At the base of the peninsula on the right side is the reasonably upscale Le Royal Beach restaurant. The bench itself is basically two slabs of white cement. Behind it stands a tall shard of limestone with a plaque on it that has gone green, as copper does, with age. What I wanted to do all summer was quite simple: to read a particular book, or at least a section of that book, sitting on that particular bench stationed nearby that particular monument. So there I sat a short while ago, bicycle parked on my right, water bottle on the bench beside me, book in my lap.
Being the height of the August holidays, it was hot. The sun scorched down out of the late morning sky. But I could hardly do that. I was due to meet a friend there for lunch later. I leafed through the book to remind myself of its context, squinting through my sunglasses as the sun bounced off its pages. Duel of Wits by Peter Churchill. The book had been translated from its original English, I later learned, under a wholly different title.
But last winter, as I sat in Toronto researching the details of life in Antibes more than a century ago, one thing led to another. Searching online, I found a secondhand copy of Duel of Wits at a community college somewhere in Indiana. When the book arrived in Toronto, I packed it away for summer in France. I already knew the part of the story that interested me most, having read it online.
So there I sat in the mid-August sunshine, on a cement bench with a navy hardback book having the reference number Published in , this copy was marked with stamps for the libraries of Scott Community College and Palmer Junior College. Flipping its pages brought forth a wholly familiar smell from my youth β that musty paper scent you find in old books, and especially in those sorts of books that have oodles of facts to impart to any chance reader. The scent cut straight through the expected smells of the seaside β sea and salt and sweat β and beckoned me into another world.
Churchill had dedicated his work to Arnaud β the code name for the late Captain Alec Rabinowitch , a radio operator β and to his underground contacts who, like him, had died in their pursuits.
