It was through Dr Alcan that Grandsailles obtained an interview with Veronica. Alcan had warned Grandsailles, ‘She is very irritable. Her nerves are in shreds, but her biological freshness is bound to save her. The people of this country are so intact that they can allow themselves to get out of order once in a while. When the time comes they never fail to mark the exact and pitiless hour of their decisions.’

  ‘What I have to tell her is very painful for her and difficult for me,’ Grandsailles had said.

  ‘Whoever comes to destroy her dream can only do her good,’ answered Alcan.

  ‘I shall ask you one thing,’ Grandsailles had said further, ‘I beg you not to tell anyone my real name. I am here incognito, and all my undertakings might be jeopardized. Remember that I am just Nodier, the retired aviation lieutenant – even for Veronica.’

  To Veronica Alcan had said, ‘He comes from Europe, he has a message for you. He insists on telling you everything himself, even his name.’

  Alcan was astonished that Veronica showed no reaction – she seemed to have expected this. Resentful of his departure, she had become coldly estranged from him and, with her mind roaming elsewhere, she even betrayed her impatience to bring their conversation to an end. Alcan was leaving for Syria the next day, yet Veronica hardly deigned to be aware of it.

  Humanized, enriched and enlightened by the distant virtues of Solange de Cléda’s loftiness of soul, the Count of Grandsailles felt the atheistic pettinesses of his character evolving toward the stable and central cross of mature faith. He was forty-five years old, and he was surprised now to find himself submerged by a feeling that was new to his heart – pity. It is true that this pity contained residues of his narcissism, for he began by exercising it chiefly on himself. He would say to himself, ‘I’m getting old, and for the first time in my life I feel lonely; in my prolonged and quasi-monastic retreats in the Château de Lamotte Parisian society with its trivial passions sufficed to haunt my solitude, and the saturnalia of my mistresses would prowl outside, around my celibate’s bed, under the watchful eye of that tearful bulldog, my canoness. Here no one knows me, and the few people I might have seen I must avoid because of the degrading infirmity of my change of personality. The canoness is sad; she hides it as best she can, but she is sad, and she has grown even uglier!’

  Formerly the evolution of this ugliness, grown invisible through habit, had not been devoid of a certain diabolical seductiveness that exerted its fascination over him, but in his present state of mind Grandsailles could merely observe the monstrous growth of her ugliness objectively. He felt nothing but pity for her, and this was something he was not yet resigned to! No longer having anyone over whom he could tyrannize the Count suddenly believed himself to be a weak man. ‘I know! I know!’ he would repeat to himself, ‘a crisis of Catholicism!’ But instead of thinking of this development as he would have formerly, that is to say, fearing it as if it were an attack of sciatica, he now almost wished that the religious crisis and the sciatica would occur simultaneously, so that their combined physical and moral pain might offset the frightful emptiness of his life.

  ‘In any case I’ve got a fine case of rheumatism,’ he said to himself, trying to stretch his ailing leg which for several days had obliged him again to walk painfully and to have recourse to a cane. That afternoon, after his solitary meal in his room, he had slept a little and now he was thinking of the sad duty he presently had to perform: that of meeting Veronica Stevens to announce Lieutenant Randolph’s death and give her the little cross of pearls and diamonds which the latter had entrusted to him. ‘Where did I put it?’ the Count wondered and, getting up, immediately found it in the first drawer he opened. ‘It’s touching,’ he said to himself, picking up the little wooden box tightly tied with string, ‘but I can’t bring it to her like this,’ and he tried to think of a case in which he could put it. Having untied it he took the cross between his fingers and examined it. ‘I’ll simply bring it to her in my hand, that’s the most natural.’ How he wished this business were already over! For nothing in the world was so depressing to him as scenes of weeping, the rôle of consoler, in which he had always felt himself awkward. Each time it was only with difficulty that he could repress a desire to become brutal, so as to have it over with more quickly.

  Today, however, he had taken it upon himself to accomplish this Christian task with more resignation, and he seemed already to derive from it an imperceptible sweetness of recompense. After his apprenticeship as a conspirator, was he now about to school himself in pity? In any case, he felt that this second rôle was as foredoomed to failure as the first. Nevertheless he had just imposed upon himself still other duties of this kind – that of speaking to his canoness to try to help her overcome the melancholy in which he saw her sinking and to give her an opportunity to unburden herself of the reasons for her bitterness. Moreover, he reminded himself day after day of the moral necessity of writing to Solange de Cléda in order to make up for all the wrong he had done her.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said to himself as he started out on his errand, ‘Veronica Stevens is a pleasant person, and my visit may furnish me the occasion of a quiet friendship and provide me with the background of a discreet salon to which I can go from time to time and hold forth.’

  When he got down into the lobby of the hotel the Count noticed that he would be fifteen minutes early for his appointment with Veronica. The stormy weather accentuated his thirst, considerably aggravated recently by his constant alcoholic libations. Just a while ago, in the depth of his sleep, benumbed by a stomach irritation, he had dreamed with delight of cascades splashing among fresh mosses and bare arms plunging to the shoulder in icy springs on whose edges grew tufts of mint. Grandsailles went into the King Cole bar, saying to himself, ‘I am going to drink some very cold mineral water, but I’ve sworn to myself never to touch another drop of alcohol.’ The bar at this time was completely deserted.

  ‘An armagnac?’ asked Dominique, seeing the Count approach.

  ‘Yes,’ said Grandsailles, instantly yielding to temptation, ‘it will bring my spirits back. The thought of this visit crushes me!’

  ‘There’s going to be another storm, and when there’s a storm here it’s really something!’ said Dominique as he poured out the brandy, generously filling the wide-bottomed glass beyond the white line. Grandsailles unconsciously lifted his hand to his cheek to counteract the pricking sensations to which he was subject.

  The outside of Veronica Stevens’ private mansion was in the style of the most sumptuous old New York houses, but there was nothing to differentiate it from all the others. The trip in the taxi had chilled the Count to the marrow, and the biting cold of the New York winter made his skin numb and seemed to him to have covered his face with mutilations. The immaculately groomed English servant who came to open the door for him impressed him favourably. Grandsailles took delight in slowly removing his gloves, feeling himself appreciated for the first time in weeks, from the depth of the most impenetrable reserve, by this servant with lowered eyes. Preceded by him, the Count of Grandsailles passed through two feebly-lighted rooms, and was ushered into a long corridor that led to the drawing-room where Veronica Stevens stood, with her back turned, clad in her long starched white robe, surrounded by three black Afghans lying at her feet as if protecting her.

  Veronica was facing the large mirror over the fireplace, and she watched his reflection as he approached. The corridor that Grandsailles had to pass through to reach the salon in which he came upon Veronica’s calm figure was a kind of very narrow gallery of mirrors with a ceiling so high that it seemed to vanish in the darkness of the shadows. This gallery was very feebly lighted by rock-crystal wall candelabra placed every two feet, but the little salmon-pink shades of tightly folded silk which were further covered with several layers of voile of the same colour subdued the light, diffusing it so much that one might have thought oneself under water at the bottom of an aquarium. The corridor seemed interminable, and as if in a dream the Count of Grandsailles advanced, leaning heavily on his cane with one hand, walking painfully and holding the little cross of pearls and diamonds which he was to deliver tightly pressed in his other hand. At each step he felt all the barometric pressure of the electrically charged atmosphere weighing on his leg and to the benumbing indolence provoked by digestion was added the heavy fire of the glass of armagnac which had poured into his veins all the molten lead of his native land. The emotion of the impending scene made him weak and awkward; moreover, he had neglected to plan in advance how he should announce the dreadful news. His legs barely dragged him. If only he had another corridor like this one to pass through to give himself more time! But already he had reached the doorway and nothing could further put off their painful interview.

  Here he stopped, surprised by the immobility of Veronica, who had not made a single movement. Was she observing him in the reflection of the mirror as he approached. Surely she was, for the moment she turned round to face him he had the impression that she had been watching him since he appeared at the end of the corridor and that she already knew him. Grandsailles had not had time to bow his head to greet her when Veronica had already come up to him very close and was looking into his eyes with an expression both of scrutiny and of deep shock. She seemed to sense or to know the news which the Count had come to announce.

  Just as he was about to speak Veronica, without waiting for his words, flung her hands out and seized the one in which the Count pressed the little cross. Instinctively he held back in bewilderment. How could she have guessed? But no word could have been at this precise moment more eloquent than the simple gesture of letting his hand open, and he did so. Veronica seized the cross and fell sobbing into the Count’s arms. He pressed her to him with that enveloping and symmetrical suavity that he seemed to have inherited from the trimmed foliage of old French parks. His gestures were velvety and sober like those of a protective tree, and Veronica in spite of her bowed head and the effusions of her excitement seemed lofty and tranquil as a tower. Grandsailles, while waiting for this first outpouring of grief to cease, continued silently to hold her thus while with his distraught eyes, moistened by tenderness, he surveyed through the heavy strands of Veronica’s hair that grazed his lips the rich and caressing ensemble of the drawing-room.

  Outside the day had darkened and it was beginning to snow, while inside everything seemed to come to life in the warmth of the two black marble fireplaces that faced each other, crackling in unison with two symmetrically arranged wood fires. Over each of the fireplaces two oblong and parallel mirrors repeated to infinity till it became lost in a greenish haze the stereotyped reflection of the group formed by Veronica weeping in the Count’s arms. Grandsailles let his gaze rest on this couple to which the flickering flames communicated a kind of life of its own, while seeming to unite them in a single tremulousness. The three black Afghans paced the room around the couple with movements that were melodic and velvety like the resonances of a cello, and their presence gave a strange sense of familiarity to the scene.

  It was at this precise moment that something unforeseen suddenly occurred. Veronica had stopped weeping and had lifted her bowed head, and with half-shut eyes she brought her face close to the Count’s offering him her lips. In a flash Grandsailles realized the frightful misunderstanding which his situation had created, and pushing Veronica away exclaimed in a muffled voice, as if to himself, ‘Why, it’s awful! It’s impossible!’

  As he spoke he quickly raised his clenched hand to his cheek to repress a smarting pain in his scar, while the abrupt movement he had made to break away from Veronica had caused his cane to drop noisily to the floor. Afraid that his rheumatism would hinder him, he did not try to pick it up, and without its aid he limped painfully over to a couch and leaned against its back. There he remained for a moment, with his head hanging, as if ashamed, his brain reeling with the tumult of contradictory ideas that assailed him. The clumsiness of all his last movements had revolted his pride, putting him in a humiliating posture in his own eyes – tortured with pain, bound and trapped by the embarrassing affront of a dreadful mistaken identity.

  Veronica had not ceased to observe his slightest movements with an icy and inquisitorial stare, believing in turn that she completely understood his attitude – he was holding back because of his physical incapacitation! Invalid though he was, she but loved him the more. She took a resolute step toward him, and in a contemptuous tone that might have seemed the voice of fury if it had not been the much more imperative one of her passion, she said:

  ‘If you had not come back, I should probably have died of the malady which has tortured my spirit for a year! Have you ever wondered what it is to love in this way? How can you be afraid that scars or any other injury could come between us – when I was able to love you without a face! Nothing can tear me from my dream now that I know my delirium was a reality. You cannot imagine what I have suffered. In my distracted condition I had lost even the memory of your gaze, and like a dreadful blind woman I could have recognized you only by finding and touching this cross that I gave you.’

  Eagerly she raised the little cross to her lips, but in an instant all her violence seemed to drain out over the abrupt slopes of her spasmodic, exhausted energy and it was as though this violence had all gathered in the depression of her black despondency. She began to pace nervously across the room, followed by the anxious gaze of her three dogs, as though she were skirting the edge of a fit of madness, seeming to make a point of avoiding certain zones of the intricate ornamentation of the oriental rug whose prevailing colour and pattern were blood and lotus-blossoms. She now had an expression that was menacing, insulting, and childish at the same time and a delicate trembling like a down of fear ruffled the whole length of her body while she seemed to bend under the weight of her hair and be about to break in two. Finally, shaking these tresses with effort, as if to enable herself to talk – for she had become suddenly voiceless and could not make herself heard – she managed only to utter a sibilant and barely intelligible murmur that demanded a great effort, ‘It’s happiness that makes me weep this way – it’s nothing! It’ll pass…’

  But her voice finally choked in an inarticulate, painful exhalation, and her face assumed a set smile that grew terrifying. Having abandoned her challenging attitude of a while ago she drew close to the Count, a little fearfully, as if imploring his indulgence for her state so that he would take her in his arms again.

  ‘Alas,’ said Grandsailles, ‘and yet I have to tell you everything!’

  ‘No! No!’ Veronica managed to cry. ‘No! I love you! No matter what I might hear!’

  The Count of Grandsailles found himself again hesitant, holding Veronica’s body in his arms, warm and desirable as the boiling, corrosive and ulcerating body of madness itself. As they stood thus, linked to each other by their evil fate, pressed to each other by the two-headed serpent of chance, Veronica found release in calm and beneficent tears whose sweetness seemed to bind them together in still more chains…. For Grandsailles remained criminally silent, and each new second that they lived thus in misunderstanding became more irreparable. Around them and in Grandsailles’ suddenly lively and imperialistic eyes each knick-knack, each bit of porcelain, each rock-crystal ornament, each golden angle and each mesh of Veronica’s hair began to glisten with the malefic and iridescent fires of an opal. In each object, from the lotus-blossoms on the carpet to the very heart of each of the abundant snowflakes that now were falling beyond the window, he perceived the sparks of his concupiscence flash and he felt them leave a searing mark – sparks in the depth of the six eyes of the three Afghans who were looking at him temptingly.

  Now, like a coward, Grandsailles was asking himself, ‘How shall I dare to tell this woman who has just regained her happiness that the man she believes me to be is dead and that instead of being the one to console her I am only an emissary of death! Why utter the irreparable word that will only destroy this great illusion without otherwise altering the course of destiny?’ Why doom himself to sink by speaking when he had only to remain silent to save himself? Since Veronica was supremely beautiful – and even if she had not been, the fever of her ardour would have sufficed to make him desire her…. It was so good not to know which was in the other’s arms, which was the more deceived… so great was the pleasure of their confusion of feelings and of personalities. There was so little of himself in the name he was using and in the false memory she had of him, without a face, so unreal…. Then, taking Veronica’s face between his hands Grandsailles kissed her with all the sensual mastery of his consummate experience, and with the studied kiss of a usurper and a traitor sealed the charitable and supreme lie of pity on which they founded the union of their future life.

  The next morning the Count of Grandsailles received a letter from France, from his notary Pierre Girardin:

  ‘Dear Monsieur Grandsailles,

  ‘By the time this letter reaches you the distress of our plain of Creux de Libreux will be at its height. In the relentless hands of the invader the progress of the mining developments and of the even more devastating war industries has already ravaged the whole region of the old vineyards, of the Saint Julien domains, as well as all the surrounding forests which were in turn cut down, not sparing the ancient spring that flows through them which, you remember, you like to call the “fountain of Adonis”. All this has now become inaccessible terrain ringed and protected by barbed wire and high tension cables. What would have become of the Moulin des Sources properties if they had still belonged to Rochefort? The Moulin, as the key source of water-power, would no doubt already have been turned into a large electric plant. For the moment this seems an eventuality that might be spared us, or at least be put off.