The town of Etretat, with its gray rock, its white shingle, and its blue sea, lay resting beneath the blazing sun on one of July's radiant days. Its general aspect was like a crescent, the two ends of its curve terminating in two gateways — one small, the one on the right; the other large, the one on the left — which advanced into the still water, both of them wading in, while a pinnacle rose until it stood level with the cliffs. On its long beach sat a company of summer visitors watching the bathers; and on the terrace of the casino another crowd had gathered, standing or seated, displaying beneath the light of the shining sun a flowering garden of finery, amid which glittered red and blue parasols embroidered with flowers of colored silk. At the far end of the terrace, along the promenade, yet another party of summer folk kept themselves apart, wanting quiet and seeking rest; they timed their slow steps to the music of the waves, far from the press of bodies and the din of voices. Among these was a well-known and gifted young man, the painter Jean Summer. He walked abstracted and downcast beside one of those small carriages used by cripples, pushed slowly and gently by a servant; and in this carriage sat his wife, a girl in the first bloom of life, letting her sad gaze wander over the beauty of the sky, the adornment of the earth, and the gaiety of the people.

The husband and wife went along in this fashion, exchanging neither word nor glance, until the wife said:

"Let us stop a little." So they stopped, and the servant brought the painter a little canvas chair, and he sat down on it. Everyone who passed the silent, silent pair cast on them a look of tenderness and sorrow, for tongues had been busy with the report that an affair of devotion and sacrifice had taken place between them,

since the young man had married her in spite of her lasting infirmity, touched, as it was said, by her love for him. One man said to another — the two were sitting on chairs, letting their eyes roam over the open space:

"No, that is not true. I know Jean Summer very well indeed."

"Then why did he marry her? For she already bore this infirmity at the time of the marriage — is that not so?"

"Yes, it is so; and yet he married her. He married her as people marry — in truth, and in folly."

"And then?"

"And then? There is no then and no before, my friend. A man is a fool because he is a fool. You know that ridiculous marriages are a specialty of painters: they marry very nearly all their models (modèles), and they will marry old mistresses, or feeble-minded ladies — for what reason under the sun? Why? Nobody knows why. One would imagine, on the contrary, that their long familiarity with that breed of women whom people call 'models' would have made them loathe the female sex; instead, after seating them to paint their pictures from them, they marry them. Read the truthful, cruel, beautiful little book that Alphonse Daudet wrote under the title Artists' Wives.

"As for the couple you see there, what happened between them happened in a particular fashion and in a dreadful way.

"That girl played out a farce — or rather, a grievous tragedy. She staked all she possessed to win everything or lose everything. Was she sincere? Did she love Jean? God alone knows that. Who can determine with any finality what is false and what is true in what a woman does? They are always sincere in the visible workings of their emotions and the manifestations of their feel-ings. They are indignant, crim-inal, devoted, generous, or base according to the impulses and impressions that pass through their hearts. They lie perpetually, without wishing to, without knowing, without understanding; and yet, with all that and in spite of it, they have an absolute frankness of sensation and senti-ment, which they show in violent resolutions and decisions — unex-pected, incomprehensible — that defeat our logic of opinion and judgment and our habit of weigh-ing and reconciling. The sudden-ness and violence of their resolves make riddles of them that cannot be solved; and so we never cease asking this question: 'Are they sincere?' 'Are they false?'

"But they are, my friend, sincere and false at one and the same time, because it lies in their nature to be sincere and false to the utmost degree of sincerity and falsehood — or else to be nothing of either at all.

"Look at the means by which the most honorable of women contrive to get from us what they want, and you will find them com-plicated and artless: complicated,