But since the death of the elder Grandsailles the property, burdened with heavy debts and mortgages, had had to be subdivided into three sections. Two of these had fallen into the hands of a great landed proprietor of Breton origin, Rochefort, who immediately became one of the Count’s bitterest political enemies. One of the first things Rochefort did on entering into possession of his new property was to cut down the three hundred square metres of cork-oaks which fell to his title and which had lost their productive value by being separated from the rest of the great wood. They had been replaced by a planting of vines which grew poorly in the exhausted and excessively stony soil. These three hundred square metres of uprooted cork-oaks in the very heart of the family wood of Grandsailles not only bore witness to the dismemberment of the Count’s domains but also this gap had brought completely into view the Moulin des Sources, now inhabited by Rochefort – a place keenly missed, for it was the key to the irrigation and the fertility of the greater part of Grandsailles’ cultivated lands. The Moulin des Sources had formerly been completely hidden by the wood, and only the weather-vanes of the mill tower, emerging between two low oaks, had been visible from the Count’s room.

  Next to his devotion to the land, his sense of beauty was certainly one of the most exclusive passions that dominated Grandsailles. He knew himself to have little imagination, but he had a deeply rooted consciousness of his own good taste, and it was thus a fact that the mutilation of his wood was extremely offensive to his aesthetic sense. Indeed since his last electoral defeat five years previously the Count of Grandsailles, with the intransigence that characterized all his decisions, had abandoned politics, to await the moment when events would take a critical turn. This did not imply a disgust with politics. The Count, like every true Frenchman, was a born politician. He was fond of repeating Clausewitz’s maxim, ‘War is only the continuation of politics by other means.’ He was sure that the approaching war with Germany was inevitable and that its coming was mathematically demonstrable. Grandsailles was waiting for this moment to enter into politics again, sincerely wishing that it might come as quickly as possible, for he felt his country day by day growing weaker and more corrupt. What, then, could the anecdotic incidents of the local politics of the plain matter to him?

  And while he was impatiently waiting for war to break out, the Count of Grandsailles was thinking of giving a grand ball….

  No, it was not only the proximity of his political enemy that oppressed him at the sight of the Moulin des Sources. In the course of these five years, during which the heroic and unswerving devotion of Maître Girardin had succeeded in stabilizing his fortune and in organizing the productivity of his lands, the last wounds that the division of his property had inflicted upon his pride and his interests seemed slowly and definitely to have healed. It should be added that if Grandsailles had been relatively indifferent to the dwindling of his former domains, he had never despaired of buying back the properties that had been taken from him and this idea, dimly nursed in the depths of his plans, helped provisionally to make him feel even more detached from his ancestral estates.

  On the other hand he could never become accustomed to the mutilation of his forest, and each new day he suffered more acutely at the sight of that desolate square on which the wind-broken grapevines of a moribund vineyard pitifully wrung their twisted arms at geometrically distributed intervals, an irreparable profanation on the horizon of his first memories – the horizon and stability of his childhood – with its three superimposed fringes, so lovingly blended by the light: the dark forest of the foreground, the illuminated plain and the sky!

  Only a detailed study of the very special topography of this region, however, could satisfactorily make clear why these three elements of the landscape, so linked and constant, achieved such a poignant emotional and elegiac effect of luminous contrast in this plain of Libreux. From early afternoon the descending shadows of the mountains behind the Château would begin progressively to invade the wood of cork-oaks, plunging it suddenly into a kind of premature and pre-twilight darkness, and while the very foreground of the landscape lay obscured by a velvet and uniform shadow, the sun, beginning to set in the centre of a deep depression in the terrain, would pour its fire across the plain, its slanting rays giving an increasing objectivity to the tiniest geological details and accidents – an objectivity which was heightened even more paroxysmally by the proverbial limpidity of the atmosphere. It was as though one could have taken the entire plain of Libreux in the hollow of one’s hand, as though one might have distinguished a slumbering lizard in the old wall of a house situated several miles away. It was only at the very end of twilight and almost on the threshold of night that the last residues of the reflections of the setting sun regretfully relaxed their grip on the ultimate empurpled heights, thus seeming to attempt, in defiance of the laws of nature, to perpetuate a chimerical survival of day. When it was almost nightfall the plain of Creux de Libreux still appeared illuminated. And it was perhaps because of this exceptional receptivity to light that, each time the Count of Grandsailles experienced one of his painful lapses of depression, when his soul darkened with the moral shadows of melancholy, he would see the ancestral hope of perennial and fertile life rising from the deep black forest of the spiny cork-oaks of his grief – the plain of Creux de Libreux bathed in warm sunlight, the illuminated plain! How many times, after long periods spent in Paris, when Grandsailles’ spirit would sink into the idle scepticism of his emotional life, the mere memory of a fugitive glimpse of his plain would revive in him a new and sparkling love of life!

  This time Grandsailles had found Paris so absorbed by political problems that his stay in town had been extremely brief. He had returned to his Château de Lamotte without even having had time to be affected by the progressive disenchantment eventually produced by a too continual indulgence in relationships based exclusively on the tense drama of social prestige; this time on the contrary, the Count had come back to his domains with an unquenched craving for sociability, which induced him to invite his closest friends, as he once used to do, to come and spend weekends with him.

  It was two weeks now since Grandsailles had been back and dined as usual on snails or crayfish in the company of his notary, Pierre Girardin. These were meals over which they held interminable low-voiced conversations, served on tiptoe by Prince, the old family servant.

  Maître Girardin, as has been noted, concealed turbulent literary leanings beneath the strict and modest severity of his profession, just as his everyday laconic and objective phraseology concealed a succulent, metaphoric and grandiloquent verve, a modest expansiveness to which he gave free rein only in the presence of intimate and trusted friends, among whom the Count of Grandsailles was the first to be privileged.

  Grandsailles took a voluptuous delight in his notary’s long tirades, full of images and often touched with grandeur. And not only did he savour them, but he also put them to good use. For if it is true that the Count possessed a remarkably eloquent style and spoke the French language with a wholly personal elegance, it was no less true that he was incapable of inventing those unexpected images that came so naturally to Girardin, images of a slightly acid and cynical fancifulness that had the peculiar faculty of effectively penetrating the vulnerable zone of seduction and of dream in the suggestible and chimerical minds of women of refinement. Grandsailles would note Girardin’s lyrical inventions and bizarre ideas in his memory and often, not trusting his memory, would jot them down in a tiny social engagement book in handwriting fine as a gold thread. On such occasions Grandsailles would often beg Maître Girardin to repeat the end of a sentence, and the latter then experienced the moments of his greatest pride and was forced, in spite of himself, to display the double row of very white teeth in an almost painful smile wrenched from the severe contraction of modesty. Maître Girardin would lower his head, respectfully waiting for the Count to finish his fine scrawl, and on his bowed forehead blue-tinged veins, normally quite visible and prominent, would swell even more and reach that swollen and shiny hardness characteristic of arteriosclerosis.

  In Pierre Girardin’s set and embarrassed expression there was not only pride compressed by the humble willingness to keep his distance, but also there was a shade of uneasiness, barely perceptible yet impossible to dissimulate. Yes, Maître Girardin was embarrassed, he was ashamed of Grandsailles, for he knew exactly the use the latter made of his notations, which was simply to enable him to shine in society, and it was in truth thanks to the occult inspiration of his notary that the Count had acquired his unique reputation as an original conversationalist. He availed himself of these jotted notes also and more especially to seduce women, and above all to keep alive that latent and consuming passion, composed of idle talk and artificiality, which by the growing addiction to its slow and fatal power linked him to Madame Solange de Cléda.

  In fact Grandsailles, who had a poor memory, would go so far as to study the course of his meetings with Madame de Cléda in advance, and his conversations were always woven around three or four lyrical and flashing themes that had usually developed in the course of the long evenings spent in the company of his notary. It is true, to do justice to the Count, that with his natural gift of speech and his mastery of the art of social intercourse, he would often achieve real gems of style, while with the restraint of his rare good taste he developed and polished the excessive, succulent and picturesque elements which had sprung from his notary’s somewhat plebeian lips but which, if he had presented them without modification in an ultra-Parisian salon, might have seemed pretentious, ridiculous or out of place, if not all three at once. Grandsailles, who had had Pierre Girardin as a playmate at the Château during his whole boyhood, had also gained from his notary an immediate, trenchant and elementary understanding of human relationships, which only a person sprung from the most authentic stock of the common people, like Girardin, could have given him. Thus each time it was said of the Count that he was a great realist in spirit, it was in large part to the logical virtues of his notary that people unwittingly alluded.

  The Count of Grandsailles not only usurped his poetic images, his profound remarks and his almost brutal sense of reality from Maître Girardin, but he had even imitated the latter’s way of limping. Five years previously in an automobile collision during the tragi-comic events of the electoral campaign, the Count and his notary had both suffered a similar injury in one leg. Maître Girardin was completely cured in three weeks, but the Count, whose leg was badly set, retained a limp. He had nevertheless time to observe the way his notary walked during his convalescence, and immediately took to imitating his limp, which struck him as having an impressive dignity. Indeed, by giving a slower and more serene inflection to the rhythm of his defective walk Grandsailles only added to his perfectly proportioned and manly physique a note of melancholy and refined distinction. The Count also kept from this accident a long and very thin scar, which extended in a straight vertical line from the left temple to the middle of the cheek. Now this cut, which was very deep, was barely visible, but like a barometer it would appear sharp and purplish on days of storm, and at such times it would itch violently, forcing the Count who did not want to scratch himself to bring his hand sharply to his cheeks, to which he would hold it pressed with all his might. This was the only incomprehensible tic among all his gestures and movements, which were so deliberate as to touch the fringe of affectation.

  The Count of Grandsailles was giving, that evening, a dinner by candle-light to twenty-five of his closest friends who, having all arrived in the course of the afternoon, were now in the midst of ‘primping’ before going down into the reception room at half-past eight. Grandsailles was all dressed an hour ahead of time, and as in the case of his love-trysts, his evenings in society or even a meeting with an intimate friend, he liked to sip without haste a long, slightly and delightfully anguishing wait, during which he had time to prepare himself for the kind of effect and the situations he would like to bring about. He had a horror of anything that betrayed the barbarous love of improvisation, and on this particular evening, ready even earlier than usual for the reception, the Count sat down to wait at the desk in his room. Pulling his little engagement book out of the drawer, he began to consult the notes taken in the course of these last two weeks by means of which he expected to give brilliancy to his talk. He neglected the first three pages, written confusedly and with little conviction, and containing phrases and themes intended for general conversation, then smiled as he came upon a page full of surprises exemplifying clever ways of breaking into a discussion, and finally stopped at a page on which was written only the phrase, ‘Notes for tête-à-tête with Solange’.

  He remained for a long time absorbed in the contemplation of this page, and a kind of invincible indolence prevented him from proceeding, at the same time urging him irresistibly to follow the confused and agreeable course of a seductive reverie.

  It was a bizarre passion that united Hervé de Grandsailles and Solange de Cléda. For five years they had played at a merciless war of mutual seduction, more and more anxious and irritating, having as yet crystallized only to the point of exacerbating a growing impulse of rivalry and self-assertion which the slightest sentimental avowal or weakness would seriously have threatened with disillusionment. Each time the Count had felt Solange’s passion yield to calms of tenderness he had come forward eagerly with new pretexts to wound her vanity and re-establish the wild and rearing aggressive attitude which is that of unsatisfied desire when, whip in hand, one obliges it to overcome more and more insurmountable obstacles of pride.

  It is for these reasons that after their long sessions carried on in the semi-languorous tone of a light idyll sprinkled with feigned indifference and delicate play of wit, while both of them were in reality stubbornly hiding from themselves the frenzied gallop of their passions. Grandsailles was always tempted to tap Solange on the buttocks and give her a piece of sugar, as one does to a thoroughbred horse prancing up with the supple elegance of his movements to place his boundless energy at your disposal. For the Count regarded all this with the same good-nature as a horseman covered with dust and bruises who has been thrown several times during a spirited ride. Nothing is more fatiguing than a passion of this kind, based on an integral coquetry on both sides. Grandsailles was telling himself this when he heard the clock in the drawing-room strike half-past eight. He raised his head which he had held for a long time bowed, leaning on his hand, and looked for a few moments at the plain of Creux de Libreux, which because of its special topographical configuration still held the reflections of the last gleams of day in spite of the reigning semi-darkness.

  Casting a last glance at the plain the Count of Grandsailles promptly got up from his desk and, limping in his characteristic fashion, crossed the corridor that led to the reception room.

  He walked with that free, calm elegance so well set off by a last nervous touching of the hand to one’s hair, a final clumsy straightening of one’s tie or a suspicious and casual passing glance at a mirror, characteristic of the most highly bred Anglo-Saxon timidity. The Count advanced to the middle of the room where he encountered the Duke and Duchess of Saintonges, who had entered through the opposite door at the same moment, and gave them each in turn a kiss on both cheeks. The Duke looked extremely moved, but before he had time to open his mouth there was heard the approaching sound of a violent discussion which suddenly ceased at the threshold. The young Marquis of Royancourt, with his head swathed in bandages, appeared, flanked by Edouard Cordier and Monsieur Fauceret, and all three came rushing over to Grandsailles, trying to outdistance one another. Seizing and softly pressing the Count’s hand, Camille Fauceret exclaimed, ‘Fine messes your protégé, the Marquis of Royancourt, gets himself into! On the very evening of the day when he becomes a King’s Henchman he fights side by side with the communists to overthrow the only government that knew what it wanted and that had the guts to impose it, a government of order!’

  ‘Damn it!’ the Marquis de Royancourt broke out jovially, touching with his finger a fresh patch of blood that had just appeared through his bandages. ‘It’s bleeding again. I’ll run up and change the dressing. It will only take me ten minutes, and I leave it to these gentlemen, my dear Count, to tell you everything that happened. By the time I get back all the spade work will have been done, and I will only have to add the truth.’

  In a few seconds the room was almost completely full and Grandsailles, while he was busy receiving his guests, began through fragments of conversation coming to him in a jumble from all directions at once to learn the tragic events of the day before. It was the Sixth of February, as it was already being called, which had just brought about the resignation of the Daladier cabinet.

  The Count of Grandsailles had an invincible antipathy for the radio – indeed did not own one – and having spent the day without reading the newspapers, he now listened with a kind of voluptuous intoxication to the avalanche of sensational news to which the names of almost all his acquaintances were closely linked. He would interrupt from time to time to have some detail clarified, but before the person had had time to explain, his attention would already be drawn by the surprise of fresh revelations. The Count of Grandsailles limped back and forth from group to group, his head thrown back, his face slightly turned to the left, lending an equally attentive ear to everyone and with his glance fixed on some indeterminate point in the ceiling. By this detached and superior manner he wished to show that while interested in these events in a general way, not only was he not astonished at them but refused to be drawn into the feverish atmosphere of the conversations which only the decorum of the place prevented from becoming acrimonious.