De Potter's Grand Tour by Joanna Scott

from inside the villa and watched a black cat that had planted itself on the bottom step of the tower and was picking grit from its paw.
    When Gertrude returned, she wore a halo she’d woven with daisies. She announced that if she could find a way to do it, she, too, would settle permanently in Cannes. “How lucky you are, Auntie,” she declared.
    The girl was right: Aimée was lucky to have found Armand de Potter and to have escaped the provincialism of her friends back home. Because of Armand she had the chance to collect armfuls of carnations, to ride in automobiles through the countryside of Provence, and to preside over Grand Bois. Armand had introduced her to the world across the ocean and made it possible for her to structure her days in such a way that she was continually enthralled. As Madame de Potter, life was never boring. She was reminded of this as she watched Gertrude in her daisy halo trying to catch one of the lizards scurrying up the wall of the Villa Fiorentina clock tower.
    The next morning, Armand left to lead the Classic, Oriental, and Alpine Tour. He prepared for the trip in the usual way, packing his trunk and putting his tickets and passport in order, reviewing his itinerary, reading up on the archaeological sites he planned to visit. Aimée saw him off at the station in Cannes instead of accompanying him to Marseille, since she had a meeting at noon with the architect who was designing the gardener’s cottage. She wrote in her diary that night, propped up in her bed by a pair of tasseled pillows, “A. left today for Naples.” She considered writing a line about the fine coq au vin Felicie had prepared for dinner. Instead she just added, “Cloudy & damp.”
    She kept herself busy visiting and receiving friends, running errands in town, going to the dentist and to church. The weather remained unseasonably cool and rainy, and a flare-up of rheumatism made her fingers stiff. On some days she and Gertrude declined to join friends on excursions and instead stayed home, reading or playing cards by the fire. The builders started digging the cellar for the gardener’s cottage. Several times, often in fog and drizzle, Aimée invited her niece and Miss Plympton to accompany her on a carriage ride down to la Croisette to see the waves crashing against the jetty.
    The weather began to improve toward the end of May. On the first of June Aimée hired a car and took Gertrude and Miss Plympton to Mandelieu to pick up Victor at his school. A few days later they set out on a trip together, traveling through the Vars Valley to Grenoble and Lausanne on a new itinerary Aimée had agreed to test out for De Potter Tours.
    She expected to enjoy herself, but things started to go wrong. The first hotel they stayed at was a musty place, with a nest of scorpions in the closet. Not only did Victor develop a cough and have to spend a day in bed, but poor Miss Plympton didn’t fare well either. In Puget-Théniers she was nearly prostrated by the heat and humidity, and by the time they reached Grenoble she was, as Aimée reported in her diary, “entirely used up.”
    The group arrived in Lausanne on June 10. After suffering the heat on the slow train from Grenoble, Aimée shared Miss Plympton’s exhaustion. She left Victor in Gertrude’s charge and retired to her room right after dinner. She pushed open the shutters that the maid had latched, then sat on the window seat and took out a book. She lost herself in this absorbing fantasy about time travel for several hours, reading straight to the end. Not until several months later, when she was finally returning the book to the shelf at Grand Bois, would she consider the coincidence: while she’d been following the time traveler up to the point when he enters his machine and disappears forever, Armand de Potter had gone missing.

 
    El Kef to Tunis

    Y OU CAN BE SURE that if he were telling this story, he