‘Génie can say what she likes,’ she would argue with herself, and then turn to Génie: ‘The Count of Grandsailles is a just man. He is perhaps already on his way here to join me. My poor Génie, the people of Libreux will have to listen to him. He is their master, Génie!’

  ‘Times have changed, Madame. Madame doesn’t know, as we do. We hear things. You never go out of the Moulin des Sources, and perhaps it is better for us all that you don’t!’

  ‘Will the peasants of the Libreux forget all the charities and the help they have received from me during these winters? Have they no longer any heart?’

  ‘I am afraid not, Madame. Evil winds are already raising the dust of the plains, and as for hearts – the Germans have worn them thin!’

  ‘You must be patient. Génie, as I am, and let us pray that the Count will bring reconciliation to the bosom of each of our families and between each of our families. May Catholic France once more achieve the pacification of blood.’

  The Count of Grandsailles was of the breed of men who come into their own during troubled periods of civil war. Vindictive by nature, his spirit prematurely afflicted with twilight delirium was injected with a new and final exaltation of avenging patriotism by the war’s termination, and he planned to return to Libreux in the rôle of a judge. He now repudiated the life of shameful compromises and of usurpation which he had led during these last years. His would now be the probity and inflexibility of an exemplary Spartan, for his beloved country was once again menaced by death – this time in the form of anarchy.

  ‘Girardin, it is on the ground on which your body fell that we shall now shoot our traitors!’

  Approximately one month before the Count of Grandsailles obtained permission to return to France he was visited in his Palm Springs oasis by Broussillon who was on a confidential mission, having become the leader of a new political party. For after Girardin’s death, having assumed too individual a rôle in the sabotage plot of Libreux and broken the discipline of the communist party, he had at last been expelled from it. In retaliation he had committed the infamy of betraying former comrades, and his inordinate ambition, as well as his anarchist aspirations, led him at once to form a new independent party of reactionary colour, though adapted to certain extremist ‘civil war’ tendencies that were opportune at the moment.

  Broussillon had come firmly resolved to link the Count of Grandsailles’ future political activity in Libreux with his own. But Grandsailles, as hostile as ever to any plan involving the industrialization of Libreux, was bent on converting it back into an exclusively agricultural region and presently it was Broussillon himself who was impressed and contaminated by the Count’s political plans and who began to yield to him in everything. The growing influence of his authority over his compatriot’s ideas, which had at first seemed so firmly rooted, reawakened Grandsailles’ love of action, still intact and more exasperated and impatient than before.

  But on the third day this state of effervescence and impatience was shaken, as if deliberately, by the greatest despair in Grandsailles’ whole life when, still unbelieving but thunderstruck with grief and anger, he received from Broussillon’s lips a detailed report of Madame de Cléda’s conduct during the period of the occupation. With fiendish cunning Broussillon had waited for the opportune moment when Grandsailles already felt as though he were returning to his country of Libreux in the rôle of a redeemer, as though he were biting into the thirst-provoking apple of his power – the domination of Libreux – with all its juice and its skin, so ardently craved during his long absence from his native land, during the long, dry desert of his emigration. Then Broussillon half-casually remarked. ‘It will be difficult, if not impossible, to aspire to the slightest influence in Libreux if you see Madame Solange de Cléda when you return.’

  The list of accusations against her was detailed, minute – a refined and overwhelming torture. The apparently irrefutable proofs that Broussillon offered regarding the permission given the Germans to divert the Moulin des Sources streams reduced him to a tense, dreadful silence: a collaborationist…. But Broussillon had, as if carelessly, kept an even more searing accusation for the end.

  ‘In Libreux it is no one’s secret,’ he said, ‘that for more than a year Madame de Cléda lived quite openly with her lover the Viscount of Angerville, who later mysteriously disappeared. That’s something the devoutly Catholic peasants of Libreux will never forget, and it is on the revival of this religious feeling of the people that we largely have to count today. Besides, the clergy of Libreux have kept Madame de Cléda completely isolated, going so far as to accuse her of satanic practices with a charlatan tanner who claims to be inspired by God.’

  ‘D’Angerville! D’Angerville! I should have guessed it,’ Grandsailles repeated silently to himself. Yet he could not swallow, much less digest, these accusations that came as such a sudden shock to the salivary and gastric juices of his hopes, lovingly secreted during all these months. And served by Broussillon, whose person now appeared to him in all its sordid shabbiness, they were revolting to the point of nausea.

  ‘Get out of here!’ he broke out hoarsely, ‘I don’t want to believe you nor see you again. Madame de Cléda is the being I love most in the world. It is from her alone that I wish to know the truth and it is her alone whom I will believe. She will tell me the truth. Even if all Libreux rises up against me. I shall listen only to her.’

  Broussillon, muttering inarticulately, bowed and stumbled his way out, and Grandsailles immediately sat down to his desk to write the following letter:

  ‘Dear Solange:

  ‘I have on several occasions in the past done you great wrong and have despaired of your forgiveness. But I could never lie to you. And this is why, when destiny involved me in the greatest lie of my life, I confessed everything to you – my marriage with Veronica and my then hopeless passion for you. I might have said nothing at that time, since we were not morally bound to each other and our relations had even been completely broken, but I preferred to risk losing whatever respect you might have for me to hiding my true feeling from you. Your response to this was so generous and fine that I have looked upon you since then as a divine being.

  ‘But our relationship is in the realm of the absolute and only there can we maintain it. Now, on the sordid plane of contingencies, I am being asked to believe, with plausible supporting evidence, that during all this time you lied to me! In only a few weeks I leave for Europe. But before this I must have the truth from you on two matters. One is that you make no mention in your fervent letters of your relations with d’Angerville, and the other, that when you informed me of the progress of the growth of the little forest of cork-oaks which you planted for me you said nothing of the Moulin properties under the occupation.

  ‘On these two matters, both equally decisive, I shall believe no one but you. Has d’Angerville ever been your lover? Did you yield the water rights to the enemy? I appeal only to your sense of honour to answer me, but if the answer to these two questions is yes, never again expect my forgiveness. I shall not grant it.

  Still your

  hervé.’

  A week before the date set for his departure for Europe the Count received one of the first cables from the other side of the ocean to be made available again for the use of private individuals. It said merely. ‘both acc usations true – solange de cléda.’

  The morning for the Count of Grandsailles’ departure from the oasis was like an image in which a fleeting mood of curious malaise has been captured. Even without knowing wherein this mood consisted one felt that enigmatic and unavowable bonds had linked the Count, Betka’s child and the canoness in a new mystery consummated during their long seclusion. The Count, who from complete lack of exercise was now able to walk only with a faltering step, as though he had just risen from a long illness, had aged by five or six years and his face bore the imprint of a superhuman determination. He was frightful to behold, especially in the analytical and unretouched light of the California sun. Beside him, always a little behind and unable to catch up with him, walked Betka’s son, also limping, with the help of a crutch. He was pale and beautiful as a wax doll, wore black stockings on his legs that were thin but curved and modelled like those of a girl. From time to time he would lift a little lace handkerchief to his nose as if to examine whether it was bleeding. Two paces behind them followed the canoness of Launay, and it was she who was the most horrible to behold, for she seemed rejuvenated! And a spark of crabbed and vindictive voluptuousness rendered her gargoyle’s ugliness even more perfidiously demonic.

  On the ship that was bringing them back. Grandsailles was almost constantly in the company of the renegade Broussillon. He liked to dictate laws, to linger over the formulation of laconic maxims on which the fate of the fatherland were to depend.

  ‘You will tell me later, my dear Broussillon, the incidents of Betka’s death in Tangiers. It consoles me nevertheless to know for the moment that she died in the arms of Mademoiselle Cécile Goudreau, who is a great friend of mine. It is fortunate that Betka left me her son – it is as though she had a premonition that she was going to die…’ Then he would go on and expound further laws, his upright jurists’s reveries and the new legislative prescriptions, half bucolic, half ascetic in the manner of Saint-Just, which were to be engraved in the future rose-grey granite of Upper Libreux. But at times he became a man of empire, and nostalgically parodying Napoleon, about whom he was reading a book at the moment, he would say, ‘To a weak and devoted man I would try to offer reassurance; but to you, Broussillon, who are a man of strong character, I shall speak differently. We don’t know what awaits us in France. We must know how to be both aggressive and compliant, our rôle is to dare and to calculate, not to shut ourselves up in a fixed plan but bend to circumstances, let ourselves be guided by them – to profit by small occasions as well as by great events: limit ourselves to the possible, but stretch the possible to the limit. We must be pitiless – suppress the loose-tongued and the corrupt who already threaten France with anarchy and complete ruin. Sacrifice all that may still remain of memories and past sentimentalities. I am building myself a soul of marble, a soul that is unassailable, a heart immune to common weaknesses. But you, Broussillon? You are not initiated to the mysteries of the “bending of blood”, and only those who have painfully passed through this are tempered for all the ordeals of moral endurance. Yes! I shall have a son – a real son of my own! With my blood! A son procreated by other laws than those of nature! The “bending of blood”!’

  Broussillon was only waiting for the moment when he could feel firm ground under his feet and plunge into action, and meanwhile let himself float on the morbid fascination of the Count of Grandsailles’ delirious ideas. Hour after hour as they paced the decks or leaned over the railings, their two pairs of eyes devoured the anxious distances of the ocean beneath the starry vaults of early April, in which the snow of each star had already melted and was replaced by a warm touch of the sun.

  ‘It’s the same illness, the same kind of attack that she was seized with the day of the procession,’ said Génie to Martin, ‘but this time Madame will die of it.’

  On the very evening when Solange answered the Count of Grandsailles with the laconic confession of her faults she had had to take to her bed, a prey to the same cerebral fever that had already once kept her ill for several months. But the doctor immediately noted that her condition was much more acute, for Solange was at the same time seized with convulsions which racked her body and only yielded after euphoric climaxes to states of such utter supineness that for several hours she might have been thought to be really dead.

  Grandsailles had dealt Solange a deadly blow. She had understood immediately, and the figure that rose before her inward eye, fiercely intact and full of rancour was that of her enemy – the authentic Grandsailles. He was her enemy and had never ceased to be. What could she answer to his letter? Their love, after all the martyrdom she had endured, could no longer be based on the plane of bargainings, and of excuses even less! Was she to explain to him that d’Angerville had been her lover on only one occasion, under circumstances in which his, Grandsailles’ image had possessed her exclusively? That she had paid dearly for this by a frightful illness and that it had happened at a time when he was constantly unfaithful; that she had no reason then to hope that his marriage to Veronica would some day be broken?

  And why should she have marred their correspondence, revealing a love that seemed so absolute, with the avowal of her infidelity, so difficult to tell about from a distance in a letter, which she would have confessed to him face to face and which she knew had left in her mind no other traces than those of a nightmare! The injustice was too great for one woman’s heart. And then the matter of the water rights of the Moulin yielded to the invaders! Well, the Count wanted her to die: she would die without complaining.

  Thus she began to die. But death was difficult for a body prepared only for the consummation of a long-sought happiness. Her will did not command unquestioning obedience and her body at last revolted. The chaste, ethereal smile that had but recently mirrored the serenity of her soul now became the horrible frozen smile of her morbid ecstasies from which the tanner-shepherd alone had been able to deliver her. Now the Count’s vindictive violence had entered the most delicate parts of her flesh like an iron rod, constantly prodding her old wounds, giving her no rest. Time after time, inexorably, she was forcibly subjected to pleasure in an interminable torture of mortal voluptuousness. ‘It is the Count of Grandsailles who has come to visit me again,’ she would cry in her delirium. ‘Already I hear the hooves of his black horse beating upon my heart… and his arm is raised with the red sword of his vengeance to punish me! I am going to die, and never was the air so filled with birds!’

  This was true: through the wide-open window, beneath the whitewashed porches, under the tiled cornices of the Moulin and on each of the budding branches, never had so many different birds been seen or heard, twittering and singing, pressing against one another, as in that first month of the April of victory. Génie wept in silence, her two hands joined, and the older of the Martin brothers, like a faithful Saint Bernard dog, watched his mistress with a look of grief more ancient than tears.

  ‘I don’t want to stay in this room when I die,’ said Solange de Cléda. ‘I want to be taken down immediately and I want my coffin to be placed on the cover of the dining-room table where I sinned. Leave the coffin open so that I can see the prostrate figure of Christ on the wall, and don’t nail the lid down before I myself tell you to!’

  At half-past five in the afternoon the tanner came to give Solange extreme unction. But it was a painful scene to witness, for the demons would not abandon her body, and Solange cursed the rustic cross that the tanner held with his trembling fist close to her face. Late in the afternoon of the following day she began her agony. In her delirium Solange de Cléda spoke again, ‘How many days have I been dead?’ she asked, ‘Five – I know – five. They will have to begin to bury me. I make the air bad, my flesh is spoiling… until today I could still be visited, but now everybody is beginning to be afraid of me. Why is my coffin all filled with bones, and whose bones are they?’

  Then she held out her hand that was delicate as a fairy’s.

  ‘Let everyone leave here! I want to stay alone! He is coming, he is going to come one last time to visit me in my coffin before they nail me down. Stop! Wait just one last moment before nailing me down!’

  ‘Poor thing,’ said Génie, making the tanner and Martin leave the room. ‘She hears the hammer-blows of the masons who are tearing down the German constructions at the Moulin. She thinks they are already nailing down her coffin. I told them this morning to wait till Madame Solange was dead, but they all hate Madame now.’

  At this moment they heard a spasmodic rattle in the midst of which Solange cried out, almost unintelligibly, ‘Je suis la dame!’

  The tanner half-opened the door. Solange de Cléda had breathed her last, her arms were spread out wide like the branches of a tree, her head was thrown back and her face remained taut, her lips parted in a beatific smile.

  ‘That is how she died;’ said the tanner. ‘How she must have loved him, for not only did she give him her life – she wanted also to give him all the eternity of her soul. She refused God in order to receive him, to the end! But God is merciful!’

  Génie shut Solange’s eyes, of which only the whites were showing. They folded her arms across her chest and made her hold the rustic cross in her hands. Several times Génie tried to close her mouth, but it refused and continued to remain a little open, and between the parted lips her small, even teeth continued to shine in a pure, childlike smile. They had to wait six hours before the coffin was ready. The cabinet-maker, who had heard that Solange had died possessed by devils and who suspected that the tanner had had a hand in all this, had his wife give the excuse that he had gone out to work in his vineyard in Lower Libreux and that he would not be back till the following day. Then Prince came and took measurements of Solange’s body and in the little carpenter’s room in the cellar of the Château de Lamotte proceeded to build a coffin. He used boards of very fine lemon-wood that had been cut a long time before. When the coffin was finished he carried it on his own shoulders to the Moulin des Sources, and at half-past ten in the evening they put Solange in the bier which was placed, in accordance with her wish, on the round table in the dining-room, and they began the prayers for the dead, while the wax of four large candles spattered on the chocolate-brown cloth.