Barbara Stevens’ death awakened Veronica’s slumbering filial love by her absence of grief, just as church bells sometimes awaken one only the moment they cease to ring. Veronica now loved her mother because she had been so unconscious of her mother’s life and was so little moved by her death. As her eyes were not blindfolded by the confusion of emotion, Veronica had been able to see ‘what it was like’ and death appeared to her similar to her image of the man with the hidden face. It was thus that her passion became dangerously morbid, her growing love and veneration for her mother now blended with her passion for him, and his existence appeared to her as certain as the death of her mother whose face, which had been a thing of such little moment, already tended to disappear while the sweetness of these two feelings appeared to her equal. The little cross became tinted with sinister reflections of eclipse and stars of Venus, and each of the little diamonds again became the nails of Christ crucified.

  For it was as though Barbara Stevens’ death, far from calming her daughter’s impetuous anxiety, only accentuated her frenzy to the point of exaggeration, just as it sharpened the fixity of all her obsessions. Her unsociability, too, became pathologically irascible. In the evenings, when she returned from her mad rides across the desert, Veronica would rush up and shut herself in her room, as if afraid that someone would come and disturb her in her dream. Ignoring all conventions, she would cross the great covered patio crowded with lawyers, newspapermen and businessmen who waited day after day in vain for an appointment. As if possessed by evil spirits, her face frowning, Veronica would each time vanish like a gust of wind, barely acknowledging the presence of others with a wave of her hand clutching her riding crop. Fortunately Betka’s entire and limitless devotion, stoutly seconded by Miss Andrews, partly made up for Veronica’s utter heedlessness. Betka took it upon herself to look after the vast interests of the rich heiress and managed to guide her friend’s interests with considerable wisdom. But Veronica, far from being grateful to her for her long hours of labour and her sacrifices, took umbrage at all this. Yes, Veronica developed a deep resentment against Betka: Betka interfered in her business affairs, even though Veronica knew this was done solely for her own good; Betka had a son and this son, Veronica claimed, detested her; Betka had let her breasts grow large; she tried to pry into Veronica’s secret feelings; she was too fond of admiring her own body; she – above all Veronica resented the fact that the latter had always obstinately refused to share the confidences of her passion; never, never had she condescended to approach Veronica’s incipient delirium.

  In reality the one wrong which Betka was guilty of was that she had never lent herself to any of those outpourings of the heart which were the sole reason she wanted her for a friend. ‘What stiffness!’ Veronica would rage, and she would continually fret and say to herself, ‘How she has always gone out of her way to avoid speaking of him – of the man with the hidden face!’ Veronica for her part, out of sheer pride, would rather have died than take the least initiative in broaching this subject to which she felt her friend so bitterly hostile; it was as though Baba, thus excluded from their common life, had been Betka’s own lover!

  It was thus that their mutual and tacit silence on the one essential subject separated them, making their friendship ever hard and exalted, more exalted and acute even than before because it was more and more unsatisfied, bristling, precious and saturated with unhappiness like a diamond with a few drops of gall at its centre. Betka, in turn, suffered in silence, consumed with the thousand and one tortures of all jealousies, not toward Baba, whom she had forgotten, but toward that multiplicity of centrifugal pleasures of the blood-swollen arcs which make man and which she knew kept Veronica’s alert, intact and pure biological organism in a permanently hallucinated state of expectation, while she felt her escaping from her own life more and more. Yes, the man who would appear at any moment could not but be the enemy of her who had renounced man for her friend – worse than her enemy, her executioner. Whether he was the impassive creature with obliterated features chosen by Veronica, or another with a more real face, did not matter – and how she already hated him! For this man, because of her friend’s sense of the Absolute, was going to mark the irreparable end of everything between the two of them and this end would be the beginning of their hatred – she would hate Veronica – was it possible?

  While waiting for the man to appear, Veronica and Betka were already quarrelling in silence over their child, Betka’s child, and as the two of them sat in profile as in an ancient cameo representing a scene of circumcision, the one would hold the baby by the arm, the other by the leg, and their respective hands instead of offering the caresses which they simulated, seemed rather to press on the child’s flesh like possessive claws. How were they going to share him who no more distinguished them in his affection than if they had been one? Two, who should have been one! One for him, and for themselves, two!

  Between Veronica and Betka there was staged each evening a little drama, followed by a bitter tangerine-slice of reconciliation – a constant battle that was gradually getting the better of their friendship. On one of these occasions when Veronica had treated Betka most harshly, subjecting her to her extreme caprices, going so far as to put her out of the house only to beg her immediately to stay, making her weep, consoling her and making her weep again, Betka overwhelmed with despair finally exclaimed with rancour, ‘There is nothing so fierce as a virgin!’ She spoke the truth, for virgins have sharp teeth shaped like harpoons and their mouths are like nests filled with arrows that cupids carry in quivers carved out of fine mucus hanging from a strap across their shoulders.

  On another occasion matters took an even more serious turn when Veronica struck the child’s legs with a whirring blow of her riding crop. Immediately devoured by remorse she had run out, saddled her horse and ridden off into the night in a heavy sandstorm, and Betka in turn had to gallop after her, fearing that in her unbalanced state she might do something desperate. She finally caught up with her. Veronica, with her orbits bathed in the light of the new moon, seemed no longer to see, and her eyes were filled with sand. For the first time Betka had the courage to say to her. ‘You will go to pieces if you continue to think of your frightful invalid. You know that I kept from you the fact that I know the horrible nature of your aberration, and you already detest us, my son and me, because of him, whose face you have never seen and whose voice you have never heard.’

  ‘I know I am sick. I shall get a doctor for this, but not to have him cure me: to have him find me what I want! Mad that I am!’

  Veronica had uttered these words in a burst of resentment, while at the same time growing calm like a red-hot iron when it turns white – quiet and concentrated, like a blind statue of folly, a riveted dementia that contemplates its chimera…. Then she repeated, ‘My doctor will help me to find him! You stay here and take care of yourself and your son. You’re stupid. I’ll go off and try to find my frightful invalid… I feel a craving for fragmentation. Even when I was little I always preferred dolls without heads. Insects do the same – I’ve observed them in the desert. Mutilation – a beautiful mirage! Only broken gods, mutilated Apollos, and the noseless faces of philosophers have nobility. And as for yourself, like the Saint Agatha whom I look at every Sunday in the mission, each time I wanted to love you I have felt like cutting off your breasts!’

  The following day Veronica left alone for New York, and Betka, the child and Miss Andrews remained in Palm Springs. She established herself sumptuously in the Park Avenue mansion which she had just inherited from her mother. It had always been too frigid, and now she wanted to surround herself with a caressing, warm setting, woven in little grasses of caprice and feathers of illusion. Her adolescent femininity leaned out of the windows of her soul. And the latter, like a turtle-dove, came and went, bringing back wisps of nuptial straw in its bill. It was as though Veronica were making her nest, and with her quasi-animal instinct she was in fact making her nest.

  The antiquarians were like dry little birds, who wore tie-pins on their jabots and who ceremoniously helped her to make her nest, hopping about with their hands full of porcelains, like rare eggs, around her fortune, in minuets in which nothing was broken. The violent Amazon’s life that she had recently been leading now seemed a hell of Tantalus, in which her impetuous body tended obscurely and desperately to tear itself apart without ever succeeding. Enough of pebbles sharp as knives! Enough of the desert of love! Free, free at last of Betka, of the child, of the horses, of the sun and of that calcinating wind that still tugged at the skin of her cheeks and made her teeth grate with the arid sand of river dreams, presaging the Nile of her dry season! ‘Now I am ready for my mutilation. I want to be rid of “it”.’ But instead, war again won the day, this time involving her own country, and Veronica felt the cold dagger of Japan enter the flesh of her individual problem, opening a breach of icy water which closed the desired one of her deflowering.

  Her nest was finished on the very day of Pearl Harbor. And in the whirl of black smoke, with the steel skeletons of the American ships, twisted and contracted like the arms of colossal dying starfish, capsized under a starless sky, Veronica felt the decision of her own sacrifice to her country graze her body with the flags of ancient victories and her will fluttered like the star-spangled banner. For she not only loved her country but identified herself with it. The fountain of Adonis? The tomb of Adonis? He and only he! Living or dead, real or unreal, he remained alone and unique in her thoughts, now especially since her own face was in turn going to be hidden by war, since at the moment when the slit of her mouth was preparing to open, it was to be covered by the white membrane of the hymen of sacrifice, by the panting mask which lends an occult touch to the faces of surgical nurses.

  For she had decided to become a nurse, and specifically requested that she be assigned to the care of the severely wounded. She wanted to get close to the war, to the sharpest and most cutting that it had to offer. Besides, during the two months that she had spent in New York since her arrival, the city’s resources of seduction had been quickly exhausted. How often she had told herself during this period, experimenting with a cynicism which did not at all suit her, ‘At last I can give myself a rest from the exhausting torture of health and fresh air by upsetting my liver in good bourgeois fashion in the comforting and invigorating atmosphere of night-clubs, with a straw glued to the corner of my lips, sipping an alcoholic drink that turns my stomach but gives me the illusion for an hour and a half a day that I am intelligent!’

  Now Veronica had just let this straw drop from her mouth with disgust, and instead of making the round of the night-clubs she began to see Dr Alcan, a psychiatrist, with whom she had struck up a friendship when they had met on returning to America on the same ship, the Excalibur. She wanted two things of him – help in recovering her moral equilibrium and connections through whom she might gain admission to a hospital.

  Dr Alcan, without being handsome, could be seductive by the liveliness of his intelligence, giving one the feeling that one was constantly playing hide and seek with his mind on the too naked and flat expanse of his face, which was ennobled by the constant agitation of thought. But Veronica herself knew too much about psychoanalysis to be the dupe of her natural and inevitable tendency to ‘transference’ and was able to limit her need to see him constantly, sometimes twice a day, to a simple faithful friendship, a friendship however to which she knew she would be obliged to give a good deal of herself, perhaps even too much, as soon as the doctor should require it.

  Everything that she had been dying to tell, but had never been able to, to Betka whom she adored and whom she was almost ready to hate because of this, she could and even had to tell now to Alcan, toward whom she felt no other inclination than that which the confession of her delirious fantasies procured her – always on her obsessive theme of the man with the hidden face. These confessions brought her daily closer to him in a promiscuity of confidential habits which in the end made their meetings more and more indispensable, and worst yet, irreplaceable. Who else, indeed, could have listened to her with so much acute comprehension? Thus when Alcan, in the course of the treatment, had to announce to her that he was shortly leaving for Africa to rejoin the French army fighting in Syria, this was such a blow to Veronica and her reaction was so great that she seemed unable to overcome her disappointment. To accustom her to the idea that their sessions must necessarily end, they decided to hold them at greater intervals, reducing them to a strict minimum. Veronica’s melancholy then became illuminated by the open lights of those interminable sleepless nights in which insomnia with its eyes which never closed and in which hornets nested, sat beside her endlessly in its long-trained robe from which the beads of the hours dropped one by one.

  Alcan had insistently advised her to return to Palm Springs, but now Veronica found herself more and more unable to think of the place where her mother had died without fright. What had become of the energy, the will, that spotless and prancing health of a thoroughbred horse, which had made of her an impregnable moral fortress? The will proposes and the subconscious disposes, and instead of the active courage which she had promised herself it was as though the towers of her soul had suddenly crumbled at the sound of war, just as the walls of Jericho had collapsed at the sound of the trumpet of Maccabee. For the faceless knight of the obsession that besieged her spirit had just completed the seven required circles around the stronghold of her virginity. Alcan’s departure was delayed, put off from day to day, and this uncertainty became for Veronica worse than anything.

  A year thus flowed by, and Veronica’s mental state gradually became stabilized, sinking into a misty confusion of her memory and her imagination. These symptoms of endemic morbidity were becoming, according to Alcan, all the more alarming since Veronica seemed to be beginning to ‘enjoy’ seeking refuge in the arms of her own psychic malady as if on the consoling bosom of the sole solution.

  At half-past twelve noon, the masculine hour for a quick drink in the King Cole bar at the Hotel St Regis, André Marion and Alcan had just met.

  ‘What are you having?’ asked Marion.

  ‘I’ve just ordered a Dubonnet. What will you have?’

  ‘I’ll take an old-fashioned,’ said Marion to Dominique, the bartender. Then, heaving a sigh and turning to Alcan, ‘You see, I’m becoming adapted. It’s whisky, water and sugar. It’s not too nauseating, and it keeps its promise. I learned this a year ago.’

  ‘But tell me, old man,’ said Alcan, ‘do you know who is here?’

  ‘So many people!’ said Marion sadly.

  ‘You know who is here?’ Alcan insisted once more with an air of excitement.

  ‘Who?’ Marion asked.

  ‘The Count of Grandsailles!’

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ Marion exclaimed.

  ‘I met him yesterday afternoon at the Frick Museum,’ Alcan answered triumphantly, quickly stirring his friend’s old-fashioned with the glass stirrer.

  ‘He was reported to be dead,’ Marion objected, crunching a potato chip.

  ‘I know, a Casablanca paper even published the news that he had blown himself up on board the Prince of Orminy’s yacht.’

  ‘Listen, old man, everybody has been dead, and everybody resuscitates, and sooner or later they turn up here. General Dutilleil was reported to have been killed in a plane crash. Well, it wasn’t true. And Charles Trenet, the singer, did you know him?’

  ‘What has become of him?’

  ‘Nobody knows anything about him,’ said Marion. They drank in silence. Marion looked at the hat-check girl and said, ‘By the way, what is Grandsailles doing here?’

  ‘He sees no one, he doesn’t give anyone his private phone number, but he’s living here. He must be on a mission. He told me he was leaving soon.’

  ‘I have to dash,’ Alcan said suddenly, ‘I’m late. I’m having my last luncheon with Veronica Stevens. Are you living at the St Regis?’

  ‘Why yes, for the time being,’ answered Marion.

  ‘Then I’ll telephone you – we’ll have dinner together. Don’t tell me you’re not free. I’m leaving in three days for Syria. I know a place, a kind of bistro, where they make wonderful tripe!’

  ‘Give me another old-fashioned,’ Marion told Dominique.

  Alcan had told the truth, for just a week before, the Count of Grandsailles had arrived in the United States by plane from South America. He had taken two adjoining apartments, one for himself and the other for his canoness, on the nineteenth floor of the Hotel St Regis, and already the neat piles of several unopened packages from the shops of the best antiquarians cluttered his drawing-room. Since his arrival in America, on the pretext of wanting to break with his past and respect the democratic ways of the country which offered him its hospitality, the Count had formally renounced his usurped title of Prince of Orminy, and had kept for his daily use only the obscure and inconspicuous name of Mr Jules Nodier, d’Orminy’s civil name. In certain circumstances he availed himself of the latter’s rank of retired lieutenant and wore his aviation insignia. At the same time he had immediately hired two lawyers who were already fighting like two Japanese cocks to do him service and who were trying to release a part of the fortune which d’Orminy had transferred to the United States a long time ago.

  The practical beginnings of his new life were working out pretty well, but New York had no charms for him. With the exclusiveness that had always characterized the Count’s passions, he could see no other feminine faces than the remembered and now adored one of Solange de Cléda. ‘Life is hard, bitter and a heavy burden far from Solange,’ he would say to himself. He would drink now – though he had always been a model of sobriety – as though he were seeking in the fires of old armagnacs the taste of the earthly spirit of his absent and distant Libreux. ‘There are two things that I can no longer put off doing,’ he would tell himself every morning. ‘One is to send Solange a long letter by diplomatic pouch to make up for everything; the other is to discharge my duty to Randolph as best I can, by announcing his death to Veronica Stevens and giving her back the cross. When this painful scene is over with everything will be better!’