Sunday Read Online Free PDF

with him than his mother had been.
    One day when he opened the bathroom door he had surprised Berthe stepping out of the bath, her body pink and dripping with water, and he had had the same feeling of embarrassment as when, on two or three occasions, he had seen his sister undressed.
    He had felt no real desire nor even wish for any of this, neither the Riviera nor Berthe. Chance had placed him in this house, which had become his, almost without his realizing it. Belonging to a different generation from Big Louis, he had adapted himself better and had discovered the market at Cannes, the fishing folk, the games of bowls; he had even acquired something of the local accent.
    He had gradually changed the menus and the decoration.
    And then, the first winter after her husband's death, Madame Harnaud began to drop increasingly transparent hints to him.
    At first it had been:
    'I shall never be able to get used to this country . . .'
    It was no matter that it rained less than in Vendée: the rain here upset her more than the rain in her own part of the world, and, from her chair in the window, she would stare stony-eyed at the sky.
    The cold also seemed more insidious to her, and she complained of pains in her back, in her neck, in her legs.
    Maubi was already at work on the vines, the kitchen garden and the farmyard, for Big Louis had bought, with the house, a sizable piece of land.
    'That man steals from us. Our fruit costs double what it does in the market. You'll see, Emile, as far as these people are concerned, we will never be anything but strangers good for fleecing . . .'
    She used to write a lot to one of her sisters who was a widow, at Luçon, and who lived with her daughter, still a spinster at forty. In her heart of hearts she dreamed of going to join the two women. She did not refer to it at this stage, but she was preparing the ground.
    'If only I could sell La Bastide again!'
    It was too soon to think of that. They had sunk too much money in it and the business was not firmly established enough to tempt amateurs. While through the agencies they would recover practically nothing.
    Emile was beginning to recognize the pattern. Big Louis was not the only one to have let himself be lured. Hundreds, thousands of others like him, who, after an active, often hard life, hoped for semi-retirement, had yielded to the temptation of the Riviera and put all their savings into an inn, a restaurant, a cafe or some kind of business or other.
    Most of them brazened it out and pretended to be satisfied, but one could see them wandering, in the evening, along the Croisette or around the port, like perpetual strangers.
    They did not belong to the district and yet they were not tourists either.
    'If only,' sighed Madame Harnaud, 'Berthe could marry somebody in the trade!'
    Berthe seemed to escape the torments of other young girls and had no adventures. As soon as she got a moment to herself she would read, alone in the corner, deaf to all that was being said around her.
    It had taken some time. And it had required an attack of bronchitis, in the depths of January, when the mistral was blowing from morning till night, for Madame Harnaud to make up her mind to speak out more clearly.
    'If I don't go back there,' she groaned, 'I feel in my bones that I shall follow my poor Louis, and it won't be long before I join him in the cemetery. When I think of him buried in a country which is not his own!'
    She was forgetting that it was she who had decided on this.
    'My sister insists that I should go and live with her. That's impossible so long as I'm not reassured about what will become of Berthe and La Bastide . . .'
    Emile, who had taken her meaning, was not enthusiastic. For weeks, he had turned a deaf ear, occasionally looking at the young girl furtively and wondering whether, all things considered, the game was worth the candle.
    'You will have to get married one day, Emile . . .'
    The truth is that he had become attached to La Bastide,