Likewise, in the upper part of the tree-woman the bare shoulders disappeared in their turn into the rough surfaces of the bark, becoming transformed into tufted branches which, in spite of the confusion of their interlacings, preserved an unequivocally human character in their open and suppliant arms.

  The old servant, Prince, came silently into the room, announcing to Grandsailles that the mayor of Libreux would like to speak to the Viscount of Angerville. The latter, deciding to stop at the mayor’s office for a moment, promised Solange to come and fetch her in time for them to leave at half-past six, and Maître Girardin took advantage of this occasion to retire. While Grandsailles was seeing d’Angerville as well as Maître Girardin to the door. Solange after putting the sugar-bowl back on the table went and sat down on a small tabouret standing in one corner of the large balcony. The moment Prince had come to make his announcement she had glanced furtively at the clock on the mantelpiece. Unexpectedly she was going to have a tête-à-tête of exactly three-quarters of an hour with the Count, and for nothing in the world did she want their conversation to take place in the frigid, too ceremonious centre of the room.

  With her eyes fixed on the plain, Solange made herself very small, curled up, resting her chin on her knees violently pressed together till they hurt. She felt Grandsailles’ uneven steps slowly approach, and then his lips fervently kissing the top of her head, while with his hands he took her under each arm, trying to lift her.

  ‘You’re not comfortable here,’ said Grandsailles, ‘come and stretch out on my bed.’

  Solange then bent her head back, for the first time offering her full face to his gaze, and asked, ‘Do I look so much as if I were dying?’

  ‘No, you are divinely beautiful, but you look tired, very tired.’ And with these words Grandsailles, slipping one arm under Solange’s legs, lifted her easily to the height of his chest and carried her thus to the bed, where he put her down gently, careful to make her head rest exactly in the centre of a small, very thin pillow covered with steel-grey silk.

  Grandsailles immediately went to fetch the table and bring it close to the bed. Solange lazily stretched her legs and the bones in her knees cracked one after the other with the same sound and at the same moment that the vine-stumps, which Prince had added to the fire a while ago to revive it, were beginning to kindle and crackle in the fireplace.

  ‘You’re completely worn out!’ said the Count as he brought the table over, ‘you went to such great pains last night to dazzle me.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ asked Solange, not giving much weight to her question.

  ‘How could it be otherwise?’ answered the Count with an air of amusement, ‘when just now you tried to make me believe in front of d’Angerville that you had a dinner engagement, which you don’t have at all and which you invented purely to excite the weakness of my curiosity. But unfortunately for me and in spite of myself, I have seen so much of that kind of thing that it’s impossible for me to be mistaken as to the substantiality of a real or an imaginary dinner. In my own world I have become like those peasants, in theirs, who can tell, just by holding an egg in their hand, whether or not a chick will hatch from it.’

  Solange did not answer. She was so happy to feel her body, that constantly ached from the superhuman rôle she was playing, now rest softly on the bed of the being she adored, that the Count’s provocative teasing slid over her heart without leaving the slightest trace of rancour. Grandsailles could have insulted her, and she would not have been in the least disturbed by it.

  In the languorous bliss of her abandon she shut her eyes, feeling the presence of the Count standing at the foot of the bed before her, looking at her with his scrutinizing eyes, yet seeming not to see her.

  ‘What are we thinking of?’ asked Solange in a low, dreamy voice. ‘I am thinking about the two of us for it was lovely, after all, to have tried to believe in our desire. You are thinking about your wood!’

  ‘It’s true,’ Grandsailles answered. ‘I’ve been thinking about my wood. And why shouldn’t both of us try, in all humility, to find what is natural to us? After all, it’s really too stupid to try at all costs to convince ourselves, by an irritating exertion of our imaginations, that we have been devoured by a mutual passion through all the five years that our flirtation has lasted. If we had wanted to ever so little, we could have found a hundred occasions to make love and to unmake it. We would even have had time to follow d’Annunzio’s advice, when he said…’, and Grandsailles recited in a ringing and slightly mocking tone, ‘“Each of us must kill his love five times with his own hands for this love to be born again five times, five times as violent.”’

  Solange, touched to the quick by his mockery, felt as though she could die, and Grandsailles continued in a friendly note of hypocritical gentleness,

  ‘By the way, I should like to give Madame de Cléda a bit of advice: she has reached such a refined level of beauty, of elegance and distinction that it is extremely regrettable that she should continue, with an utterly childish and romantic shamelessness, to try to create around herself a literary and poetic atmosphere that betrays her bourgeois origins all too clearly.’

  ‘Just as in the case of the Count of Grandsailles,’ Solange retorted, aping his tone of voice, ‘the senile shamelessness with which he exhibits his prosaic mediocrity too clearly betrays the country squire!’ And she underlined the last two words with a passionate burst of sarcasm.

  Grandsailles turned his back and, limping a little ridiculously, walked toward the balcony door, which he opened with a violent movement, as though the air of the room were choking him.

  ‘Country squire! It’s true!’ shouted Grandsailles. ‘You see,’ he said, pointing with his finger to the gap in the wood of cork-oaks, ‘those few trees that are missing matter more to me than your life! It is because of such things that wars are waged. The smile of our dead fathers fades in our memory with the years, but one does not forget a piece of land that has been snatched from one, or an uprooted tree. One also forgets five years of stupid and snobbish flirtation – but a single claw-mark in the heart of one’s property, no! That one never forgets.’

  All this Grandsailles had spoken with his back turned, facing the landscape, while he tried to tear loose a big section of moss that had grown in a joint between the stones on the balustrade of the balcony. Finally the moss yielded, pulling with it a piece of the cement that filled the fissures in the stone. Seizing it in his hand Grandsailles hurled it forcefully in the direction of the wood.

  Solange suddenly gave vent to a great theatrical burst of laughter, and just as suddenly stopped, for Grandsailles had turned round and was approaching the bed, his face ravaged by emotion and so full of menace that she was frightened. Never would she have thought him capable of such passionate hatred. But it was too late to change attitudes, and Solange’s expression remained fixed in a contemptuous smile, which Grandsailles could no longer bear to see, which he decided to eradicate by main force. He bore his hands down on her face, burying it in the pillow, pressing with all his might.

  Solange remained motionless, with the dilated eyes of an animal at bay.

  ‘I don’t want to see that smile on your face,’ Grandsailles growled. ‘Idiot! What do you know about my world!’ And as he spoke, pressing down more and more convulsively, his little finger slipped into the wet slit of Solange’s mouth in such a way that his large gold ring struck savagely against her gums, which immediately began to bleed. Abruptly recovering possession of himself, the Count fell conscience-stricken to his knees at the foot of the bed and begged forgiveness.

  Solange got up, leaning for a moment on Grandsailles’ shoulder, and in turn walked over to the balcony, but instead of going outside, she remained standing in a corner, protected by the dark shadow of the heavy curtain. Presently her shoulders, lifting and falling with her hurried breathing, were shaken by convulsive sobs.

  Then Grandsailles went over to her, and taking her face this time with infinite gentleness, kissed her on the mouth. It was the first time he had ever kissed her thus, and it was done only to obtain forgiveness. Solange reflected, as she stopped weeping.

  ‘Forget all that, dear,’ she said, ‘I was too happy just now on your bed. I don’t want to play any more – I love you madly, whether you like it or not!’

  At this moment they heard the footsteps of Maître Girardin, accompanied by Dick d’Angerville, who was coming to fetch Solange. The latter withdrew to the mirror over the fireplace, pretending to fix her hair and wiping the blood from her chin, while Grandsailles was busy talking with d’Angerville and the notary about the visit they had just paid to the mayor of Libreux.

  When Solange was ready, the Count said goodbye to them all at the door to his room. In the courtyard Prince helped d’Angerville, who had an obsession about the arrangement of luggage, insisting on loading everything in the car himself, and on using the least possible space. Madame de Cléda paced back and forth, then went over to a semi-circular stone bench which stood behind a very old cypress-tree and on which had been placed a wicker basket with fresh eggs. She leaned one knee against the bench, took an egg, broke it and swallowed it. Then she swallowed another, and still another, and so on up to five.

  She must eat more. As soon as she got back to Paris she was going to begin taking care of herself as she never had before. Feeling that they were about to leave, Solange took a last egg, broke it and swallowed it in the twinkling of an eye. Thus far she had performed all these little operations with extreme care and without spilling a drop, but this time a little of the white slid down her chin and dropped to the ground. As she had no handkerchief she wiped herself with the back of her bare hand, remained for a moment motionless with her head bent forward in the attitude she had assumed to prevent the white of egg from spilling on her dress, and held her two hands out with the fingers widespread for the tips to dry.

  At this moment she heard the deck of the trunk-compartment slam inconclusively, then bang down a second time with more force and with finality. Eager to drive, Solange took the driver’s seat, and presently they were entering the anticipatory night of an immense forest of giant chestnut trees that formed a tunnel across the road as in the famous Fragonard painting in the Chester Dale collection. Twenty minutes passed in silence, and as Solange’s hands were engaged at the wheel she felt the dried white of egg tugging at her chin, causing her periodically to twist her face into a little grimace that imparted an infinitely touching and unhappy expression to it.

  Dick d’Angerville, discreetly observing her, already had on the tip of his tongue his habitual expression. ‘Bonjour, tristesse,’ but this time, since her tears in the Count’s room as well as the little scratch on her lip had not escaped him, d’Angerville remained silent and turned the radio on softly. Solange let herself sink into an intricate reverie, tenacious and all-absorbing, broken and begun again a hundred times with growing insistence. Through a thousand heroic adventures she imagined herself buying back Grandsailles’ ancestral domains, thus preventing the industrialization of the plain of Creux de Libreux by her tireless perseverance, and in the end replanting the three hundred square metres with cork-oaks. Thanks to her sacrifice, Solange de Cléda saw the heraldic oak of the Counts of Grandsailles grow again and become perpetuated.

  Besides, was she not the Lady, the cork-oak?

  In the Château de Lamotte, left to his habitual solitude, the Count and his notary were preparing to dine. That morning Grandsailles had told Prince. ‘For tonight I feel like having a salade au coup de poing!’ And Prince had set out on the table everything that was needed to make this ‘fist-blow salad’, as it was called in that region.

  When the Count and his notary were seated, Prince placed before the Count a large bowl, from which emerged the rough back of half a loaf of peasant bread which had soaked for some time in a dark-red juice composed of a mixture of oil, vinegar, blood sausage finely diced, and a soupçon of grated chocolate. Maître Girardin then took a large peeled onion that Prince handed him on a folded napkin and placed it in the very centre of the bread, continuing to hold it with his fingertips to keep it in place. Now Grandsailles shut his fist, held it suspended for a moment menacingly over the onion, taking his aim. Thereupon he struck it vertically with a vigorous fist-blow, crushing it into numerous pieces that scattered over the crust of the loaf, which in turn was shattered to bits. At this point the whole was strewn with fresh escarole, and salt and pepper were ground over it with a mill. The successful blow was the signal at which Prince, who had been following his master’s ritual with extreme and anxious attention, returned to the kitchen reassured, while the notary, as though struck by a sudden vision and without detaching his hallucinated gaze from the salad bowl, exclaimed:

  ‘A miracle! From the Count’s blow I see rising the entire plain of Creux de Libreux. Tell me, is it madness or am I right?’ And, bringing the candles closer to give better light to what he wanted to show, Maître Girardin began his description of the salad bowl standing there before them, with an eloquent enthusiasm stimulated by the fact that he felt himself honoured by the admiring perplexity of Grandsailles, to whom these whimsical and ingenious sallies of the notary’s had the gift of communicating a sudden joviality.

  ‘Look, my dear Count,’ said Girardin, pointing with his pale writer’s fingers to the undulated and broken protuberances of the loaf, ‘if that isn’t the very configuration of our crusty and golden hills of Libreux, of the gentle slopes, the abrupt and unexpected ridges, the deep ravines in which cascades of fresh onions flow, for it is those thin, snake-like and shiny slices that represent the hard opalescent tension of our swift streams, with their silvery foam, as they break away from the snows piled up at the far end of the bowl. The luxurious escarole represents the leafy foreground of the fertile and well-irrigated vegetation of the plain. While beyond, emerging from the forests of dark lettuce, appear the first solemn and pastoral undulations, where the grains of rye lying prone and baked into the crust represent to the life the ruminating attitude of motionless and meditative cattle, while the brilliant salt crystals sprinkled over the illuminated heights in turn represent the windows of the distant villages sparkling in the late afternoon sun. There, by chance, is a large grain of salt clinging solitary and lustreless to a steep bank: that’s the whitewashed Saint Julien hermitage; And there is more. Look, my dear Count, at the little pieces of pepper, ground somewhat irregularly, slightly elongated – some even look as if they had heads – they walk, they are our peasants, dressed in black; they fill the hollows of the highways and the twisting roads in teeming processions as they return from the day’s tilling….’

  Grandsailles sat there fascinated and melancholy. ‘All this that you are telling is beautiful as an Arcadia by Poussin,’ he sighed, then avidly launched into the salad with all the energy of his knife and fork which had remained suspended in his hands during Maître Girardin’s whole exposition.

  After the salad, Prince served truffles covered with ashes, in their little immaculately white paper wrappings, and poured a red wine of 1923 vintage which, as Girardin put it, had a bouquet of sunshine. They ate the truffles in silence, and when the goat cheese was served the Count said to his notary.

  ‘Well, my dear Girardin, now talk to me about Madame de Cléda.’ He uttered this request in the same tone in which he might have asked him to play a favourite piece of music.

  ‘I was just thinking of her,’ answered Maître Girardin, ‘as we were eating the truffles. Everyone sees things according to his own lights. The Viscount of Angerville no doubt imagines that Madame de Cléda’s body of a goddess harbours the soul of a queen, and many of her numerous admirers, misinterpreting the permanent fire of her gaze, attribute to her the unsociable temperament of a courtesan. And I, being a notary, ought to see her above all from the point of view of my profession, as a fine match, or else from the point of view of my rustic and poetic naïveté, as a fairy. Well, neither satisfies me. I see Solange de Cléda rather as a kind of saint.’

  And as Girardin detected a shade of irony in the Count’s eyes he went on to explain, ‘By the grace of God saints often possess bodies as beautiful as Aphrodite’s. Now this afternoon, during the whole time we were having tea, I was observing Madame de Cléda. She was dressed so scantily that there was no mistaking the sovereignty of her body, yet she would often keep her arms crossed over her bosom, as though she felt chilly, suggesting at one and the same time the pose of a sculptured nude coming out of her bath and that of a saint listening to a message from heaven. I was struck, as I watched her, by the purity reflected in the oval of her face. And her lips were so pale that I could only think of the nun in the song they still sing in Libreux: “The Feast-Day of the Hermit of Saint Julien”.’

  ‘I don’t know it,’ said Grandsailles.

  ‘According to the local legend,’ Girardin explained, ‘Saint Julien in passing through this region accompanied by his faithful followers discovered the tomb of a nun who had been famous for her beauty. When the coffin was opened the entire body had turned to ashes, and thistles and clover had grown in its place. Only the nun’s head, covered by the white and dazzling hood, remained intact, but her mouth had become white as chalk and jasmines grew from the corners of her lips.’

  ‘I see!’ said Grandsailles in a whisper, as if to himself, ‘the truffles under the ashes… the paper wrappings: the headgear….’

  Girardin concluded, ‘And the refrain of the song, sung with a melancholy inflection, to the accompaniment of the flute, the bagpipe and the tambourin, goes as follows:

  Her breasts were two live stones,