, in which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer beneath the limes of Baden, and would find in those years a sad but splendid profundity, such as a poet might have lent to them; and he would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insignificant details that made up the daily round on the Côte d’Azur in those days, if it could have helped him to understand something that still baffled him in the smile or in the eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm than does the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence, so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli. He would sit, often, without saying a word to her, only gazing at her and dreaming; and she would comment: “You do look sad!” It was not very long since, from the idea that she was an excellent creature, comparable to the best women that he had known, he had passed to that of her being “kept”; and yet already, by an inverse process, he had returned from the Odette de Crécy, perhaps too well known to the holidaymakers, to the “ladies’ men” of Nice and Baden, to this face, the expression on which was so often gentle, to this nature so eminently human.