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Why spades? There is no sand at Marie-le-Bois. Why that fishing-rod? Not a river floweth within miles and miles of the Villa des Roses. And it must furthermore be revealed that the “wood” of Marie-le-Bois consists in reality of a few acres of shabby bushes, dead grass and gaunt trees; that the villa itself is a hideous, gritty little structure, rendered all the more uninviting by what the estate agent calls an “ornamental” turret, and that never a rose (never even a common sunflower) has bloomed in the scrap of waste ground joyously designated by M. Durand a “garden.”

No matter; M. Durand, a simple, small bourgeois, is happy, his good wife rejoices, the three children run wild in the hot, dusty roads, deaf old Amélie is to be heard singing in a feeble, cracked voice in the kitchen; and the Duvals and the Duponts—also of the small bourgeoisie—are equally happy and merry in the equally hideous and gritty villas named “My Pleasure” and “My Repose.”

Between them they have hired a rough, bumpy field, in which they play croquet for hours at a time—the ladies in cotton wrappers and the gentlemen in their shirt-sleeves. But not enough mallets to go round and constant confusion as to whose turn it is to play.