Marseilles however had of course survived— the only part of the coast one could not care about, the ugliest part, the city. Of course. Its docks were inundated, and the neighborhoods immediately behind them; but the land rose quickly here, and the higher neighborhoods had gone on living their tough sordid existence, big ships still anchored in the harbor, long floating docks maneuvered out to them to empty their holds, while their sailors flooded the town and went mad in time-honored fashion. Sylvie said that Marseilles was where she had heard most of the hair-raising tales of adventure from the mouth of the Rhone and elsewhere around the Med, where the charts meant nothing anymore: houses of the dead between Malta and Tunisia, attacks by Barbary corsairs . . . “Marseilles is more itself than it has been for centuries,” she said, and grinned, and Michel got a sudden sense of her nightlife, wild and perhaps a bit dangerous. She liked Marseilles. The car lurched in one of the road’s many potholes and it felt like his pulse, he and the mistral rushing around ugly old Marseilles, stricken by the thought of a wild young woman.

More itself than it had been for centuries. Perhaps that was true of the entire coast. There were no tourists anymore; with the beaches gone, the whole concept of tourism had taken a knife to the heart. The big pastel hotels and apartment buildings now stood in the surf half-drowned, like children’s blocks left at low tide. As they drove out of Marseilles, Michel noted that many of these buildings appeared to have been reoccupied in their upper stories, by fishermen Sylvie said; no doubt they kept their boats in rooms downstairs, like the Lake People of prehistoric Europe. The old ways, returning.

So Michel kept looking out the window, trying to rethink the new Provence, doing his best to deal with the shock of so much change. Certainly it was all very interesting, even if it was not as he remembered it. New beaches would eventually form, he reassured himself, as the waves cut away at the foots of sea cliffs, and the charged rivers and streams carried soil downstream. It was possible they might even appear fairly quickly, although they would be dirt or stones, at first. That tawny sand— well, currents might bring some of the drowned sand up onto the new strand, who knew? But surely most of it was gone for good.