Two days later Solange was buried by the two Martin brothers, the tanner-shepherd, Génie and Prince in the Moulin des Sources chapel. And after the long night of waking. Prince returned to sleep only two hours, for this was Sunday morning and for nothing in the world would he be late for the first mass. With the tanner it was hard to tell…. After all, it wasn’t regular…. For some time, as he himself said, Prince’s life had hung only by a thread, but he was born to serve with resignation. To the death of his only son in Germany, which it had been impossible to keep from him any longer, was now added the death of Solange de Cléda, whom he had venerated all these days and months in the silent but fervent concentration of his respect. His house in Lower Libreux had also been destroyed by the enemy during the evacuation. And still the Count had given no news of his return. How changed he was going to find the country!

  Prince, the Count of Grandsailles’ old servant, awoke with a start considerably before the hour and dressed in his best holiday clothes. He was one of the first to get to church. He went up close to the altar where the Holy Sacrament was exposed, and humbly bowing his head said, ‘Lord, here I am, this is Prince.’ Then he prayed for the grace of Solange’s soul and for the Count’s prompt return.

  During the time that the Count of Grandsailles was homeward bound, Randolph was sailing in the opposite direction, toward his native land, America. He had been among those whom destiny had chosen as a hero to carry out the grandiose prophecy of Nostradamus when, symbolically designating the countries of Europe, he predicted that they ‘will feel the yoke of “the Beast of Blood”.’ But just as it seems on the point of dominating all, the Beast will be subdued by a young people come from beyond the seas to redeem and deliver with its new blood the faults of the ancient people that has spent itself in the excesses of science and of sin. Thereupon, like armies of sons returning blindfold to meet their naked white-haired mothers, enriched by the science of blood which they have drunk at its venerable source, those who do not remain buried in the millenary earth will return beyond the seas to the young country whence they have come and with their own women will bring forth children of a new breed.

  Thus Veronica also was included in this prophecy; for she became a mother. Like a warrior after the battle, the man with the hidden face of her chimera at last raised the visor of his helmet, and she saw him.

  All were becoming visible again, who had been creatures without faces, creatures of dissimulation, of camouflage and treachery.

  And what is peace if not the rediscovery of the dignity of the human face?

  All this time – while the methodical Teuton in his rapacity was turning the course of the streams to wrench the metals of war from the bowels of the earth of Old Libreux and empires were crumbling; while the immutable snows were burying the victories and defeats of the Russian plains; while mimetic men devoured one another like carnivorous plants in the depth of the jungles; while the whole action of this novel was unfolding – the wood of young cork-oaks that Solange de Cléda had planted on the morrow of the Count of Grandsailles’ ball had been growing. The wood had grown, and now each of those trees, instead of reaching the stature of a little man, had reached the stature of a little giant.

  Last Sunday as the two Martin brothers were passing through the grove toward three in the afternoon on their way to vespers, the older one said to his brother, ‘Lend me your knife. Let’s see what we can tell about the cork.’ And taking the large knife that his brother unsheathed he went up to one of the oaks that stood approximately in the middle of the wood and that was smaller than the others. He sank the blade hard into the softly squeaking bark and, cutting through it the shape of a large rectangle, he slipped the fingers of both hands into the upper slit which he had cut wider so as to get a good grip, and slowly and firmly began to pull. After a few moment’s effort the sheet of cork gradually peeled off till it came loose in his hands intact and without a break. Such had been the custom since time immemorial; this was the mark by which the cutters would know that the cork of this wood could be gathered in due time.

  In the place which the strip of cork had left bare in the middle of the tree-trunk now appeared a kind of delicate skin – silky, tender, sensitive and almost human, not only because of its colour which was exactly that of fresh blood but because these trees stripped of their costume of cork strikingly suggest the bodies of naked women with their arms raised to the sky in the noblest attitudes, and by their bold lines and the smoothness of the rounded reliefs of their trunks they imitate the most divinely and ideally flayed anatomies in the world of sense perception, while yet they have their deep roots in the earth. The mere presence of a naked cork-oak in a landscape suffices to fill the evening with its grace.

  The two Martin brothers drove the carriage down to the Libreux station to fetch the Count of Grandsailles, the child and the canoness, and Grandsailles realized by the reserved attitude of the peasants whom he met there that the country was hostile to him. Also, in the course of the short ride to the Château de Lamotte he learned that Solange de Cléda had died just a week ago in the Moulin des Sources. At the Château Prince came and opened the door with his usual self-effacing, timid air, as though the Count had only been away overnight. Yet tears were streaming down the creases on each side of his nose. ‘My good old Prince,’ he said ‘what you must have suffered and endured!’

  ‘That’s all over,’ Prince replied modestly and, visibly eager to break away from the embarrassment of such effusions, he hurriedly gave orders for the placing of the baggage in the rooms that he had had made ready.

  Betka’s child was exhausted, and the canoness immediately put him to bed while the Count, who had just entered his room, remained in the centre looking vacantly at each piece of furniture, not knowing what to do. How long did he stand thus? When the canoness came in to announce that dinner was ready he gave a start and said. ‘It’s about time we changed the electric bulb in this room. It hardly gives any light….’

  ‘One would think winter was coming back,’ said the canoness, ‘do you hear? What a wind!’

  Seated in the dining-room the Count watched the canoness bustling about. ‘Where is Prince?’

  ‘He isn’t feeling well. The excitement of Monsieur’s return… and Prince is very old!… But he left everything prepared and I will only have to serve.’

  The Count could barely swallow his meal. His eyes burned. Each of the delicate attentions that Prince had shown in the dishes he had prepared for him…. For in this meal there was everything that Prince knew the Count loved best in the world. How had he managed to keep his best wines for him? Mon Dieu! How bitter all this tasted today! And the canoness came and went. She did not let him out of her sight for a moment, but though her eye was attentive its sparkle, as he knew, was kindled by rancour.

  ‘Why, my good canoness, do you insist on looking at me as you do?’ he asked toward the end of the meal. ‘Don’t I deserve pity like the rest? And haven’t I kept my promise to bring you back to your beloved Libreux?’

  The canoness placed one knee on the chair and riveted her wicked eyes on him. ‘Pity for you?’ she said with sudden fierceness, ‘pity for the Count of Grandsailles?’ She shook her head with a frightening smile.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, canoness, how dare you talk to me in this way?’

  Then deciding to unburden herself once and for all of everything she had carried locked away in her heart throughout her long life, the canoness slowly came round the table and by some fiendish chance sat down beside him on the very chair which Solange de Cléda had occupied several years before, on the one occasion when she had dined there.

  She assumed the most comfortable posture, as though she had been alone in the room, half-opening her fat legs in an attitude of complete relaxation and abandon, and in her characteristic way picking up the corner of her apron and holding it to her eye which was running as much as ever. Her hunched body, tightly squeezed into an old alpaca dress with an irridescent sheen like a fly’s wings, began to shake with irrepressible little squeals of laughter.

  ‘Seigneur Dieu! Pity for the Count of Grandsailles!’ Then she darkened and added, ‘We are back in Libreux. What else was left? Now we have only to die here.’

  Yet Grandsailles for the first time in his life was pitiable. He tried anger, but he could not even change the shameful expression of his blighted face. With his bowed head he resembled the bare field of Libreux in winter covered with grey stubble.

  ‘You succeeded in fooling everybody, but there are no secrets from your canoness. The Prince of Orminy… Fouseret….’ the canoness began to reel off implacably, like a judge pronouncing sentence.

  The Count looked at her, terrified, as though his own accusing conscience had just awakened and become incarnated in her.

  ‘Yes, you know it, Grandsailles! And that saint, Solange de Cléda, that angel of heaven, you killed her, too. Slowly, slowly, slowly – only one of the race of the Grandsailles could have done it in that way. You tore away all her living skin bit by bit over the long years of her martyrdom. And at the end, when she thought you were going to make her happy, you gave her your last knife-thrust in the middle of her noble bosom!’

  ‘Shut up, canoness!’ Grandsailles growled hoarsely.

  ‘A despot! That’s what you are – the blood of Girardin! For him, too, you are to blame!’

  ‘Shut up! Get out of my sight, your ugliness fills me with horror,’ Grandsailles shouted, his threatening fist seizing the naked Silenus that formed the stalk of the silver candelabrum.

  But instead of obeying him the canoness only drew closer, kneeled on her chair, leaning her elbows on the table and as she bent forward without the slightest embarrassment the gaping neck of her dress exposed her bosom far down, with her two breasts, withered, elongated and dangling like a goat’s, but white as milk. ‘Well, no,’ she said in a low voice, throwing her hot breath full into his face, ‘I won’t leave the handsome Grandsailles, and certainly not before I have told you everything – the main thing. For your greatest crime of all is not having made a child. Always in your family one like you has been followed by a virtuous son, and only a son could have made up for all the evil you have done on earth.’

  ‘Shut up. Shut up! What do you know about those things? I shall have my heir!’

  ‘Who?’ the canoness exclaimed diabolically, and she raised her arm and mockingly pointed to the floor above. ‘The poor martyr who is sleeping upstairs? You old lunatic! You’ve made a cripple of him! And you might be locked up in prison for the rest of your life if it was found out! You old lunatic! You have deserved nothing. And you have only what you deserve. You have had the skins of the finest and most beautiful women of your time, and you weren’t able to have with any of them what the peasants of Libreux have the very first time – a son! And now you couldn’t have him even if you wanted to, because you are almost impotent. No secrets from your canoness. But she is closer to your bed than you think, and I know that you could still have this son, but only with me – yes, with your canoness!’

  ‘Horrible old madwoman! I’ll punish you! Just wait!’

  ‘I am only sixty-five years old. I seem to be a thousand because I’ve been living by your side, and you’re a dog. But I am still able to bear a child, and I can prove to you that what I say is true!’

  At this moment a strange phenomenon must have occurred in Grandsailles’ harassed and delirious brain, for in the depth of his anger he was seized all of a sudden with an incomprehensible attraction which seemed to be born precisely of everything that was most abominable and repulsive about the canoness – her eyes edged by her chronic conjunctivitis, like red wounds, appeared to him suddenly precious like those of a divinity, set in rubies; her evil drooling mouth with its crooked teeth seemed to him a stream with the wheels of a mill of temptations that was pulling him into an abyss of ignoble desires; and the foaming saliva that thickened like a yellowish-white paste at the corners of her lips hallucinated him like drops of an aphrodisiac and deadly pus. Standing before him in its reality was the frightful succubus dream that had haunted him all his life, incarnated in the decrepit and familiar flesh of his canoness. And it was not a dream!

  ‘It is Solange de Cléda, eternally damned because of me, who has entered into the demon’s body of my canoness to be with me once more! The devil take you!’ roared Grandsailles, lifting the silver candelabrum threateningly.

  ‘Wretch! It’s the devil who brought me here and all hell is speaking to you through my lips!’

  ‘You’re going to get it now!’ Grandsailles roared in a paroxysm of hatred, ‘but once I start, I’ll hit again a hundred times till your face no longer looks like anything human.’

  Then the canoness began to retreat, but continuing to hurl invectives at him all the while, as if thereby to attract him, backed away to the end of the corridor where her room was. The Count, like a somnambulist, entered after her, still holding high the silver candelabrum with which he was threatening her. The door closed behind them and presently there was heard the sound of two dreadful blows followed by an absolute silence, a thousand times more sinister than any sound.

  At about this moment Betka’s child must have awakened, for he came out of his room, limping on his crutch, wearing his long nightshirt that reached to the floor. He went down two steps, and hearing nothing more went back to bed. One also had the impression that all the dogs of Upper and Lower Libreux had conspired to bark together at this same hour.

  The following morning the canoness of Launay, sitting on her bed, wept uninterruptedly. In the dining-room the Count of Grandsailles, his head resting on the ebony of the table, has just awakened. He seemed to have aged by several more years. He got up, and with the aid of his cane stalked down the long corridor, without stopping before the canoness’s room to console her. He went up into his room and headed straight for the balcony door which he opened, stepped outside and sat down on a little stone bench adorned with chimeras. His heart contracted at the sight of the deep black forest of young cork-oaks that had grown during his absence, and he could not avert his eyes from the realization of this old dream.

  In the centre of the forest he could see the oak which the elder Martin brother had marked last Sunday. It was the living symbol of Solange, martyrized by the war, flayed alive by the peace, dead and buried behind those trees. Solange de France, breasts of live rock, lips of jasmine! For how many years Grandsailles had lived in a state of hallucination, waiting for this moment when he would again see his beloved plain of Creux de Libreux, the illuminated plain! Already he could feel it, without yet seeing it – just a little higher, above the tree to which his gaze had remained obstinately riveted. Obscure sounds of carts, to the left, in the direction of the Moulin, attested the whole earthy and sacred reality of this soil…. But instead of looking up, the Count of Grandsailles bowed his head and hid his face in his hands.

  THE STORY OF PETER OWEN PUBLISHERS

  Peter Owen founded his eponymous publishing house in 1951. From the beginning he championed major but little-known international authors including Hermann Hesse, Shusaku Endo, Anaïs Nin and Tarjei Vesaas, often publishing them in English for the first time. Hesse’s Siddhartha was one of the first novels he published, buying the rights for £25. The company helped to build the British writer Anna Kavan, as well as Margaret Crosland, who published 25 books with the firm – translating 18 titles from the French, including works by Jean Cocteau and the Marquis de Sade, as well as writing seven books of her own. Peter Owen also published Salvador Dalí’s only novel. The list eventually included ten Nobel Prize-winning authors, earning Owen an OBE for services to literature.

  Born in Nuremberg in 1927, Owen moved with his British-born mother to London soon after Hitler came to power; his German-Jewish father joined them a year later. His first job was as an office boy at The Bodley Head, and, after a brief stint in the RAF, he used an armed-forces paper quota and capital of around £800 to set up his own publishing company, aged 24. Several years later, an aspiring novelist named Muriel Spark came to work for him as editor.

  Peter Owen was one of a kind; a maverick, a pioneer. Throughout his seven decades in publishing he was known as much for his flamboyant shirts and snakeskin ties as for his dogged persistence and dedication to high-quality literature in translation. Independent to the end, Owen ran his publishing house until he died in 2016, aged 89. His memoir, Not a Nice Jewish Boy, appeared shortly after his death. Pushkin Press acquired the company in 2022.

  AVAILABLE AND COMING SOON FROM

  PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

  The Pushkin Press Classics list brings you timeless storytelling by icons of literature. These titles represent the best of fiction and non-fiction, hand-picked from around the globe – from Russia to Japan, France to the Americas – boasting fresh selections, new translations and stylishly designed covers. Featuring some of the most widely acclaimed authors from across the ages, as well as compelling contemporary writers, these are the world’s best stories – to be read and read again.

  MURDER IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

  RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA

  THE BEAUTIES

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  LAND OF SMOKE

  SARA GALLARDO

  THE SPECTRE OF ALEXANDER WOLF

  GAITO GAZDANOV

  CLOUDS OVER PARIS

  FELIX HARTLAUB

  THE UNHAPPINESS OF BEING A SINGLE MAN

  FRANZ KAFKA

  About the Authors