This is a secret jewel of nineteenth-century European literature. A love story written with a unique elegance. At the end of the nineteenth century, on a North Sea beach, a unique passion will be born between Emile and Maria. Maria is responsible for the narrator, forty years after the events took place. These are not epic events, but an arbitrary but immense story, like all love stories. What drives the emotion of love? What ignites the fleeting and eternal emotion? Perhaps no more than movement, a scent, and a landscape. This is a love story that recalls the brushes of Flaubert and Stendhal, and that prefigures the films of Ingmar Bergman and the books of Magritte Duras. Rarely has so much and so well been said about impossible love between married people. A moving and unforgettable book. A novella by the painter, artist, and biographer of André Gide, who managed to immortalize in words the most defining event of her life.