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I who dreamed about it all my life and persuaded Louis to come and spend his holidays in Nice . . .'
    As for Berthe, she was just as she was today, as calm, as secretive, as wanting in softness, and yet she was a pretty, fair-haired girl with a well-rounded figure.
    From the first months everything had gone badly for the Harnauds at La Bastide. First of all the famous Van Camp, who had sold them the property and pretended to understand everything better than an architect, had made plans which, when the masons and carpenters tried to execute them, had turned out to be impossible.
    He had not taken into account the slope of the ground nor the distance from the well, nor the thickness of the existing walls, so that they had to undo part of what was already finished, dig a new well, change the position of the septic tank.
    On the pretext that this was the Midi, Van Camp had not allowed for heating, and the very first winter they had been frozen up, in spite of having electric heaters on so that they blew the fuses.
    Finally Big Louis had discovered, at Mouans-Sartoux, a bistrot where at every hour of the day he could find company, and he had switched over from white wine to pastis.
    At this period Ada must have been about nine years old, and if she were already in the neighbourhood, Emile had taken no more notice of her than of the other children he used to see sometimes on the roadside. Nor had he heard any mention of Pascali, who had, however, taken part at one stage in the building operations.
    That the inn had been finished in spite of everything was almost a miracle, and, with Big Louis now incapacitated, there were only the two women left to look after it.
    Big Louis had lived another two years, part of them in his bed, part in the downstairs room or on the terrace, and Emile eventually succeeded in understanding, as Madame Harnaud and Berthe did, the sounds he emitted.
    It was Emile, at that time, who occupied the attic which had now become Ada's room, and there were already the same iron bed, several of the stains on the wall, but not the coloured print of the Virigin Mary.
    At first guests were rare. They had put up a board on the Route Napoleon, with an arrow indicating the way to the hotel. They also advertised in the Nice newspaper and in the folders handed out by the Tourist Bureau in Cannes.
    On some days, however, there was not a soul to be seen. On Saturday evening, Emile would go by bicycle to Cannes or Grasse, where he would have no difficulty in finding a girl to dance with.
    Oddly enough it was about a month before Big Louis' death that, without any reason, business had begun to pick up. People from Cannes, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, started the habit of coming to lunch or dine in small groups at La Bastide. The idea spread, and on Sundays lunches reached the thirty, then the forty, mark.
    Emile, in white cap, was kept busy in the kitchen where a certain Paola, an old woman from the neighbourhood who was Madame Lavaud's predecessor, peeled the vegetables, prepared the fish and washed the dishes, while Berthe supervised the tables.
    Big Louis had died at the height of the season and they had scarcely had time to bury him. After talking of transporting the body to Luçon, Madame Harnaud had finally decided, to avoid complicating matters, to bury him in the cemetery at Mouans-Sartoux.
    They had three residents, including a Swiss woman who had promised to return for a few months each year, and they could not submit them to the sight of a long period of mourning.
    Without noticing it, Emile had become more or less the master of the house, and he had replaced his bicycle with a motor-scooter, until such time as a van could be afforded.
    He had never made any advances to Berthe. It had never occurred to him. Perhaps because he had known her at school, and because she was two years older than he was, he looked upon her rather as an elder sister. Now he had never much liked his sister Odile, who was even more strict