Madame need not
hesitate to cross her legs, if she found that attitude comfortable;
monsieur could at once remove coat, waist-coat, collar, cuffs, if he
found the weather warm.
Families whose size testified to their bourgeois respectability, lolled
in happy promiscuity upon the sands; the children constructed forts or
canals, the women tore some neighbour's reputation to pieces, the men
lay back lazily and smoked and kept an eye out for the bathers.
There were always many scores of them, belonging principally to that
strange and tragic half-world which hangs suspended, like Mahomet's
coffin, between earth and heaven, or, at least, between mass and class,
and which stretches out its tentacles and sucks nourishment from both.
These with a regularity almost religious, spent an hour of every day,
weather permitting, splashing in the gentle surf or posing on the beach
in costumes more or less revealing, according to the contour of the
wearer. The climax of the afternoon, the coup-de-theatre which all
awaited, was the appearance of Mlle. Paul, late of the Varietes. This
was such a masterpiece in its way that it is worth pausing a moment to
describe.
Suddenly the door of her bathing-machine, which has been drawn just to
the water's edge, is flung open, and she appears on the threshold,
wrapped in a white sheet with a red border, producing a toga-like effect
not ungraceful.
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