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Updated: May 18, 2025
Hyères, with a semi-invalid, a hospital nurse, and quantities of medicine bottles and draught-protectors, is not the ideal place one reads of in guide-books. Theodora grew to hate the sky and the blue Mediterranean. She used to sit on her balcony at Costebelle and gaze at the olive-trees, and the deep-green velvet patch of firs beyond, towards the sea, and wonder at life.
Down to Hyères we floated again, on the wings of the Aigle, I looking longingly across the valley where the old town climbed a citadeled hill, and lay down at the foot of a sturdy though crumbling castle. If this were really my own tour, as I am trying to play it is, I would have commanded a long stop at Costebelle, to make explorations of the region round about.
There are sacrifices which no man should be called upon to endure, so the naval officer hesitated, and at last directed the porter to put his luggage on the top of the Costebelle Hotel "bus." There would be society at the hotel it is true, but he could avoid it, while if he went to the rural tavern he could not avoid the cooking. Thus he smothered his conscience.
As he expected, he had no difficulty in arranging with the proprietor for the largest of the little cottages, but he thought he detected a slight depression on the right eyelid as that person handed him the key. Had the owner suspected his purpose? he asked himself anxiously, as he drove back from the town to Costebelle. Impossible.
Lunch at Costebelle seemed to justify his choice of an abiding-place. The surroundings of the hotel were dangerously charming to a man whose natural inclination was towards indolent enjoyment. It was a place to "Loaf and invite your soul," as Walt Whitman phrases it.
England would be their destination, but the doctors assured him a month of Paris would break the change of climate with more safety than if they crossed the Channel at once. Costebelle was a fairyland of roses as they drove to the station, and peace had descended upon Theodora. She had fallen into her place, a place occupied by many wives before her with irritable, hypochondriacal husbands.
The Turnours had lunched, if not wisely, probably too well, at Valescure about one o'clock, and it wasn't yet four; but the air at the beautiful Costebelle hotels is said to be perpetually glittering with Royalties and other bright beings of the great world, so her ladyship wouldn't have been persuaded to miss the place.
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