A widower, Fran?ois des Ygrées established himself near the principality; on the grounds of Roquebrune; he took pension with a family, which included a pretty brunette called Mia. There he reared the bearer of his own name with the baby-bottle. Often he would go out at dawn for a walk at the sea shore. The road was fringed with amaryllis which he would always compare involuntarily with packages of dried cod. Sometimes, because of the contrary winds, he would turn to light an Egyptian cigarette whose smoke rose in spirals like the bluish mountains emerging far off in Italy.
* * *
The family in whose bosom he had installed himself was composed of the father, the mother and Mia. M. Cecchi, a Corsican, was a croupier at the casino. He had previously been croupier at Baden-Baden and had married a German woman there. Of this union Mia was born; her carnation tint and black hair bespoke her Corsican blood. She was always dressed in buoyant colors. Her walk was balanced, her figure arched; she was smaller at the breast than at the buttocks, and a touch of strabism lent her dark eyes a somewhat distraught look, which only rendered her more tempting.
Her speech was lazy, soft, guttural, but pleasant nevertheless. It was the accent of the Monegascans whose syntax Mia followed. After having seen the young girl gather roses, Fran?ois des Ygrées began to take notice of her and was much amused by her syntax for whose rules he enjoyed making research... First of all, he noticed the italianisms in her vocabulary, and especially the habit of conjugating the verb "to be" with the wrong auxiliary. For example, Mia would say: "Je suis étée," instead of "J'ai été." He also noted her bizarre way of repeating the verb in her principal clause: "I was at the Moulins, while you went to Menton, I was;" or better: "This year I am going to the gingerbread fair at Nice, I am."
One time before sunrise, Fran?ois des Ygrées went down to the garden. He abandoned himself to sweet reveries, during which he caught cold. All of a sudden he began to sneeze about twenty times in succession.
Sneezing aroused him. He saw that the sky had whitened and the horizon cleared with the first light of dawn. Then the first shafts of sunlight enflamed the sky along the Italian coast. Before him spread the still sorrowful sea, and on the horizon, like little clouds above the film of sea, could be seen the curving peaks of Corsica, which always disappeared after the rising of the sun. The baron des Ygrées shivered, then he yawned and stretched himself. He kept on regarding the sea to the east where one might have said there glittered a royal navy in sight of a seaport with white houses, Bodighère, which furnished palms for the festivities of the Vatican. He turned toward the immobile guardian of the garden, a great cypress, begirt with a full-blown rose bush which clambered up almost to its top. Fran?ois des Ygrées breathed of the sumptuous roses of nonpareil fragrance whose petals, as yet closed, were of flesh.
And just then Mia called him to have his breakfast.
With her braid hanging down her back, she had just come to pick some figs and she was letting a few creamy drops flow into a pitcher of milk. She smiled at Fran?ois des Ygrées, saying:
"Have you slept well?"
"No, there are too many mosquitoes."
"Don't you know that when you are stung you should rub the place with lemon and in order not to be stung by them you should put vaseline on your face before going to sleep. They never bite me."
"That would be too bad. For you are very pretty, and ought to be told so oftener."
"There are those who tell me so and others who think so without telling. Those who tell it to me make me neither hot nor cold, as for the others, so much the worse for them..."
And Fran?ois des Ygrées conceived at once a little fable for the timid:
FABLE OF THE OYSTER AND THE HERRING
An oyster dwelt, beautiful and wise, on a rock. She never dreamed of love but during fine weather simply bayed beatifically at the sun. A herring saw her and it was as a spark of powder. He tumbled hopelessly in love with her without daring to avow it.
One summer day, happy and coy, the oyster yawned. Smuggled behind a rock the herring looked on, but all at once the desire to imprint a kiss upon his beloved became so overpowering that he could no longer restrain himself.
And so he threw himself between the open shells of the oyster who in her surprise shut them with a snap, decapitating the wretched herring, whose headless body floats aimlessly upon the ocean.
"'Twas so much the worse for the herring," said Mia laughing, "He was much too foolish. I too want people to tell me that I am pretty, not for fun, but so as we can marry..."
And Fran?ois des Ygrées noted for future consideration her curious peculiarities of syntax: "so as we can marry." ...And he thought further: "She doesn't love me. Macarée dead. Mia indiffer............