dozing chauffeur woke with a start. She sat in the car, her lovely face set, controlled, her eyes brave and watchful, looking straight ahead toward nothing. Her dress was bright red and her brown legs were bare. She had thick, dark, gold hair like a chow's.

      With half an hour to wait for her train Rosemary sat down in the Café des Alliés on the Croisette, where the trees made a green twilight over the tables and an orchestra wooed an imaginary public of cosmopolites with the Nice Carnival Song and last year's American tune. She had bought Le Temps and The Saturday Evening Post for her mother, and as she drank her citronade she opened the latter at the memoirs of a Russian princess, finding the dim conventions of the nineties realer and nearer than the headlines of the French paper. It was the same feeling that had oppressed her at the hotel —accustomed to seeing the starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as comedy or tragedy, untrained to the task of separating out the essential for herself, she now began to feel that French life was empty and stale. This feeling was surcharged by listening to the sad tunes of the orchestra, reminiscent of the melancholy music played for acrobats in vaudeville. She was glad to go back to Gausse's Hotel.

      Her shoulders were too burned to swim with the next day, so she and her mother hired a car — after much haggling, for Rosemary had formed her valuations of money in France — and drove along the Riviera, the delta of many rivers. The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names — Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo—began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha's eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast — their closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes they favored were put away until their return. We'll be back next season, they said, but this was premature, for they were never coming back anymore.

      It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark. It was pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, and to hear the fierce mechanical pianos behind the vines of country estaminets. When they turned off the Corniche d'Or and down to Gausse's Hotel through the darkening banks of trees, set one behind another in many

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