Only two appeared, but they were very remarkable, a man and a
woman--father and daughter. They immediately reminded me of some
of Edgar Poe's characters; and yet there was about them a charm,
the charm associated with misfortune. I looked upon them as the victims
of fate. The man was very tall and thin, rather stooped, with perfectly
white hair, too white for his comparatively youthful physiognomy;
and there was in his bearing and in his person that austerity
peculiar to Protestants. The daughter, who was probably twenty-four
or twenty-five, was small in stature, and was also very thin, very
pale, and she had the air of one who was worn out with utter lassitude.
We meet people like this from time to time, who seem too weak for
the tasks and the needs of daily life, too weak to move about, to
walk, to do all that we do every day. She was rather pretty, with a
transparent, spiritual beauty. And she ate with extreme slowness, as if
she were almost incapable of moving her arms.
It must have been she, assuredly, who had come to take the waters.
They sat facing me, on the opposite side of the table; and I at once
noticed that the father had a very singular, nervous twitching.
Every time he wanted to reach an object, his hand described a sort of
zigzag before it succeeded in reaching what it was in search of, and
after a little while this movement annoyed me so that I turned aside
my head in order not to see it.
I noticed, too, that the young girl, during meals, wore a glove on her
left hand.
After dinner I went for a stroll in the park of the bathing
establishment. This led toward the little Auvergnese station of
Châtel-Guyon, hidden in a gorge at the foot of the high mountain, from
which flowed so many boiling springs, arising from the deep bed of
extinct volcanoes. Over yonder, above our heads, the domes of extinct
craters lifted their ragged peaks above the rest in the long mountain
chain. For Châtel-Guyon is situated at the entrance to the land of
mountain domes.
Beyond it stretches out the region of peaks, and, farther on again,
the region of precipitous summits.
The "Puy de Dôme" is the highest of the domes, the Peak of Sancy is
the loftiest of the peaks, and Cantal is the most precipitous of these
mountain heights.
It was a very warm evening, and I was walking up and down a shady
path, listening to the opening strains of the Casino band, which was
playing on an elevation overlooking the park.
And I saw the father and the daughter advancing slowly in my
direction. I bowed as one bows to one's hotel companions at a watering
place; and the man, coming to a sudden halt, said to me: