Tender is the Night Book 1, Chapter 3

At almost two, Rosemary and her mother went to the dining room for lunch. Rosemary informed her mother that she had fallen in love at the beach.

Topic Tracking: Love 1

Her mother inquired whether she spoke to him, and Rosemary said that she had, just a little, and that he was very handsome with reddish hair, but married, as usual. Rosemary's mother was her best friend, and she had put every effort into guiding her. She, Mrs. Elsie Speers, had no personal resentments or bitterness about life, and had been twice satisfactorily married and twice widowed. One of her husbands was a cavalry officer and one an army doctor. She had not spared Rosemary, and had thus made her hard. By not sparing her own labor and devotion, she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, "so that while Rosemary was a 'simple' child she was protected by a double sheath of her mother's armor and her own - she had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar." Book 1, Chapter 3, pg. 13

Mrs. Speers then asked Rosemary if she liked it at Gausse's hotel, and Rosemary said that it might be fun if she knew those people, but that the people who spoke with her were not very nice. Then, she complained that they recognized her, and that everybody had seen "Daddy's Girl". Mrs. Speers waited until Rosemary's egotism subsided and then asked when she was going to go see Earl Brady. They decided that they would definitely see him some day before they left.

Rosemary then took the bus to the train station, and felt uncomfortable by the people staring at her silently. On the train, the first class compartment was filled with advertising and had its own atmosphere, created by the people in it who were scornful of the world around them which was less swift. At the station in Cannes, a dozen cab drivers slept.

As she came out of drug the store with a bottle of coconut oil, she saw Mrs. Diver, arms full of sofa-cushions, go to a car where a black dog was barking. The car's chauffeur woke with a start, and Mrs. Diver sat in the car, looking bravely straight ahead toward nothing, wearing a bright red dress, with her thick, dark, gold hair. Having half an hour left to wait for her train, Rosemary sat down in the Café des Allies, and starting reading The Saturday Evening Post, which she had bought for her mother, as she drank her lemonade. She had also bought Le Temps, but she found the memoirs of a Russian princess in The Saturday Evening Post more appealing. Being used to everything being either tragic or comic, she found the French life empty and stale. This was accentuated by the sad tunes of the orchestra playing. She was glad that she was returning to Gausse's Hotel.

Her shoulders were too burned to swim the next day, so she and her mother hired a car and drove along the Riviera. The chauffeur, a Russian Czar from the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a fabulous guide who knew of all the kings and rajahs who had come to the area for several reasons, and brought the names of different towns and places to life.