Betka left for Africa with Randolph. There was no thought of marriage between them, but they could not get along without each other. Grandsailles had entrusted Betka with a mission, and for this she had to meet Cécile Goudreau in Tangiers.

  The day the Count moved back to the oasis he said to his canoness, ‘I want the child to live and be treated as a prince. He will occupy the whole second floor of the house. He must never leave the enclosure of the oasis. He has a dreadful but precious blood disease. With him I shall risk what little is left of my soul. This will be the great experiment. Nothing exists that is not in the blood! I shall live in a single room, and I want you next to me, canoness. You will pray for Solange.’

  He forbade any cleaning to be done in his room, which became like Faust’s study. And for the first time in his life his hair remained ungroomed through the long days, matted and snarled by the choleric insomnia of his interminable nights. He wrote profusely and incoherently, drawing up human and divine laws. He deflected blood from its natural course. France and Solange became a single divinized being in his delirious brain, he lived alone with her, turning into a living madman, yes, a madman! The Count of Grandsailles! ‘Old fool! Old fool!’ the canoness muttered within the caverns of her ego, ‘God will punish you!’

  In the plain of Creux de Libreux the persistent November rains were followed, after the mists and snows and sunny days of winter, by the March downpours. Beneath the Germans’ yoke Europe was rediscovering the tradition of its ancient catholic unity through the community of suffering, and in Libreux the Middle Ages were being reborn with their springtime of superstitions. At the Moulin des Sources Madame Solange de Cléda had come down to the refectory for the first time in three months. It was still cool and she kept a footwarmer full of hot coals under her feet and a white wool shawl over her shoulders. Her head, resting on three fingers of her left hand, was bowed over the table with its dark chocolate cloth, while two fingers of her other hand lying on her right knee held the Count of Grandsailles’ letter, folded in two, which she had received that morning. Behind her stood Génie, with one corner of her apron pulled up and tucked into a belt of thick cord from which several old keys hung down to the middle of her belly. With her arms folded and one finger to her mouth, she had just turned her torso in the direction of the half-open door to the kitchen where the older of the Martin brothers was sawing wood. When the latter had stopped his work and silence returned, Solange said, ‘I now have every proof that the Count came again and possessed me during the whole period of my illness.’

  ‘If it is as Madame claims, it can only be by the demon’s art,’ answered Génie, keeping her eyes fixed on the opposite wall as if in these circumstances a glance cast by chance upon her mistress might in turn bewitch her.

  ‘You know, Génie, when the Count comes and visits me he sees me not with the eyes of his memory, but with his own eyes, and then his eyes hurt him. Do you hear, Génie? And his head feels as if it is going to burst. He tells me this in his letter, Génie! He says he has seen me with a scarlet dress opening the gate to the back road. That’s my garnet dress! It was the day I went to the clearing to watch the men working. Titan was with me.’

  ‘The clearing will be good for pasture now,’ said Génie, following her own train of thought. ‘Madame ought to go walking in the clearing often, and not stay away from church too long. Everything that happened to Madame during her illness I’d swear was only evil spirits.’

  ‘The Count was not a believer,’ said Solange.

  ‘By thinking of your soul perhaps you will prevent his from being damned,’ replied Génie.

  ‘I know,’ said Solange, ‘since the Viscount of Angerville did not come back and Girardin was shot by the Nazis. I have felt as if these frightful misfortunes were my fault!’

  ‘Madame!’ Génie exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, Génie! I know what I am saying. All these things that are happening to me are very ugly sins.’

  ‘Think of the Count’s, Madame. I know a woman of Lower Libreux who had just the same thing happen to her, just the same as you. Well, it wasn’t her fault, it was a man who had her under a spell. She became pregnant and her belly got big, just as if they had really been together. Well, in spite of all that she was cured and she even became a kind of saint.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard about her. And it was the tanner who exorcized her,’ said Solange. ‘I know what you’re getting at: you would like me to go and confess to that fellow – priest, shepherd, tanner or whatever he is.’

  ‘Why, yes, all of us would like you to. Since he’s no longer a tanner he never wants to go into houses. He says mass out of doors and he confesses and gives communion with real bread to those who go to him out in the fields. Today nobody can believe in real curates any more. It’s all right for us peasants to help load a truck with potatoes for the Nazis if we have to, but priests have no business hanging around with them the way they do.’

  ‘But how can I go and meet the tanner, since they say all his movements are watched?’

  ‘I can arrange that,’ said Génie, ‘I’ll have him meet you in the clearing.’

  ‘And how will I recognize him and know that he will listen to my confession?’ Solange asked with childlike concern.

  ‘Just as it’s always done. He will make you a sign when you are to come to him,’ answered Génie.

  ‘You are right, Génie. I must confess myself to the shepherd-tanner and pray God to forgive me my sins and the Count’s, so that he may visit me only in his thoughts, and so that he may see me in his memory but not with his eyes. And just as he has had the power to abuse my poor body from afar with the demon’s aid, so may I, by the force of my virtue and with the aid of God, be able to save his soul.’

  When Solange de Cléda reached the clearing of the Moulin she sat down on a rock and waited. About a hundred paces away she caught sight of a shepherd who was whittling a branch to make a stick with. The plain was illuminated and a broken rainbow remained suspended between Upper and Lower Libreux. The clearing was strewn with white stones lighted on one side and casting long black shadows. Each of the spaces that separated one stone from the others appeared to Solange to be infinite, and she felt surrounded by a limitless expanse, so true it is that when hope pacifies souls the things of the earth begin to resemble those of heaven. Everything was separate, clear, imbued with that melancholy serenity that the planets would possess if it were given to man to see them closer as solid bodies, each one lighted on one side and projecting a long black shadow on the immense metaphysical mineral of the firmament.

  The shepherd had just stood up and, cutting a low branch from an oak-tree, tied it with a bundle of fibre in the form of a cross close to one end of his stick. Then he climbed a small hummock covered with wild mulberry and turning in Solange’s direction raised his rustic cross above his head. Solange had risen in turn, and the two figures could be seen crossing the clearing and going to meet each other.

  EPILOGUE

  The Illuminated Plain

  Epilogue

  All things come and go. Years revolved round a fist more and more obstinately closed with rage and decision, and this fist, since the character was sitting in a large armchair with his back to us, was the sole thing which it was given us to see.

  From the adjoining room a strident music, monstrously amplified by an unknown device, reaches a brassy intensity that is so vibrant and furious that it seems as if its sole effect on the human ear must be to draw blood. And day and night this powerful apparatus wearilessly repeats the same selected pieces from Wagner’s The Valkyries, Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde, repeats them over and over again. Suddenly the closed fist tightens even more and its bones seem about to cut through the skin and its knuckles are livid as cherry-pits. It strikes on the arm of the chair once, twice, three times, four times, five times. The fifth time blood begins to flow. Then it strikes once more and once again with even greater force. Again it remains motionless for several hours, and as the blood coagulates it becomes dark and almost black, like a very ripe cherry.

  Nothing surpasses the honour and supreme glory of blood! Why did not destiny allow Jesus to live in my time of domination, so that I might have strangled him with my own hands! The dirty, snivelling Jew, the cowardly masochist, the disgrace and shame of strong men! You would have deprived the world of the sole thing that is capable of making man resplendent – blood! You would have spared man the sacred treasures of the blood that was given us by God to shed! Only the cringing race of Jewish curs could have invented that degrading incarnation of the idea of God and steeped it in the degenerate blood of the sickly body of that lackey of pity, of that prophet of remorse, Jesus Christ! All that is unstable, dishonouring, infamous and sullying I include in that name, Jesus Christ! Ah, he who should come, sword in hand, to open a breach of fresh, pure and regenerative blood in the virgin heart of paganism, in the depth of the grottoes of live rocks of the race, of the Olympian mountain of Venusberg, and kill the vile dragon of Christianity….

  At this moment the first echoes of the crescendo in the death-scene of Tristan and Isolde resounded stridently, painfully, in his harassed tympana and the thought of his own death assailed him, acerated and sharp, as though a silver sickle were cutting a low swath across the floor on which his eyes were fixed. He lifted his feet nimbly as if to avoid the stroke. For the last six days he had been subject again to a new maniacal and obsessing fit of cleanliness. He lived in horror with the thought that death might overtake him while any part of his body had not been washed and washed again several times during the day with perfect scrupulousness, and any of his mucous parts had the least suggestion of an odour.

  For some time he had been voluptuously inhaling a warm redolence that emanated from the somewhat rustic tanned calf-skin of his Tyrolian boots. Suddenly his heart received the shock of a frightful doubt: had he washed his feet again in the course of the day, as was his habit? For it did indeed seem to him that, mingled with the effluvia from his boots, he caught a faint suggestion of an odour from his feet. He tore off one boot and sock; the moment his very white foot, slightly moist with perspiration, was liberated from its sheath, he pushed his forefinger between two toes, lifted it to his nose and inhaled: his face turned purple with rage and hate. Yes! It smelled! He rushed to the bathroom and, not wanting to lose a second by running water into the bath-tub, immediately plunged his foot into the washstand under the faucet in an uncomfortable and strained position. He washed his foot ten times, a hundred times, the interstices between his toes were becoming red, but always there remained an offensive residue of odour that would make him begin all over again, tirelessly and obstinately. When one of the feet was thus washed, he unshod the other one and washed it in turn with the same care.

  Having completed this operation he went back into the large room which he had just left and sat down again in the armchair. Then one saw that this character was Adolph Hitler. Likewise, by the long rectangular window looking into space one recognized that he was here in his retreat of Berchtesgaden. Before sitting down again Adolph Hitler stopped in front of the large Vermeer abducted from Count Chernin’s collection (the most beautiful painting in the world, according to Salvador Dali), that he had kept here since the occupation of Vienna. Hitler’s hand seemed to caress the canvas, barely grazing it, and lingered briefly on the laurel-crowned young woman’s face, slightly averted in a divinely graceful movement. At this moment his fingers contracted and remained convulsed and stiffened like a claw. Then the hand relaxed and became limp, pale and as if filled with tepid water, and he went back and sat down in the armchair.

  One perceived then that this armchair was surrounded by the greatest artistic treasures in the world. Raphael’s ‘Betrothal of the Virgin’, from the Museum of Milan, Leonardo’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’… Piles of the rarest and most priceless manuscripts, and over there, behind him, in the half-light in the centre of the room, the ‘Victory of Samothrace’ – the real one, the one from the Louvre Museum, but looking in this horrible rigid room like a bad reproduction.

  Six days previously, Hitler had blown up the single elevator by which his eagle’s nest could communicate with the rest of the world. If they should try to destroy him, they would be forced to destroy with him the most sublime dreams and creations of civilization. Before Hitler’s eyes, lost now in the mists of the Valkyrie that rose from the rains sweeping over the plain, night had conjured up the vertical forest of black cypresses of Boecklin’s ‘Island of the Dead’. One might have said that these same cypresses were growing now within his own room as it became progressively flooded by the velvet darkness of another night of nightmares and delirium. His visions were about to begin. And already the familiar phantoms were arriving, each in turn, to take their places in their habitual spots. The fluid and purple-streaked melancholy of Dürer at his left, and at his right old Nietzsche, all transparent and visible only by the frightfully sharp points of his moustache and the two deep holes of his orbits, desiccated by the malign fever of his brain. To his right, and in a solitary corner, the Mad King, Louis II of Bavaria, dressed in ermine and azure-blue, the flaccid and wet umbrella of his onanism riveted to the middle of his chest like an arrow.

  Then followed the procession of Prussian generals, the only free men on earth, for being without conscience or pity, equal to the implacable gods, they had been entrusted by destiny with the mission of spreading the Furor Teutonicus of German blood throughout the world. ‘Yes, we have lost another war! I shall win the next one! For I am indestructible and invulnerable. They can tear me from my people, uproot me, but never destroy me, for like a cancer I am in the blood of the German people, and the blood of the German people is indestructible and eternal, and like a cancer I shall sooner or later end by reproducing myself again inexorably in the soul of the entire German people! It is neither an ideology nor a “Kultur” that I have defended. I am proud of having proclaimed the death of intelligence. It must some day be annihilated by the German people. I do not have to give ideas! I give to the world pieces of my soul, which are pieces of the soul of the German people, and this soul shall triumph!

  ‘But what about the body? What about the body of the German people?’

  The body of the German people was standing before him, the Pontius Pilate of a new dispensation, on the expanse of the infinite snows of the Russian steppes. It was all covered with black veils, and its feet were frozen – and odourless….

  There were heard the canticles of a land of saints. The Red Army, an army of unbelievers, sustained by the prayers of their white ancestors as on a bed of snow! Their dispossessed ancestors still had the treasure of their ancient faith to give them and thereby save their souls!

  ‘The bending of blood! The bending of blood! A chimera? That which cannot be?’ Thus that other madman, the Count of Grandsailles, kept endlessly repeating enigmatic words, hammering his dusty table with his closed fist as he sat in his own seclusion – his oasis.

  ‘The moment is at last approaching when I can return to the illuminated plain of Libreux after the long darkness of my exile and bend the rainbow of the old blood of Grandsailles on the body of Solange de Cléda. The war is ended!’

  During all these last years, since Solange had gone to the clearing of the Moulin and confessed herself to the tanner-shepherd on a serene late afternoon in March, she seemed indeed to have been exorcized and freed of all her ills. The Count of Grandsailles’ spirit had ceased to visit her in a manner outrageous to her modesty. Nevertheless he did not for a single moment leave her thoughts. But she let her spirit dwell on him only to pray day and night for the redemption of his soul. At the same time she practised charity and she had Martin and Prince rebuild the old chapel of the Moulin, where the tanner-shepherd would secretly come and say mass. Her orgasms, that used to occur in the midst of the most excruciating tortures of her spirit, were succeeded now by mystic ecstasies suffused with the beatitude of her purified soul and of her body’s calm. But furthermore God had rewarded her, bestowing upon her the greatest of all happiness, which she would never have dared to ask or to hope for: the Count of Grandsailles, divorced from Veronica, was at last in reality going to take her for wife. Here were already two letters from him which she read again and again, sprinkling them with tears of joy. Now all the sufferings she had endured throughout those long years of the occupation appeared to her negligible.

  But would she still be beautiful? Yes! For the mark of suffering had only further ennobled her. As there are wines that age well, so she had suffered well. For in her suffering there was no alloy of pettiness. Only little worries and base, mediocre fretting make faces ugly and shrivel bodies, great martyrdoms never. For these convulse and deform only the muscles tense with passion of the Apollos of anguish shining like snow-white bones through the burning wounds of crucified Christs. Solange de Cléda, lovely martyr without any trace of the sword! And what a pent-up treasure, what an intoxicating murmur of intact desire was that of the resurrection of her flesh, and to what mortal had it ever been given to approach the miracle of this woman, elevated to sublimity by deliria of abstinence and the holiness of prayer!

  How could Solange de Cléda, in her state of pre-nuptial euphoria, have perceived or fixed her attention on the little reticences full of bitter and fearful innuendoes that Génie and the Martin brothers, since the end of the war, had constantly introduced into their least remarks. Yet the isolation, as of a plague-centre, created by the fermenting atmosphere of civil war of Libreux with its venomous and baleful whisperings, was daily growing more dense round the Moulin des Sources and its streams that had been deflected by the enemy and remained like a burning and ineradicable stigma. But she was a woman, only a woman, knowing nothing of politics, and all that she had done, and done solely in order to safeguard the interests of her ungrateful son, had been governed by the advice of Maître Girardin who had died so nobly for his country! How then could they hold it against her that she had acted in the light of the experience of so exemplary a citizen?