‘Girardin showed me a printed circular addressed to the men of the maquis,’ said d’Angerville, ‘and it’s really very impressive.’

  At this moment Titan barked in the court.

  ‘He’s already here, it’s he!’ Solange, all pale, got up from the table. ‘Please,’ she said to d’Angerville, ‘go upstairs and tell Génie to go up too. I want to be with my son alone and without witnesses.’

  D’Angerville got up immediately just at the moment when Girardin broke into the refectory. ‘Madame,’ he said, running forward to kiss Solange’s hand, ‘your son is here, but he has come with an escort. I shall retire upstairs and wait to speak to you about last minute details. Everything is arranged, and the procession will start for Saint Julien in two hours.’

  D’Angerville, Girardin and Génie hurried upstairs, shutting behind them the heavy oak door at the head of the stairway, which was usually left open. Solange de Cléda remained alone, waiting, and leaning against the edge of the table which had not been cleared and in the centre of which the soup tureen was still steaming. The door opened without any preliminary knock, and three men entered: the one in the middle was her son. He came forward toward Solange and kissed her on the brow, then said to her severely:

  ‘Article Three of our statutes formally forbids us to communicate with our families. In my capacity as a leader I might have come without escorts. I haven’t wanted to do this, for I am anxious to have witnesses to all my acts. If I am here it is not as a son but as an outlaw and a guerilla. I have come to demand that you shelter six of my men and hide them for two days, and to force you to perform at least a part of the duties which you seem to forget.’

  As if wishing to reflect carefully before she spoke, Solange did not immediately answer. Finally she said, ‘Jean-Pierre – so you order your mother to do a thing which you know she would not have refused – hospitality for you and your people, if they are in danger.’

  ‘I know little about you, and the little I have learned is bad!’ answered Jean-Pierre, while he signalled to the two men who accompanied him to withdraw and go and sit down at the far end of the room.

  ‘What is bad?’ Solange implored, feeling faint, then recovering her self-possession in an effort to summon a little courage.

  ‘Having surrendered the water-power of the Moulin to the enemy, first and foremost,’ Jean-Pierre answered.

  ‘What do you know of the reasons I may have had for doing it?’ Solange pleaded, feeling already nailed to the wall of her execution by the implacable answer she knew her son would make.

  ‘No reason can serve as an excuse to betray our country!’ cried Jean-Pierre.

  ‘Listen to me, my son, in the Moulin des Sources I have, rightly or wrongly, invested all I owned and all you owned, and in doing this I took upon myself the whole responsibility for managing it, for seeing it through for the future.’

  ‘The future!’ Jean-Pierre repeated in a low voice, as if in a frenzy of hatred and contempt for this word.

  ‘I was having you study in Switzerland, and just as your age had spared you the horrors of war I should have liked to spare you the terror and the indignity of the occupation as well. I had planned everything so that you could remain there comfortably. You ran away. You are extraordinarily young for the task and the responsibility you have assumed, waiving not only my permission, but even my loving counsel; you might at least have let me know as a friend, if you had made up your mind to despise my authority as a mother.’

  ‘Yes, I despise your authority, and what affection have you shown as a mother or even as a friend? A week’s routine visit every year to the school, and extravagant presents to appease your bad conscience. Well, let me tell you – I used to smash and tear them up, as if it were you they represented. Now I know the meaning of all that social glamour you built up around yourself in Paris. It was a symbol of the defeat of 1940!’

  ‘My son, my son!’ cried Solange, beside herself, her voice broken by sobs, ‘if I wanted to keep the Moulin des Sources, it was for you, Jean-Pierre, for your future!’

  ‘My future?’ Jean-Pierre shouted, ‘I am one of those whose only future is death!’

  ‘How can we tell,’ Solange moaned, ‘what the end of this war will bring? What might happen to your inheritance?’

  ‘I shall be dead before that,’ said Jean-Pierre, still shouting, ‘but even when I am dead, I shall inherit your shame!’

  Humiliated and wretched, Solange drew close to her son. ‘Look at me, my son, if you won’t listen to what I have to say. At least look at me, so that you see in my face that I am not utterly contemptible! Look at my white lips, see how I suffer!’

  ‘I have been looking at you, Solange de Cléda, and I see in your expression nothing but the remnants of the bewitching beauty with which you seduce your lovers, and if you are fragile and sickly it is only because you have been in the throes of your unhappy liaison with that Count of Grandsailles who has dishonoured you!’

  Utterly dejected and at a loss, Solange slowly turned round, weeping, and staggered over to the great wall, where she buried her face in her hands and leaned with both arms against the rough stone. The moisture was still trickling down, and she pressed herself more firmly against it, feeling the cold water flowing and mingling with her boiling tears, and the voluptuousness of this sensation immediately became stronger than her own suffering. Ceasing to weep, Solange again faced her son. But now she seemed not to see him, and a mysterious smile of pleasure brushed her throbbing lips. This increasingly fixed expression must have been incomprehensible to Jean-Pierre.

  ‘Why are you smiling like that?’ he asked, both furious and disconcerted. ‘Is it contempt? Are you trying to provoke me? Or have you gone mad?’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Solange in a bare whisper, raising her hand and leaning it against the wall…. ‘I feel him coming… I know it now, it began last night…. He is going to come and visit me…. It’s he, the Count of Grandsailles, who wants to abuse me again. Everything is sweet and bitter to me for he is like you, inflexible, and he has no pity….’

  Jean-Pierre, completely bewildered, made a step toward his mother, but she, as if to avoid his touch, nimbly eluded him and went and sat down at the table, lost in her dream and impervious to the outer world.

  She was weeping softly, unresisting before the flood of tears, her bosom crushed against the table. The white cloth at such dose range dazzled her, and she shut her eyes, hiding her face with one hand. ‘You, too, have come to abuse me,’ she said, ‘leave me alone, leave me alone! You’ve hurt me too much!’

  At this moment Jean-Pierre probably had an impulse of tenderness, for he reached out his hand and began gently to stroke his mother’s hair.

  ‘Go away, now, I don’t need your pity any more!’

  The hand stopped. Stung by the fact that her son was so ready to obey her, that his love was so easily discouraged, Solange insisted, ‘Go away, I tell you….’ And then she added, ‘Now I refuse to shelter your men!’

  At this moment Solange felt Jean-Pierre’s nails dig painfully into her scalp, then his fist closed, pulling her hair excruciatingly, jerked her head back and flung it on to the tablecloth, where her cheek sank hard into the cutting crusts of dry bread. She heard nothing more. But when she opened her eyes there was no one in the room but d’Angerville, who was beside her. He kissed the corner of her lips.

  ‘When your son left,’ he said, the words blowing softly across her cheek, ‘you fainted, with a blissful expression on your face… you did not cease smiling.’

  ‘I remember nothing… but I know, he is going to come.’

  Then she looked anxiously toward the half-open door to the kitchen.

  ‘Everybody has gone to the All Saints’ Day festival,’ said d’Angerville. ‘I locked the door downstairs, so that if anyone came he would have to ring. We are alone.’

  ‘It seems to me suddenly that winter is over,’ said Solange, ‘as if spring had already begun. Take me away from here!’ And, as d’Angerville hesitated, she repeated, ‘Take me away from here, quickly, my dear; prepare the horses, I need fresh air. We’ll gallop all the way to the Saint Julien hermitage, and we shall still get there in time for vespers.’

  When d’Angerville appeared to tell Solange the horses were ready she was coming down from her room, and she stopped for a moment in the middle of the stairway, dressed in a svelte and close-fitting riding-costume that d’Angerville had not seen since their rides in the Bois de Boulogne.

  ‘How far away Paris seems, doesn’t it?’ said Solange. She had gathered up her back hair under a tiny hat pinned with a fan of partridge feathers, letting it fall in loose waves behind her ears over her shoulders. D’Angerville went up to her, took her hands and separated Solange’s arms, holding them thus for a moment away from her body, as if the better to appreciate the whole effect. ‘How your hair has grown!’ he said.

  ‘Apace with my troubles!’ said Solange.

  ‘You have no make-up,’ said d’Angerville, studying her closely. ‘I’ve seen you once before looking as badly – and as divine!’

  ‘I also remember that day,’ said Solange, lowering her eyes, ‘and how you must love me to be able to remember me as you do, in the smallest details and miseries. It was up there, in the Château…. I had been weeping then, too.’ She raised her head and looked toward the Château through the narrow window. ‘Bonjour tristesse! Do you remember?’

  ‘No,’ replied d’Angerville, ‘I said that to you the evening before, at the end of the dinner. But then I had been gallant with you, bolder than I would dream of being now; after which I called your attention to the fact that your eyes were red…. “Your eyes are red”.’

  ‘Let’s go, shall we?’ said Solange, taking him by the arm, ‘we’re going to gallop, darling. How is it we haven’t thought of riding before this?’

  In passing, Solange and d’Angerville stopped for a moment in the forests of young cork-oaks whose leaves after the last rains were tender and shiny as enamel. Solange broke off a young shoot and stuck it in the bridle to decorate her horse’s head. Then they set off again. On reaching the Saint Julien hermitage Solange wanted to continue their ride, instead of going in to vespers, and they lost their way skirting a gorge at the bottom of which the red waters of an impetuous torrent swirled. Neither of them spoke. When they returned, they caught up with the procession just at the moment when it was about to pass the German control post, reinforced for the occasion by three squads of soldiers commanded by two officers in gala uniforms. It was a moment of intense excitement for Solange and d’Angerville. They held each other tightly by the arm, mounted on their respective horses at the edge of the road where they had stopped to watch the march of the procession. Advancing with stoic indifference under the scrutiny of the control, the crowd of peasants carried lighted candles and sang to the plaintive accompaniment of the bagpipe and the precise counterpoint of the tambourine that preceded the image of the Virgin of Consolation borne on the robust shoulders of the two Martin brothers and of two others, all four holding a lighted candle in their free hand.

  ‘Breasts of live rock,’ cried the boys.

  ‘Tom, tom tom.’

  ‘Legs of fresh grass!’ sang the voices of the men.

  ‘Lips of jasmine!’ Solange repeated – ‘it’s all so beautiful it could ‘Tom! Tom! Tom!’ came the tambourine’s accompaniment.

  ‘Lips of jasmine!’ Solange repeated – it’s all so beautiful it could make one weep…. Look at Girardin, how small he looks…. He’s singing, too….’ Solange’s eyes filled with tears.

  ‘And back there, Génie – how dignified she is, how proud, in her old peasant costume,’ said d’Angerville.

  Just at this moment a frightful thing happened. Four German soldiers opened a passage through the crowd and stopped in front of Génie. Then, like a caterpillar of anguish, paralysed at the heart, the whole rest of the procession ceased to advance. As it had started to climb the slope of a hill, those in front could witness the scene from a point of vantage. The fears of the Martin brothers, Girardin and all those who carried the plans rolled in the holders of their candles can well be imagined! Solange, feeling tragedy imminent, shut her eyelids. But Génie was not alone in being subjected to this measure, for already other soldiers were searching other peasants to inspect what they were carrying in their baskets or their sacks. In Génie’s case they suspected only her wide and unusual old-fashioned skirts, spread out at the bottom by the traditional armature of woven reed, now seldom seen, which the peasant women wore in former times. Instinctively realizing this. Génie acted with extraordinary coolness. To one of the soldiers who was trying to search her she handed her lighted candle, then calmly began undoing her skirts in front of everyone. When it became obvious that nothing more was concealed under the armature than a survival of folklorish under-garments, she slipped on her skirt again, with the same nonchalance, and took back the candle which the soldier courteously handed her and which naturally had attached to it the plans which he had been holding all this time in his own hand, duped by the Libreux peasant malice.

  ‘Now that the danger is over and before it is too dark, I should like to return for a moment to the cemetery to place this new cork-oak branch at the door to the crypt of the Count of Grandsailles’ mother as an act of gratitude. I noticed as we passed that the entrance to the cemetery was open, and it’s just a short trot from here.’

  When they reached the cemetery they got down from their horses and walked. At the end of the main avenue of cypresses stood the mausoleum, built in rose-grey Libreux granite, and Solange hung her branch between the points of the Count of Grandsailles’ wrought-iron crown that was cemented to the wall and that had left streaks of rust in the stone.

  ‘Now we can leave. Let’s return quickly to the Moulin des Sources,’ exclaimed Solange. But instead of going straight down the avenue by which they had come, and which was the shortest distance to the iron fence where they had tied their horses, Solange seemed to hesitate. As if overcome by a sudden indolence, she ambled down a side lane where the weeds, still drenched with rain, grew waist-high.

  ‘Why don’t we come here more often,’ sighed Solange. ‘Let’s stay another moment. It’s not here but under the vaulted ceiling of the Moulin des Sources that I feel as if I were in a tomb. I don’t like to be shut in. When I am dead I should like always to have the open sky on my face!’

  As she spoke she stretched herself out on an ancient sarcophagus between whose fissures grew fine, tall stalks of rye.

  ‘Look at me, d’Angerville, how I will be when I am dead!’ And, feigning to stop breathing, she joined her two hands symmetrically in the hollow between her breasts, but the expression of her face instead of conforming to the rôle she was assuming, took on a quite different expression and she seemed unable to control her lips as they half opened in an ecstatic smile. The moon, breaking through a shred of serene sky, glistened on the double row of her saliva-moistened teeth.

  ‘Your hands are icy and your forehead is burning; you were all in perspiration from your violent exercise a while ago and you’re going to catch cold!’

  Solange tried to get up. ‘My head is spinning, help me get down.’ But the moment she stood up she collapsed in d’Angerville’s arms, shivering with cold. ‘Hold me good and tight, d’Angerville, it’s horrible, but I feel it’s going to come.’

  ‘I know,’ said d’Angerville, pressing her a little tighter. ‘I know what you would like now. You would like me to abuse you too, and take his place. That’s what you want of me?’

  ‘Oh, don’t! It’s not a question of you or me now. It’s our two separated loves that will do everything! Yes! I should like him to come and visit me…. Now, here! I have a horror of my room.’

  ‘I’ll bring the horses here, so that you can get back,’ said d’Angerville, brusquely depositing Solange’s body on the sarcophagus. One of her arms remained dangling, as if inert.

  ‘But what is the matter with you? Do you really want it?’ d’Angerville murmured, bringing his face close.

  ‘Yes, I want it!’

  ‘I’m going to get the horses,’ said d’Angerville.

  ‘First kiss me hard, way inside my mouth!’ said Solange.

  D’Angerville left without obeying her, but when he returned, leading the horses by the bridles, he found Solange lying as if really dead, not having moved a fraction of an inch. Then, falling on his knees, he kissed her on the mouth as she had asked him. Solange’s body had become rigid as a piece of wood. D’Angerville took her by the waist, raised her with difficulty, and began to pull her off the sarcophagus. But one of Solange’s spurs had become caught between two bricks. After a struggle they finally yielded, crumbling into a pile of clay. But d’Angerville lost his balance, and their two bodies, on the point of falling, collided violently against Solange’s black horse, who reared and fled among the tombs, whinnying plaintively in the silence of the rising night.

  ‘Stand up for a minute,’ said d’Angerville, ‘while I catch him for you.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Solange, ‘lean me here against this cypress.’

  D’Angerville did so, but Solange’s body became ankylosed like that of a lugubrious manikin. Her head flopped into the branches of the tree, which scratched her face, while in contrast to this her enigmatic smile of turpitude seemed to be accentuated in intensity and often she would violently contract her eyelids.

  When d’Angerville had succeeded in setting Solange on his own horse, leading the other by the bridle, he galloped and galloped like a madman all the way to the Moulin des Sources, outdistancing the procession just as it reached the gates of the village of Libreux. He entered the Moulin dining-room carrying Solange’s stiff body in his arms.

  ‘Not in my room! Lay me on the table,’ she said.

  ‘The procession has just reached the village. Génie and Girardin will be here any minute,’ d’Angerville shouted, his face for the first time becoming harsh and ugly.