before they fade.
Others shed their leaves at once, and then it is more beautiful still
to see the sky strewn with the scattering of their innumerable petals,
sulphurous yellow and rosy red. In that bay, which they call the Opal
Bay, the golden sands appear more charming still from being fastened,
like fair Andromeda, to those terrible rocks of the surrounding coast,
to that funereal shore, famed for the number of its wrecks, where every
winter many a brave vessel falls a victim to the perils of the sea.
Balbec! the oldest bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our
soil, the true Armor, the sea, the land's end, the accursed region
which Anatole France--an enchanter whose works our young friend ought to
read--has so well depicted, beneath its eternal fogs, as though it were
indeed the land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey. Balbec; yes, they
are building hotels there now, superimposing them upon its ancient and
charming soil, which they are powerless to alter; how delightful it is,
down there, to be able to step out at once into regions so primitive and
so entrancing."

"Indeed! And do you know anyone at Balbec?" inquired my father. "This
young man is just going to spend a couple of months there with his
grandmother, and my wife too, perhaps."

Legrandin, taken unawares by the question at a moment when he was
looking directly at my father, was unable to turn aside his gaze, and so
concentrated it with steadily increasing intensity--smiling mournfully
the while--upon the eyes of his questioner, with an air of friendliness
and frankness and of not being afraid to look him in the face, until he
seemed to have penetrated my father's skull, as it had been a ball of
glass, and to be seeing, at the moment, a long way beyond and behind it,
a brightly coloured cloud, which provided him with a mental alibi, and
would enable him to establish the theory that, just when he was
being asked whether he knew anyone at Balbec, he had been thinking
of something else, and so had not heard the question. As a rule these
tactics make the questioner proceed to ask, "Why, what are you thinking
about?" But my father, inquisitive, annoyed, and cruel, repeated: "Have
you friends, then, in that neighbourhood, that you know Balbec so well?"

In a final and desperate effort the smiling gaze of Legrandin struggled
to the extreme limits of its tenderness, vagueness, candour, and
distraction; then feeling, no doubt, that there was nothing left