HELL.
I am sitting in a restaurant in the town of ———, at the seaside. It is the height of the bathing season, the carnival of salt and fresh water, and the whole world is forgetting the labour and unpleasantnesses of city life for a few weeks.
I am waiting for my breakfast, seated at a table just outside the house, under an arbour of vines and convolvulus. The sea breeze reaches me, plays with my tablecloth and sports with my hair, uniting itself to the perfume of flowers which peep up, red, white, and violet, happy also in the midst of all the sunshine, greenery, and freshness.
Nearly all the tables, scattered about under the arbours or in the shade of the trees, are surrounded by happy people who have just taken their baths, fresh, with disordered hair, hungry and merry. Even human life has its good quarters of an hour.
Near me I see a teacher to whom two girls of about ten and twelve have been intrusted, and who, faithful to her trust, is giving them a noisy lesson in morality and gallantry, whilst she eats and drinks as if she were starving. I cannot imagine how she does it, but she manages not to interrupt her educational discourse, whilst she never ceases to eat and drink. The pupils do not listen to her, but look at each other, slyly laughing at the inexhaustible conversation of their instructress. A little further off there are three young fellows who, having passed their examinations well, have been rewarded by a visit to the seaside. They are laughing, noisy, and giddy with youth, thoughtless, envying no living soul. One of them has just finished his breakfast, and in order to pay his bill of one franc fifty centimes he brings out a red banknote of a hundred francs, and offers it to the waiter with great pride, and in such a way that everyone can see it. It is the first he has ever had, and already that morning he has offered it at the coffeehouse to pay fifteen centimes, and at the baths to pay for his ticket of fifty centimes. No one would change it, and even the waiter says he has no change; and the young fellow is happy, for he will be able to display it a fourth, a fifth, and even a sixth time.
Facing me a whole family of some seven or eight persons are eating merrily, and the children, in a chromatic scale of bright colours and different heights, range from two to fifteen years. Each one is giving utterance to its joy, clambering up and down the chairs, playing with a little dog to which they give the tid-bits on their plates. The father is red, stout, and in his shirt sleeves; he looks smilingly at his blond companion, reading in her smile the reflection of all that lisping chatter, laughter, and folly which surround them.
All these people, differing in age, condition, and intellect, unite in the same merriment, which they seem to have drawn from the sea, the father of planetary life, the dispenser of spirit and energy; and all the while the golden rays of the sun shine through the vine leaves, the ivy, and convolvulus, painting with the shade and penumbra of the leaves the tablecloth, the dresses of the women, and the rosy faces of the children, throwing patches, half shades, and glistening spots on the garden sand.
I, too, a solitary observer, enjoyed all the bright sunshine and the happiness of the people, but forgot that I had only looked to the right and straight before me; I turned calmly to the left, sure of finding there another scene of joy and brightness.
On the contrary, the picture was very different.
At a table just as clean and white as the others, played on capriciously by light and shade, two persons were sitting, a man and a woman.