Missed opportunity

Posted on Posted in: Nature, Travel
CameraFujiFilm X100T
Detailsf/2.8, ISO 3200
White balanceDaylight 5500K
Taken3 June 2021, 19:13

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About halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately, it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gauss’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.

A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gauss’s Hotel. The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold.

Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart.

Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood – she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.