When the magazine was finally organized, and when George Plimpton was selected as its editor instead of Humes, Humes was disappointed. He refused to leave the cafés to sell advertising or negotiate with French printers. And in the summer of 1952 he did not hestitate to leave Paris with William Styron, accepting an invitation from a French actress, Madame Nénot, to go down to Cap Myrt, near Saint-Tropez, and visit her fifty-room villa that had been designed by her father, a leading architect. The villa had been occupied by the Germans early in the war. And so when Styron and Humes arrived they found holes in its walls, through which they could look out to the sea, and the grass was so high and the trees so thick with grapes that Humes’s little Volkswagen became tangled in the grass.

So they went on foot toward the villa, but suddenly stopped when they saw, rushing past them, a young, half-naked girl, very brown from the sun, wearing only handkerchiefs tied bikini-style, her mouth spilling with grapes. Screaming behind her was a lecherous-looking old French farmer whose grape arbor she obviously had raided.

“Styron,” Humes cried, gleefully, “we have arrived!”

“Yes,” he said, “we are here!”

More nymphets came out of the trees in bikinis later, carrying grapes and also half cantaloupes the size of cart-wheels, and they offered some to Styron and Humes. The next day they all went swimming and fishing and, in the evening, they sat in the bombed-out villa, a breathtaking site of beauty and destruction, drinking wine with the young girls, who seemed to belong only to the beach. It was an electric summer, with the nymphets batting around like moths against the screen. Styron remembers it as a scene out of Ovid, Humes as the high point of his career as an epicurean and scholar.

- Gay Talese, Looking for Hemingway