y without seeing us, dreaming, walking with steady and slow step,
as doubtless the ladies of old walked.

She was perhaps thirty-five years old and still very beautiful, though a
trifle stout.

And Monsieur Martini told me the following story:

Mademoiselle Combelombe was married, one year before the war of 1870, to
Monsieur Parisse, a government official. She was then a handsome young
girl, as slender and lively as she has now become stout and sad.

Unwillingly she had accepted Monsieur Parisse, one of those little fat
men with short legs, who trip along, with trousers that are always too
large.

After the war Antibes was garrisoned by a single battalion commanded by
Monsieur Jean de Carmelin, a young officer decorated during the war, and
who had just received his four stripes.

As he found life exceedingly tedious in this fortress this stuffy
mole-hole enclosed by its enormous double walls, he often strolled out to
the cape, a kind of park or pine wood shaken by all the winds from the
sea.

There he met Madame Parisse, who also came out in the summer evenings to
get the fresh air under the trees. How did they come to love each other?
Who knows? They met, they looked at each other, and when out of sight
they doubtless thought of each other. The image of the young woman with
the brown eyes, the black hair, the pale skin, this fresh, handsome
Southerner, who displayed her teeth in smiling, floated before the eyes
of the officer as he continued his promenade, chewing his cigar instead
of smoking it; and the image of the commanding officer, in his
close-fitting coat, covered with gold lace, and his red trousers, and a
little blond mustache, would pass before the eyes of Madame Parisse, when
her husband, half shaven and ill-clad, short-legged and big-bellied, came
home to supper in the evening.

As they met so often, they perhaps smiled at the next meeting; then,
seeing each other again and again, they felt as if they knew each other.
He certainly bowed to her. And she, surprised, bowed in return, but very,
very slightly, just enough not to appear impolite. But after two weeks
she returned his salutation from a distance, even before they were side
by side.

He spoke to her. Of what? Doubtless of the setting sun. They admired it
together, looking for it in each other's eyes more often than on the
horizon. And every evening for two weeks this was the commonplace and
persistent pretext for a few minutes' chat.

Th