And the Seine, rolling down from Rouen, seemed a wide inlet dividing two neighbouring lands.

They reached the harbour of Trouville in less than an hour, and as it was the time of day when the world was bathing, Pierre went to the shore.
From a distance it looked like a garden full of gaudy flowers.

All along the stretch of yellow sand, from the pier as far as the Roches Noires, sun-shades of every hue, hats of every shape, dresses of every colour, in groups outside the bathing huts, in long rows by the margin of the waves, or scattered here and there, really looked like immense bouquets on a vast meadow.

And the Babel of sounds--voices near and far ringing thin in the light atmosphere, shouts and cries of children being bathed, clear laughter of women--all made a pleasant, continuous din, mingling with the unheeding breeze, and breathed with the air itself.
Pierre walked among all this throng, more lost, more remote from them, more isolated, more drowned in his torturing thoughts, than if he had been flung overboard from the deck of a ship a hundred miles from shore.
He passed by them and heard a few sentences without listening; and he saw, without looking, how the men spoke to the women, and the women smiled at the men.

Then, suddenly, as if he had awoke, he perceived them all; and hatred of them all surged up in his soul, for they seemed happy and content.
Now, as he went, he studied the groups, wandering round them full of a fresh set of ideas.