My Aunt Marguerite and my Uncle Gaston, who with their children were spending the season at Cauterets, had invited my sister and me to join them. A year earlier, I would have been enraptured by the mountain landscape: but now I had withdrawn into myself and the world outside no longer had any effect on me. And besides, I had had too intimate a relationship with nature to be willing to see it brought down to the level of a summer attraction, as it was here. It was served up to me on a plate, and I was not allowed the necessary leisure or solitude to get close to it: if I couldn’t give myself up to it, it would give me nothing. Pine forests and mountain torrents meant nothing to me. We went on excursions to the Gavarnie amphitheatre and the Lac de Gaube, where my cousin Jeanne took snapshots: all I saw were mournful dioramas. These uselessly elaborate surroundings could not distract me from my grief any more than could the hideous spectacle of the hotels planted along the village streets.