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They were then a truly charming pair and pleasant to see, the Prince rather bothered by too tight a wedding ring, his Princess rather cross and diffident, her clear gaze resting on the other young women with a jealous suspicion that her silent graciousness could not fully conceal.
    The Princess of Piedmont also had looked sad and downcast the last time I had seen her. How different from the first time I had met her at a dance in Turin, all dressed in white, sweet and splendid. It was one of the first dances she attended in Italy after her wedding; she entered, and it seemed as if she penetrated our lives softly like a secret image. How different she was now from the person I used to meet in Florence or at Forte dei Marmi; whom I sometimes surprised in Capri on the rocks or in the grottos of the Marina Piccola toward the Faraglioni. Now there was something humiliated—even in her.
    I had become aware of it a few years before on the Côte d'Azur. I was sitting one evening with some friends close to the swimming pool on the terrace of Monte Carlo Beach. On the stage of the open air theater rhythmically rose and fell a wavering fringe of bare legs of a famous troupe of New York chorus girls. It was a warm night, the sea stretched out on the rocks and slumbered. Toward midnight the Princess of Piedmont appeared. With her was a relative of the Royal family, Count Gregorio Calvi di Bergolo, and after a while she sent Calvi to invite us to her table. The Princess was silent. She watched the show with a strangely concentrated gaze; the orchestra played "Stormy Weather" and "Singing in the Rain." After a while she turned to me and asked when I would return to Turin. I replied that I would never return to Italy, unless things changed. She gave me a long, silent, sad look.
    "Do you remember the other night at Vence?" she asked suddenly.
    A few days earlier I had gone up to Vence to carry the greetings of Roger Cornaz, the French translator of D. H. Lawrence, to two young American girls who were famous at the time throughout the Côte d'Azur for certain "sacred dances" they performed. The two American girls lived alone in a small old house, extremely poor and apparently happy. The younger one resembled Renée Vivien. They told me that they were expecting the Princess of Piedmont that evening. While the younger one concealed behind a dusty curtain prepared for her dance, and her friend selected records and wound the gramophone, the Princess of Piedmont entered accompanied by Gregorio Calvi and several others. At first I did not discern any change in her, but gradually I became aware that something was withered, humiliated in her too. The young American who resembled Renée Vivien began dancing in that ill-lit room, low-vaulted like a grotto, on a tiny wooden stage decorated with cloth and paper. It was a pitiful dance, deliciously démodée, "inspired by a fragment of Sappho," her friend explained. At first the dancer appeared to be burning with a pure fire, a blue flame shone in her clear eyes, but after a while she appeared tired, bored. Her friend stared at her with a loving yet commanding look, while she talked softly to the Princess of Piedmont about sacred dances, Plato, and Aphrodite's statues. In the reddish light of two lamps with bell-like shades of purple satin, the dancer moved slowly about the tiny stage and raised and lowered first one leg, then the other, to the husky rhythm of the gramophone, at times lifting her arms and joining her hands over her head, at times letting them drop to her sides with a supreme gesture of abandon, until she stopped, bowed and, saying with childlike simplicity, "I am tired," sat down on a cushion. Her friend took her in her arms calling her petite chérie. She turned to the Princess of Piedmont saying, "Isn't she wonderful?"
    "Do you know what I was thinking the other night while we watched that young American dancing?" the Princess asked me. "I was thinking that her gestures were not pure. I