They paused before a stage in front of a tent set among a group of elm trees. A little group of townsfolk in their best clothes were watching a marionette show that was nearly concluded. Above the tent fluttered long red pennons against the blue sky and gold leaves; the stage was hung at the back with white curtains and in front with a striped tapestry of many colours, on the edge of which, where it trailed in the golden dust, a man in green velvet with a comical painted face sat beating a scarlet drum.
From the back of the tent sounded a brisk, lively music, to which the puppets danced a finale, fluttering their laces and spangles.
Clémence laughed instinctively and laid her hand on Luc’s sleeve.
“Is it not beautiful?” she said. She had never been out of Aix in her life, and never to a fair before: she was only eighteen.
The marionettes disappeared, and a little girl not above six years old sprang on to the stage with a coil of rope in her hand.
“I should like to stay,” said Clémence.
There was a thin semicircle of seats about the stage; at one end of this, in the front, they seated themselves.
The small performer deftly fastened the rope from one end to the other of the stage, about five feet from the ground, and commenced walking across it. She wore an apple-green coloured bodice and a white skirt with a red frill; she had a small, dark face, and frowned down at the rope with her arms spread wide and her body swaying.
Clémence leant forward and watched with grave absorption. Luc looked at her, studied her with covert intensity, which she was too occupied with the performance to notice.
Her face was slightly flushed, the lips parted, the absorbed eyes shaded by the brim of her straw hat; between her warm-coloured, fine neck and the frilled cambric of her fichu rolled a cluster of brown curls that caught the sunlight in threads of gold; her small and helpless-looking hands, covered in fine black silk mittens, were folded in her lap; the full folds of her pale violet silk gown fell over the chair and touched the dust.