‘It is now my duty to inform you, in this connection, of the courage, the loyalty, the spirit of sacrifice and the faithfulness to all your ideas which in spite of the difficult conditions of the time have been Madame Solange de Cléda’s sole norm of conduct. Each time litigious problems have arisen, Madame de Cléda has done me the honour of calling upon me and invariably has asked me this same and only question, “what would the Count have wished in these circumstances?” And I, making myself your modest interpreter, would transmit your wishes, the preservation of the plain of Libreux and resistance, and I was always obeyed without hesitation, blindly, I might say, and often without her even being willing to listen to my counsels of prudence when the objective could be achieved more completely.

  ‘Immediately after your ball, Madame de Cléda came and settled at the Moulin des Sources and here she has remained ever since. The first thing she did was to give orders to replant the three hundred square metres with cork-oaks, knowing that the Count had so much wanted this. The planting was done in most favourable weather – little rains broken by spells of hot sun. The Martin brothers were in charge of the work, and they chose very young oaks from the Saint Julien grove which were transplanted, each with a great ball of clayey soil of the same rich consistency as that of the Moulin des Sources. All took root and in the course of these seven months, with the last growth of new leaves, they now already have the stature of little men. The father of the Martin brothers, who is now paralysed in his right arm, came to see them last Sunday and he says that if the winter is mild and “does not break the air” they will be ready in due time to be marked for the extraction of cork.

  ‘Dear Count, I do not wish to assume the right to indulge in speculations as to the unhappy relations between yourself and Madame Solange de Cléda. My conscience would disturb me, however, if after what I have been able to observe of her conduct day after day and what I have known of her condition I were, through a criminal discretion, to keep from you this fact: Madame de Cléda is inwardly wasting away over your lack of clemency and of indulgence toward her. Never have I heard the slightest allusion to the nature of her sufferings, but from what we have kept of the peasant’s discerning and wholesome eye we are able to recognize by a slight curling of the upper leaves, invisible to everyone else, when a tree is suffering from dry-rot. Madame de Cléda has the nobility to suffer without a gesture, like the most beautiful and fragile of all the trees newly planted on your land. Were it only as for one of these, I implore your mercy. Prince maintient.

  ‘Please accept, dear Count, the unconditional and very affectionate devotion of your humble servant.

  Pierre Girardin.’

  The Count had no sooner read this letter from his notary than he sat down and wrote to Solange de Cléda, as follows:

  ‘Chère Solange,

  ‘No man can ever have been more humiliatingly and more cruelly bowed by his destiny than I am in writing you this letter. Yes, I am obliged to confess to you, at the very moment when I have become married to Veronica Stevens, that I love you. My love for you is now no longer the artificial product of the divagations of my brain. I love you as I should always have loved you, as a wife. And I must have the courage to tell you this abominable jumble of incongruity is no delirium. I, myself, have tried in vain to awaken from this nightmare. No, alas, my marriage is as inescapably real as my passion for you. However incredible all this may appear to you, the amazing circumstances under which insane chance has enmeshed my decisions would appear to you even more fantastic. But you must know that I esteem Veronica and that I have contracted sacred duties toward her whose fulfilment, by making her happy, will be my sole means of redeeming a double fault which I have committed against the person who shares my life and against someone now dead whom I betrayed and who had placed his trust in me.

  ‘Dear, beautiful, beloved Solange, allow me to address you in this way for the first, only and last time, now that I shall begin to know the unhappiness which has been yours, now that your contempt will make you forget me, while I shall never be able to forget you! Black remembers white, darkness light, remorse conscience, and you have become my conscience, my illuminated land of Libreux, France Solange! Flower-lips – that is how I remember yours, on that evening of our separation when I condemned them to silence, so unjustly mistreating you. Lips of jasmine!

  ‘Only one thing consoles me. I might have spared myself the shame of telling you that I love you, and I have not done so. This confession forever condemns and punishes all the fierce pride which has dominated my whole life. So be it. Not to have told you everything would have been too ignoble on my part. The true moral picture of me will wean you of your generous illusion. Know now that I am vanquished, still awaiting a word from you, if there can be such a word. If there cannot, I am resigned in advance to knowing nothing further of the only being I have loved in my life, and whom I adore.

  ‘I greet you respectfully. Thank you, lady, for the oaks which you have planted.

  Hervé de Grandsailles.’

  7

  Moons of Gall

  The october rains of the second fall of the total German occupation had not ceased for two weeks, and had abundantly irrigated the plain of Creux de Libreux. The candle-lighted wakes were long as breadless days, the bread under the German eyes hard, the smile bitter, and deep in the wrinkles of the peasant’s hands, rugged and as if momentarily ankylosed, some earth remained – enough to contain the germs of vengeance.

  It was odd to see the swastika sewn to the sleeve of a real Nazi guarding a machine-gun nest built of sand-bags with a little roof of corrugated iron set up at the turn of the road to the old Libreux cemetery. Across from this protective post a little cabin of masonry sheltered two other German soldiers detailed to control the movement of peasants between Upper and Lower Libreux having to pass through this zone reserved for works that were in large part secret, in the full fever of war industrialization. It was odd to see this real specimen of a Nazi soldier whom they had glimpsed until then only in the half-blurred pictures in newspapers or in the more tantalizing ones in the rotogravures of magazines. It was really incredible. Yet the Nazi soldier was there, all right, sitting patiently, his plump back squeezed by the leather belt and looking from under his helmet at the rain falling on the road full of that earth, muddy, precious as gold, the secret of the fertility of the plain, but which he must have been considering with contempt as a disgrace to any civilized country as he contemplated it with his sky-blue eyes stained by the absence of mud, eyes sterilized and castrated by the savage cleanliness of fascist motor highways. It was really odd, and even hallucinatory, to watch that Nazi, so out of place, sitting slumped before his weapon like a fat nurse busily knitting and mending the stockings of the invasion and the occupation.

  And it was fine to see the two Martin brothers, so tall and jovial, passing twice a day to and from their work at the Moulin des Sources before the Nazi who, knowing them, no longer forced them to stop and show their permits. Each time, while the other remained silent, the taller of the two brothers with a sharp toss of his head would shout to the soldier – each day with more rancour – ‘Everything all right?’ while he seemed to assassinate him with his glance, which burned like a bite of garlic. The nightfalls were lugubrious in the countryside of Libreux, when in all the villages everyone had to be home. Even the little cafés that were once so animated had to be closed fifteen minutes after the ringing of the Angelus. But on the other hand the bonds of family which had tended to relax in the last years became knit once more under the coercion of misfortune and of the enemy from without, into a solid sheaf composed of roots, of the sweat of humanity and of domestic animality. It had the colour, the morality and the rough skin of a potato, as in the days of the Le Nain brothers.

  Outside, beneath the sunless skies, the landscape of Libreux was absorbing the rain like a balm. The scars of the distant seasons of harvest and reaping were vanishing, while within each old farmhouse the walls were beginning to ooze through the poorly healed wounds of ancient cracks. Now a large damp spot had just entered to the very heart of the Moulin des Sources and appeared on the main wall, just at the intersection of the great vault that served as a ceiling for the dining-room, which at the beginning of the seventeenth century had been the refectory of the Jesuit convent of the ‘Consolation’. In spite of several layers of whitewash, a great rectangular relief representing Christ lying with his face upturned, straight as an iron bar on his tomb, which bore the Latin inscription in indented letters, Rígida Rigor Mors Est, could be distinguished. The large spot of moisture that started from the intersection of the vault spread over half of this relief, extended vertically in a long narrow line down the wall to the floor-tiling, seeming thus to flow from the wound in Christ’s side. What scenes must this vault not have witnessed, through the vicissitudes of time! Only recently the gossip of the plain had peopled it with the memory of the orgies of Rochefort, in a perpetual state of drunkenness, quarrelling and fighting throughout his Pantagruelian meals with his harem of rough, good-natured favourites with red eyes and hands, who were usually more or less pregnant.

  The austere dignity of earlier times had been restored since Solange de Cléda’s purchase of the Moulin. Reputed to be the smartest woman of Paris, she had shut herself off from society and retired here on the unhappy morrow of the Count of Grandsailles’ ball, which she had not attended. Here she had been living in an almost monastic simplicity ever since. On this evening, towards six o’clock, Solange was sitting before the large round dining-room table covered with a blackish chocolate-coloured cloth. She wore a garnet-red dress and was weeping. In her hand she held the Count of Grandsailles’ letter. Behind the door to the kitchen, always a little ajar, her maid Eugénie, who had just killed a rabbit, was observing her mistress while the blood flowed from the creature’s neck into a glazed earthenware bowl. Génie, as she was called, had her sleeves rolled up and, looking now at Solange, now at the rabbit, was uttering expansive sighs of contrition. For her rigorously Catholic education had taught her that this world is a vale of tears, and she believed that these are as fruitful for the soil and tilling of the soul as rain for the countryside and the fields. The subterranean truffle truffled the roots of the oak-tree, the snail slavered, the manure manured, the cemetery rotted, the preserves preserved, the rabbit’s blood dripped…. Solange ceased to weep, having heard the bell at the little courtyard gate awaken Titan’s barkings, and the wooden shoes of one of the Martin brothers clopping through the mud to let the visitor in. Soon the Viscount of Angerville appeared in the dining-room, dressed in his olive-green velvet peasant suit. He kissed Solange on the forehead, on the palm of each of her hands, and again on the forehead.

  ‘Will you allow me to go upstairs and lie down for an hour before dinner? While I rest I shall try to think of what we can do and what answer to give the Germans tomorrow. They can’t be put off any longer. Maître Girardin seems to have received news and secret instructions. He will come at nine for coffee and spend the wake with us.’

  ‘Yes, go, my dear. And I must write a letter during that time,’ said Solange, again offering her forehead to be kissed. When he had left she drew the gasoline lamp close and with a hand that struggled heroically to contain the tumult of her passion, wrote the following:

  ‘Dear Hervé – my – beloved – is it a dream to be able to call you this? Know, my beloved, that of your letter I have retained only your first words of love, which will remain engraved in my heart till after I am dead. Even when the worms shall have gnawed this heart away they will have to perish and be consumed in turn at the bottom of my coffin, curled up in the form of the letters of the inscription they have devoured, so true it is that this inscription must be and shall be the last reality that can be effaced from my existence! France Solange! Lips of jasmine! If the passion you express for me could become a certainty in my poor spirit that is still too incredulous, these beautiful words must suffice for the happiness of the rest of my life. I don’t want to, and must not, utter any word of pardon. You are my master. If destiny has willed that Veronica should be your wife, not only do I accept it but also I shall be able to respect this marriage by my acts. But if your love for me is such as you say it is, since your unfaithfulness to her in thought cannot be aggravated by further letters, I dare to ask you to continue to tell me that you love me. Loving the plain of Creux de Libreux, I am learning to adore you the better. Just this morning I put on high black kid boots to go out in the rain and look at the young wood of cork-oaks; some of these have reached exactly my height.

  ‘I beg a kiss for your jasmine lips of

  Solange de Cléda.’

  After the frugal and silent dinner with d’Angerville, Eugénie brushed the breadcrumbs into the hollow of her hand and folded the white tablecloth four times, leaving the table once more covered with the very dark chocolate-brown cover. Solange pulled out her sealed letter from inside the bodice of her garnet dress and passed it to d’Angerville.

  ‘This letter,’ she said, ‘must reach the Count of Grandsailles as soon as possible.’

  D’Angerville, as he took the envelope, kept Solange’s hand in his, while Génie, looking out from the smoke-blackened depth of the kitchen through the half-open doorway, kept her eyes glued to the immaculate rectangle of the envelope on which Solange’s and d’Angerville’s hands had just met, seeming to maintain indefinitely a contact without a suggestion of a caress. The Viscount of Angerville lived at the Moulin des Sources. Three months before he had come to her post-haste, alarmed by an attack of deep despair which Solange seemed to have no will to overcome. Since then he had not left her. He would not have dared to, for Solange’s spirit was subject to sudden extreme changes of mood, and the ecstasy of the periods of euphoria – a state of happy semi-unconsciousness – was almost as disturbing as the mood that would follow, in which her sense of the futility of life and her depressive anguish would confine her to her bed where she would remain for days with her shutters closed. Knowing that Solange wished to confide something to him, d’Angerville feigned calmness and indifference. As if brooding over other things he watched Génie watching them from the kitchen and preserved a long silence. It was also to help her that he had taken her hand. Finally Solange said in a low voice, ‘The Count of Grandsailles has just married Veronica Stevens in America.’

  Solange was looking into his eyes to discover his reaction, but d’Angerville’s eyes still seemed lost in the indifferent contemplation of the kitchen. Solange followed his gaze, whereupon Génie drew the door partly shut and turned on the faucet over the sink.

  ‘The Count has married,’ Solange repeated, and she went on eagerly, ‘but I am happy, very happy, for he has just written me about it – it was fate that forced him to it, but I’m the only one he loves! Do you hear?’

  ‘I am still listening to you,’ answered d’Angerville, ‘but for some time now I have found that in listening to you I think of myself.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Solange. ‘Am I too selfish ever to ask you about your own feelings? Yes, that must be what you are thinking! But why, my dear,’ she continued gently, ‘don’t you tell yourself rather that it is perhaps because I don’t dare to ask you… that it is precisely because – I know!’

  Then suddenly with her small fist Solange seized d’Angerville’s shirt in the middle of his chest and pulled it toward her forcibly, as if to oblige him to confess, ‘You love me, Dick?’

  D’Angerville lowered his eyes to the dark tablecover, where they encountered the white envelope addressed to the Count of Grandsailles, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have loved you eight years.’ There was a brief silence, and when he spoke again it was as though those eight years had drained all emotion from his voice. ‘It was only just now – when you asked me, ‘Do you hear?’ – that I understood at last with certainty that I can never have the slightest hope. But at least you must admit that since we have known each other this is the first time you have caught me being inattentive to you. You must forgive me! I have followed your love for Grandsailles day by day. I have even encouraged it, as much as was within my power, and while this was possible, but I had never yet seen your passion so glowing, seen it daze you so, as when you told me the news of his marriage! With what utter fanaticism you still persist in believing in him! And what right have I to dare talk to you in this way?’

  ‘Come, dear,’ said Solange.

  He came close and rested his head on Solange’s garnet-coloured bosom. Thus they remained without exchanging a word, as the light of the gasoline lamp began to flicker more and more feebly around its mantle, that hung crooked and half consumed. Before them the seepage of the rain on the wall shone like the slimy trail of a giant nocturnal snail. From the kitchen came the sound of the dishpan being emptied and of plates being piled upside down on the draining board. As soon as silence returned, Solange cried, ‘Génie!’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’

  ‘You can bring the coffee.’

  Génie brought the coffee, while Solange and d’Angerville remained in each other’s arms until Génie had gone back into the kitchen. At this moment Titan barked in the courtyard and the bell sounded feebly.

  ‘That must be Girardin,’ said d’Angerville, giving each of Solange’s hands a long kiss.

  The door opened, and Pierre Girardin appeared. With worried little footsteps he entered the large, cold and inhospitable dining-room and after bowing with a courtesy which always seemed affected because of an excess of sincerity immediately sat down more familiarly between Solange de Cléda and d’Angerville, though not without an apology, ‘I am sitting in the middle so that I can talk to you better.’