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There was a quantity of tables and chairs displayed between the restaurant chalet and the bandstand, a whole raft of painted deals spread out under the trees. In the very middle of it I observed a solitary Swiss couple, whose fate was made secure from the cradle to the grave by the perfected mechanism of democratic institutions in a republic that could almost be held in the palm of ones hand.
Every morning, when he looked out of his window, Vilquin felt a violent shock of annoyance as his eye lighted on the little gem of a building, the Chalet, which had cost sixty thousand francs and sparkled like a ruby in the sun. That comparison is very nearly exact. The architect has constructed the cottage of brilliant red brick pointed with white.
In return, he once arranged one of my airs for wind instruments, and, to my astonishment, it was actually accepted and played by the band in Kintschy's Swiss Chalet.
It occurred to me that, by leaving Les Plans a few days earlier than I had intended, I could take advantage of the new line connecting Chambéry and Grenoble and Valence, and so visit this glacière without making the journey too long; and accordingly I bade farewell to Madame Chérix's comfortable room, leaving my sisters in their quarters in a neighbouring châlet, and started for Geneva.
But now he drew a different moral. He was a German: it was through Germany alone that peace and regeneration could come. His country was purged from her faults, and the marvellous German discipline was about to prove itself in the eye of gods and men. He told her what he had told me in the room at the Pink Chalet, but with another colouring.
On the verandah of a pretty wooden house of the châlet description, stood a lady, shading her eyes from the setting sun, a tall, graceful woman; but as the sun's rays fell on her hair, it revealed silver threads, and the sweet, rather worn face, with a few lines on the forehead, was that of a woman of over forty; and yet she was a woman to whom life's romance had only just come.
The rocks are all calcareous, with large blocks of erratic granite. The glacière lies about 40 minutes from the Châlet of Montarquis, whence its local name of La grand' Cave de Montarquis.
But the quaint, fantastic-looking, one-storeyed châlet amused and rather interested her, for it was so entirely unlike any other dwelling with which she was acquainted.
Farther on, the big, modern hotel, rather like an overgrown Swiss chalet built by Arabs a vast, confused building the colour of sand or brown heather honey, with carved mushrbiyeh work lending an Eastern charm to windows, balconies, and loggias, and enough green, flowery garden to give a sensational effect of contrast with the tidal wave of desert poised ready, it would seem, to overwhelm palms and roses.
The monotonous life in the dainty little Chalet, surrounded by the choice flowers which Dumay cultivated; the family customs, as regular as clock-work, the provincial decorum, the games at whist while the mother knitted and the daughter sewed, the silence, broken only by the roar of the sea in the equinoctial storms, all this monastic tranquillity did in fact hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the spiritual being.
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