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scratching his cheek. The inside of his Tyrolean hat was dark with sweat. Had Armande got his letter?
    Madame Chamar answered in the noncommittal negative—though she might have consulted the telltale book marker, but out of a mother’s instinctive prudence refrained from doing so. Instead she popped the paperback into her garden bag. Automatically, Hugh mentioned that he had recently visited its author.
    “He lives somewhere in Switzerland, I think?”
    “Yes, at Diablonnet, near Versex.”
    “Diablonnet always reminds me of the Russian for ‘apple trees’:
yabloni
. He has a nice house?”
    “Well, we met in Versex, in a hotel, not at his home. I’m told it’s a very large and a very old-fashioned place. We discussed business matters. Of course the house is always full of his rather, well, frivolous guests. I shall wait for a little while and then go.”
    He refused to shed his jacket and relax in a lawn chair alongside Madame Chamar. Too much sun caused his head to swim, he explained.
“Alors allons dans la maison,”
she said, faithfully translating from Russian. Seeing the efforts she was making to rise, Hugh offered to help her; but Madame Chamar bade him sharply stand well away from her chair lest his proximity prove a “psychological obstruction.” Her unwieldy corpulence could be moved only by means of one precise little wiggle; in order to make it she had to concentrate upon the idea of trying to fool gravity until something clicked inwardly and the right jerk happened like the miracle of a sneeze. Meantime she lay in her chair motionless, and as it were ambushed, with brave sweat glistening on her chest and above the purple arches of her pastel eyebrows.
    “This is completely unnecessary,” said Hugh, “I am quite happy to wait here in the shade of a tree, but shade I must have. I never thought it would be so hot in the mountains.”
    Abruptly, Madame Chamar’s entire body gave such astart that the frame of her deck chair emitted an almost human cry. The next moment she was in a sitting position, with both feet on the ground.
    “Everything is well,” she declared cozily, and stood up, now robed in bright terry cloth with the suddenness of a magic metamorphosis. “Come, I want to offer you a nice cold drink and show you my albums.”
    The drink turned out to be a tall faceted glass of tepid tapwater with a spoonful of homemade strawberry jam clouding it a mallowish hue. The albums, four big bound volumes, were laid out on a very low, very round table in the very
moderne
living room.
    “I now leave you for some minutes,” said Madame Chamar, and in full view of the public ascended with ponderous energy the completely visible and audible stairs leading to a similarly overt second floor, where one could see a bed through an open door and a bidet through another. Armande used to say that this product of her late father’s art was a regular showpiece attracting tourists from distant countries such as Rhodesia and Japan.
    The albums were quite as candid as the house, though less depressing. The Armande series, which exclusively interested our
voyeur malgré lui
, was inaugurated by a photograph of the late Potapov, in his seventies, looking very dapper with his gray little imperial and his Chinese house jacket, making the wee myopic sign of the Russian cross over an invisible baby in its deep cot. Not only did the snapshots follow Armande through all the phases of the past and all the improvements of amateur photography, but the girl also came in various states of innocent undress. Her parents and aunts, the insatiable takers of cute pictures, believed in fact that a girl child of ten, the dream of a Lutwidgean, had the same right to total nudity as an infant. The visitor constructed a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest from anybody overhead on the landing, andreturned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber toy to her shiny stomach