‘Forgive me – I’m at your disposal,’ said Solange as she came and sat down beside the desk in the depth of a large armchair. Then she continued in a tone which seemed irrevocable. ‘I presume by your worried look that Rochefort persists in his price. It makes no difference. I have thought it over carefully and I wish the transaction to be carried through as quickly as possible – the war might give rise to new complications.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Girardin responded in a tone of moderation, ‘the new situation is something to think about and we should be wise to wait while we observe how events develop.’

  ‘No matter what turn they should take, I am firmly resolved to go through with this purchase,’ Solange answered, with growing impatience.

  ‘In that case, Madame, my professional conscience impels me only to call to your attention for the last time that the purchase of the Moulin des Sources on the present terms reduces your son’s inheritance solely to this property, for even your two houses on the Boulevard Haussmann will have to be mortgaged for this purpose.’

  Solange got up and again began to pace back and forth; but this time she had left her cigarette-holder on the table and she held her arms crossed over her chest in her characteristic way as if to keep from shivering. ‘The Moulin des Sources properties,’ she said, trying to convince herself, ‘can easily triple their revenues by using new agricultural methods, and so my son would some day enjoy the benefit and be glad of such a purchase.’

  ‘No, Madame, you must know that the purchase of the Moulin des Sources on Rochefort’s draconian terms can be viewed at present only as the momentary gratification of a whim…. Nothing less than the possibility of reincorporating it some day in the whole of the Grandsailles domain could justify….’

  ‘Do you assume for a moment,’ Solange broke in sharply, ‘that there is in this “whim” as you call it the slightest calculation on my part of a future marriage with the Count?’

  ‘Proceeding from the most elevated feeling of love, it would be only legitimate if it were so,’ answered the notary, respectfully bowing his head.

  ‘It is not so!’ exclaimed Solange, ready to burst into tears. Then, containing herself, she said resolutely, but with gentleness, ‘I take on myself the responsibility as to whether or not this is an act of madness. I must have it. With a passion like mine, doomed as it is to unhappiness, if I don’t carry through this “whim” my life is broken… without roots. My son will find it in his heart to forgive me when the time comes, and I shall answer for his future on my honour. In compensation, my devotion and my sacrifice shall be limitless….’ She put her hand on Girardin’s shoulder. ‘You have just spoken against the Count’s interests to defend those of my son, whom you don’t even know. I thank you….’ Then, laboriously but surely rectifying Pascal’s famous dictum, she said, ‘There are also reasons of the heart which the reasonings of the heart do not understand. Grandsailles does not love me. I have proof of this now by his own admission. Well, I shall become what he could have loved, esteemed. Grandsailles wanted the forest – I shall be his forest, I shall be “la Dame”. I have not become what I am in order to seduce him; I have become what I am in order to feel myself worthy, at the level of his indifference. And because everything that he wishes becomes a law of adoration for me, Grandsailles now admires me! Grandsailles can marry Lady Chidester-Ames. I shall be no less proud, and be his lady. I may not be chosen as his wife, his mistress or his slave, but I shall be the lady, the one who is engraved on his escutcheon….’ She grew fervent. ‘Yes, I love the Count. Yes, I am buying the forest because I love the Count and it is only in order to be able to feel myself at last inferior, but on his very land, planted in his earth!’ She fell silent for a moment, then she said, ‘Let me tell you this – I must surely be possessed by a demonic pride – I suffer from my unreciprocated love for Grandsailles, but his contempt would kill me!’ She drew near the fire and squatted on the rug in front of it. ‘If necessary, my pride shall be buried in his earth….’

  Girardin was preparing to leave, and as he bowed he murmured in a low voice that she could barely hear, ‘Madame, I know of your life only what I must, and what my respect allows to my deep affection.’

  ‘Everything is sweet and bitter to me,’ sighed Solange de Cléda.

  The following morning the sale of the Moulin des Sources was decided on and the date set for a week from that day.

  * The myth immortalized by Gobineau in ‘Les Pléiades’.

  † An imaginary writer, the hero of Huysmans’ novel, Là-bas.

  ‡‘The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired’ Paul Eluard.

  4

  The Night of Love

  In barbara stevens’ summer villa, surrounded by old resinous pines. Veronica and Betka had spent the whole ‘blond season’, as the ancients called it, in the effluvium of an unbroken idyllic friendship, united flesh and nails with their small child. The two friends, blended into a single pink finger of destiny, day after day observed their little one, flesh of their flesh, growing apace with the tender July moons, the ripe August ones, and those of September, already hard, smooth and shiny like a fingernail. For the ‘winy autumn’, likewise so named by the ancients, had appeared, gilding the Bordeaux countryside with its honeyed light. An old Bordeaux sailor, ragged as a young Bacchus, could be seen these days carrying away, rolled up under his arms, the remnants of the last bath-tents from the surrounding private beaches, now deserted, hurrying before the still distant rumble of the first stirrings of the sea heavily awakening from its long slumber.

  Toward the end of the first fortnight in September Barbara Stevens and her daughter Veronica once more started back for Paris, accompanied by Miss Andrews, leaving Betka and her son to remain another month in their Arcachon villa on the doctor’s advice. Barbara Stevens had hastened her return because of the announcement – now at last official – of the Count of Grandsailles’ ball, the date of which in spite of the war had suddenly and finally been set for ten days hence. On arriving in Paris Veronica, who had been speaking with her mother less and less, except when she needed more money, and who since she had been given her own cheque-book now hardly spoke to her at all, decided to leave the Ritz to go and live in Betka’s studio on the Quai des Orfèvres. In so doing Veronica merely anticipated a secretly nourished wish of her mother’s, who made only a feeble protest at her daughter’s ‘eccentricity’, since after all the boon of this more independent arrangement of their lives freed her from a thousand precautions and concealments, opening the door of her apartment, in which until then she had had to play the rôle of a mother, to the generous hospitality of her new flirtations so prodigally launched in the course of the recent summer season. Veronica knew all this, but also she had convinced herself that she adored the atmosphere of Betka’s apartment, the piping-hot and steaming café-au-lait in the morning, served in very thick porcelain cups with chips and cracks as fine, and of identically the same colour, as Madame Maurel’s hair – it was she, the concierge, who served breakfast, and she was clean, but only moderately so. Also the purring of her friend’s cat which had nothing in particular about it and was like any other purring…. And what else? Well – an undefinable something, which indeed and with reason seemed as if it must be ‘precisely’ the chief attraction, since it managed to keep her mind, habitually so calm, in a state of constant excitement.

  After a few days, as though her vague premonitions were about to materialize, Veronica passed on the stairs a strange apparition that produced in her an indescribable malaise which she could not shake off for the rest of the day; it was a weird creature, tall and slender like herself, with his head and face entirely sheathed in a very tight white leather helmet which was broken only by a slightly V-shaped slit for the eyes and another one below, straight but much narrower, for the mouth. Edging these slits the leather had a triple thickness, reinforced as by cornices, so that one caught the glint of the eyes only as if behind a lowered visor; the mouth, disappearing in the shadow of the opening, was completely invisible.

  Behind this shiny mask must be hidden some frightful disease or mutilation. Painfully the man with the hidden face descended the stairs step by step, treading unsteadily, helping himself with one arm violently clutching a crutch, while with the other he carefully leaned on the arm of Madame Ménard d’Orient, who was all dressed up in a straw-coloured gown. Once they had reached the courtyard Madame Ménard d’Orient’s white-liveried chauffeur, full of ceremonious solicitude, helped the strange invalid to get into the car and be settled comfortably, while several children who were playing with the concierge’s son stopped to watch this painful scene, silent, open-mouthed, without the slightest discretion. After the lunch-hour Veronica began to listen uninterruptedly, waiting for them to return, but she did not hear the car arrive and, reaching the landing too late to spy on them, she saw the invalid only for a second, just as Madame Ménard d’Orient’s door was being drawn shut.

  The ever-perspicacious reader will already have guessed that this astounding character, the man with the leather mask, was none other than Baba, whose rata had in fact recently crashed. He had had to undergo a gruesome trepanning operation on the spot without anaesthetics. This saved his life, but the shattering of most of the bones of his skull had left him completely disfigured. As soon as she heard the news Madame Ménard d’Orient had had Baba transported from Spain in an ambulance and had called in the best specialists to attend him. It was decided, as a daring but last expedient, to attempt to mend this mangled head by keeping it tightly compressed for several months within an orthopaedic cast of a kind which had to be created for the purpose. From then on. Baba’s case became the chief topic of discussion for osteopaths, surgeons and orthopaedists, and Madame Ménard d’Orient’s salon witnessed endless conversations of specialists on that little-known problem, ever surrounded by caprice and mystery, the resetting of bones.

  For what is a bone? That is what all bone specialists were wondering, without being able to arrive at an even provisionally satisfactory solution. To some, bones were dismal concretions, as insipid and somnolent as those that are found in the deposits formed in calcified water pipes; others considered bones as the most atavistic personifications of ductile solidifications filled with opportunism and fantasy. For the most modern theorists of osteopathy had just invented, and put into practice, surprising methods which hastened the resetting of bones in certain cases of fractures that had been considered incurable. Old men unable to take physical exercise were made to relive former travels in memory, in order to provoke in them an imaginative fatigue that acted on their bones. So, if they had succeeded in resetting bones in old men simply by making them undertake imaginary voyages, this showed that bones were not so stupid after all!

  It was Soler, the Catalonian, who was finally called in to create the new ‘bone helmet’. He had been recommended to Madame Ménard d’Orient by Solange de Cléda because among his diverse activities he had devised a clever leather helmet, made with his own hands, which he used while driving his racing car. When the orthopaedist who gave Soler the order to make the helmet showed him the radiograph of Baba’s skull. Soler was shocked. ‘Good Lord! It looks like the bones of the feet rather than those of the head!’

  But Soler, one hundred per cent Catalonian and a demon of skill, managed under the direction of the Italian orthopaedist Blanchetti to turn out an amazing apparatus. And Baba’s helmet became a technical, even an artistic, triumph. The helmet was divided longitudinally by a network of geodesic lines marking the adjustable sections that supported the frontal and occipital bones, just as other sections, likewise joining in geodesic and transversal lines crossing through the frontal ligatures, compressed the two parietal bones. Each of these meridian divisions was edged with holes through which passed laces of greased leather, as on a shoe. But by virtue of a number of metal adjustments one could, by tightening or loosening, graduate the pressure exactly on each of these sections of leather ingeniously fitting into one another and at the same time mutually adjustable and independent.

  What might be called the frightful and metaphysical aspect of this helmet was constituted by its peculiar adaptation to the face. Here, aside from the disquieting element inherent in masks of every kind, a really horrible detail rendered the sight of it not only hallucinatory but even repulsive in the extreme. This detail consisted of a triangular aperture in the leather in the place of the nose, which was covered by a fine membrane of white kid stretched so tightly flush with the cheek-covering that there was no suggestion of a nose. On the other hand this membrane was pierced by two horrible round holes ringed with brass to allow the passage of air, so that in the act of breathing the membrane was kept continually fluttering, and these rhythmic movements, like monstrous pulsations, produced upon the spectator the same irresistible biological terror as is induced by touching one’s finger to the soft part of the imperfect cranial suture at the top of a newborn baby’s fragile head. But this did not complete Baba’s metamorphosis, for even more paralysing was the strange fixity which the deep slightly V-shaped eye-slit of this helmet imparted to Baba’s habitually hard and impenetrable gaze. Now that it barely shone in the depth of the shadows, yet was sharpened, as it were, by physical and moral pain, it had become doubly enigmatic and was in every respect like the fanatical burning gaze of a warrior of the Crusades. His mouth, barred by the chastity belt of silence, had become vehemence and his masked eyes a glittering dart.

  ‘My dear Angel,’ wrote Veronica to Betka, ‘you will be flabbergasted to learn that 37 Quai des Orfèvres, in addition to your illustrious Veronica, has just become tenanted by the weird personage represented in the enclosed photographs. He is an aviator, horribly wounded in the face in the Spanish war, who after a year in the hospital now lives as a high-class protégé at Madame Ménard d’Orient’s, who is watching over him as though he were the very pupil of her eye. He might just have stepped out of the most blood-curdling novel of terror, but in spite of the fright which he inspires at first, once you are used to him you can’t help admiring the nobility of his slightest gesture, and the mask seems to enhance the beauty of his gaze.’

  In this letter she enclosed photographs cut out of an article which had recently appeared in the magazine Lu. In these pictures, taken by Pagès himself, Baba appeared full-faced, in profile and from behind. They were accompanied by sensational captions, in which Baba was presented at the same time as a hero, as the man from Mars and as the incarnation of one of the impending miracles of osteopathy and of aesthetic surgery in general; for in the words of Dr Blanchetti, who was the specialist interviewed, Baba’s face would eventually reveal no other disfiguration than light and inconspicuous scars.

  When Betka received Veronica’s letter she suffered dreadful pangs of jealousy that deprived her of sleep for several nights. She now understood the anxiety which had gripped her since Veronica’s departure. Although she knew that Baba was in Spain, she had foreseen something like this! She liked to repeat to herself that ‘nothing that could happen ever happens’. Well, she was wrong! It did happen just the same! For after all, nothing is inconceivable. And her heart told her now that no mask and no repulsion would prevent Veronica from falling in love with Baba! Veronica’s mere allusion to his eyes burned into her like a drop of boiling oil poured into the reopened wound of her jealousy. But Betka wrote nothing about the meeting Veronica had announced. She repressed all her feelings, holding her child tight to her heart. Now, set off against the seared background of autumn, she saw Baba’s tall figure bandaged in white, like the anguishing figure of Saint Lazarus, just resuscitated to interpose himself between her and her brief happiness. Whether by him or someone else. Veronica also would some day be snatched from her by passion. Sitting with her baby in her arms, Betka slowly watched the flowing resin of a pine-tree. ‘All are drawn from the same sap,’ she said to her son, as though the latter could have understood her. She took the child’s hand and kissed his little fingernails one after another, and it was like the arpeggio of the gall-moon of her past happiness.

  For three days it had not stopped raining. Grandsailles arrived a quarter of an hour early for his rendezvous at the Porte Dauphine, and Solange de Cléda five minutes late.

  ‘You are ravishing,’ said the Count to her, passing his hand lightly over her furs.

  Solange was dressed from head to foot in blue fox, that is to say, not only her coat but her turban was of fox and her shoes were covered by tiny gaiters of the same fur, now all sprinkled with drops of water.

  When they were seated, the Count of Grandsailles took up the conversation in a low voice.

  ‘For some time,’ he said, ‘I have felt a more and more intense and dangerous eagerness to explore forbidden realms of experience…. You see, the idea that now we are coldly about to decide what we are going to do… while I have to control my voice to continue to talk to you….’ Grandsailles broke off as if to recover his breath, and went on, making an effort to curb the emotion in his voice. ‘The thought of this meeting has driven me mad! It’s unbelievable, but I’m trembling like a leaf… look!’ He seized Solange’s hand. He was indeed trembling, and his teeth chattered imperceptibly.