He remembered the sharp, tangy smell of seaweed, the bite of salty wind. His grandparents looking on, benign and weathered, arm in arm. And Clarisse’s long black hair aflutter. The cars would drone past along the causeway. Noirmoutier was no longer an island. He liked that idea. But the thought of the sea inching back up again, inexorable, was both thrilling and terrifying.

He had never tired of listening to gruesome Gois disaster stories. Back at the Hotel Saint-Pierre, the gardener, old père Benoît, layered on all the gory details. Antoine’s favorite story was the one about the June 1968 accident when three people of the same family drowned. Their car got stuck as the tide came up. They didn’t think of climbing one of the nearby rescue poles. The tragedy triggered headlines. Antoine couldn’t understand how a car could possibly be swept away by water and how people were unable to escape. So old père Benoît had taken him to watch the tide creeping in along the Gois passage.

For a long time, nothing had happened. Antoine had felt bored. Old père Benoît reeked of Gitanes and red wine. Then the boy noticed more and more people gathering around them. “Look, boy,” the old man whispered. “They’ve come to watch the Gois close over. Every day, at high tide, people come from far away to watch this.”

Antoine saw that there were no more cars making their way down the causeway. To his left, the immense bay filled slowly, in complete silence, like a huge transparent lake. The water seemed deeper and darker, trickling over the muddy ridges of sand. Toward the right, sudden swollen waves that had appeared from nowhere were already impatiently licking the causeway. The two separate fluxes of water came together in a strange and startling embrace that surprised him, casting a long ribbon of foam above the cobbled road. The Gois passage disappeared in a couple of seconds, engulfed by the tide. It was impossible to imagine a road had ever lain there. Now there was only the blue sea and nine rescue poles emerging from its swirling surface. Noirmoutier was an island once more. Triumphant seagulls shrieked and circled overhead. Antoine marveled.