Europe -- Social conditions -- 20th century -- Fiction; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 20th century -- Fiction; Love stories
Many will, no doubt, remember the details of what must have been one
among the minor sensations of that time better than I can pretend to. It
happened during the summer of 1913, when I, having just left school, was
enjoying a first taste of freedom up and down Switzerland, and was far
from the long arm of even the Continental _Daily Mail_. Boy Fenwick was
found, on that dawn of his wedding-night, lying in the courtyard of the
Hôtel Vendôme in Deauville, dead of a broken collar-bone. He had fallen,
it appeared, from his bedroom window on the third floor. His beautiful
young wife (I collect the bits of rumour that came to me later) had been
asleep, had suddenly awoken to a sharp feeling of solitude, had happened
to look out at the dawn....
Tests were made, and it was found that a man could, given certain
conditions, have fallen out of that window. The hotel management
suggested that a man could, given certain conditions, fall out of almost
any window. Among the certain conditions suggested, tactfully, was
champagne. That was, I believe, adopted, tactfully. Much, of course,
must have been said and printed about the beautiful girl, Mrs. Fenwick;
and there was provided a little comic relief to the affair in the
scarcely suppressed indignation of the illustrated papers, for the
beautiful Mrs. Fenwick had in some way prevailed on Sebastian Roeskin,
the photographer in Dover, not to issue any of her photographs, and had
shown a remarkable ingenuity in evading the street-camera. And, the
tragedy happening at Deauville during the _Grande Semaine_--Deauville
at that time was still in the first flush of its victory over
Trouville--it was hushed up as quickly as possible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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