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50 JULY 2018 VOGUE.COM``````fortified with blood from a raw steak, to keep up her strengthand hopefully to ward off what were mysteriously referredto as her malaises.My sister and I were free to roam with our friends, morningand afternoon. We were not required to lie down after lunchthe way the old people did, in sepulchral silence, the metalblinds lowered against the Mediterranean glare, though wewere asked not to swim for an hour after eating, for fear thatwe might suffer an unspecified attack and drown. It wasrequested only that we appear for lunch properly dressed;that we help clear the table and do the dishes; and that weresurface just before cocktail hour, to help lay out the littlebowls of pretzels and nuts and to set the table for supper.(Dinner dishes were tidily stacked in the sink and left for poorOdet to tackle in the morning, which she tried to do silentlyso as not to waken us. The dishwasher, although present, didnot function for as long as our grandparents lived: They didnot believe in it.)After our grandfather’s death, in 1998, my father hoped tosell the place: Expensive to maintain, it needed updating andwas difficult to get to. Even within the compound, to reach theapartment required climbing 72 steep steps from the nearestgarage; both of our grandparents had been housebound intheir last years. Our aunt sold her interest in the property tomy sister, and my sister and Ibegged our father not to sell.We wanted passionatelyto retain this beautiful placewe had always known andloved. Our father agreed tohelp defray the costs, and overthe years that followed, webrought our kids to fall asleepto the sounds of the waves onthe shore far below and thecicadas’ saw, to play the games we’d played ourselves, toclimb over the same rocks and swim in the Mediterranean,to sit in the same restaurants and eat the same meals. Ourmaiden aunt lived in another, smaller flat in the compound,and she bestowed upon the children, in a modest way, theirFrench birthright: endearments and simple sentences inFrench, snippets of culture (when they were infants, she gaveour daughter a Bécassine doll and our son a stuffed Milou,a.k.a. Snowy, the dog from Tintin), a sense of belonging.But our aunt died in 2012, and the apartment felt as thoughit was dying also. It sat empty almost all of the year, tendedonly by a cleaner who stopped by twice a month, or said shedid. We finally decided we had to sell and went to visit a finaltime, in the summer of 2015. We arrived late at night, havingflown from London and driven from Nice. The hot-waterheater was on the fritz, apparently irreparably, as it transpired,and we hadn’t been there 24 hours when the entire antique fusebox blew. The wi-fi my brother-in-law had set up a few yearsbefore proved defunct, and at some point a phone bill hadbeen overlooked, so we had only our American cell phones.Busy ants formed an unbroken convoy from the kitchenterrace to the pantry cupboard. The woman paid to cleanthe flat had been ill and had instead``````Our grandparents’world was one ofimmovable routines,into which wekids slipped easilyAn elevated cache of self-tanningmists redefines the sun-kissed glow.``````SUMMER SKINVLIFEL’Eau Tan, a subtleself-tanning spritz, joinsa handful of innovativeatomizers, such as JamesRead’s Coconut WaterTan Mist and St. Tropez’sBronzing Water Face Mist.“I like to look beautifullysun-kissed and not asthough I’ve had a bathin fake tan,” says Oskiafounder Georgie Cleeve,whose Adaptive Tan Mistdebuted last month; thevitamin-packed formuladeepens skin toneimperceptibly over time.Here’s to smooth, streak-free sailing.—ZOE RUFFNER``````LEAVE IT TO CHANEL,a house as reliable forits theatrics as for itstweeds, to dock a life-sizeship inside Paris’s GrandPalais for its latest cruiseshow. But the nauticalhomage wasn’t the onlynod to Coco’s FrenchRiviera vacations. Models’burnished complexionsevoked her legendarysouvenir from l’été1923: a golden glowthat inspired legions ofsunbathers and latersparked the first-of-its-kind L’Huile Tan. It’sfitting that Chanel’snew guard—Lucia Pica,global creative makeupand color designer—hasbottled that upper-decksheen in a fresh format.``````SLEIGHT OF SKINMODEL ANDREEA DIACONU,PHOTOGRAPHED BY SEANTHOMAS, VOGUE, 2014. INSET:CHANEL L’EAU TAN.Gold ReserveCONTINUED ON PAGE 122