The Impudent Ones

CHAPTER 1

MAUD OPENED THE WINDOW AND THE DISTANT SOUNDS OF the valley filled the room. The sun was setting. It left in its wake massive clouds that clustered together and rushed blindly toward a chasm of light. The seventh floor, where they were living, seemed breathtakingly high. The view around them revealed a deep and resonant landscape that stretched right out to the somber streak of the hills of Sèvres. Between this distant horizon crammed with factories and suburbs and the apartment high in the open sky, the air, brimming with a fine mist, appeared thick and murky, like water.

Maud stayed by the window for a minute, her arms stretched out on the balcony railing and her head tilted to the side in the pose of an idle child. But her face was pale and etched with boredom. When she turned back toward the bedroom and closed the window, the humming of the valley suddenly stopped, as if she had closed the sluice gate of a river.

At the far end of the dining room stood the buffet. It was a very ordinary piece of furniture from the period of Henry II, but with time it had taken on the role of a silent character in the Grant-Taneran home. It had followed the family and they had eaten their meals off its chipped dishes for more than twenty years. Its style and the disorder that reigned in its shelves revealed a strange absence of taste. It was obvious to anyone who saw the buffet that the Grant-Tanerans never chose or bought furniture but made do with average-looking, more or less suitable pieces of furniture that had haphazardly been passed down to them through various inheritances.

Thus it was that they gathered around the Henry II–style buffet on the evenings they arrived home from their trips. And those evenings were always the most trying because they realized that they hadn’t yet left each other and that their old sideboard continued to observe them like the image of their despair.

Tonight on the buffet, the statement addressed to Jacques Grant from the Tavares Bank lay waiting for someone to open it. These statements regarding his debts often came at a bad time. This was an especially bad day because Jacques had just lost his wife, Muriel. She had died that very day following a car accident. Jacques was weeping in his bedroom, abandoned by his family, for it concerned Muriel, whom they knew very little, and each one possessed, besides their personal reasons for not reaching out to him, a reason common to all the Grant-Tanerans, a kind of contemptuous mistrust with regard to his expression of pain. So Maud didn’t go in to see Jacques, even with the excuse of the statement from the bank. Moreover, it seemed to her that the statement’s arrival wasn’t entirely bad timing; it bitterly highlighted the fateful character of this tragic and lethargic day.

In the dining room, things like her brother’s overcoat, scarf, and hat lay around in disorder, thrown over chairs. These finer objects always surprised Maud, because they were so different from her own things.

From the dining room doorway and down the dark, bare hallway came the sound of Jacques’s sobbing. Maud listened attentively, her tall frame leaning against the window and her face alert. She was attractive in this pose and her beauty emanated from her face like untamed shadows. Her pale, overly wide forehead made her gray eyes look even darker. Her face, with its skin stretched out over her prominent cheekbones, was attentively immobile.

Maud felt nothing except her heart, which was beating heavily. An irresistible disgust churned inside her, but her body held it in well, like the solid banks of a torrential stream. She listened to her brother’s sobs, this elder brother who at forty was twenty years her senior, weeping like a child. He had married Muriel barely a year ago, and this marriage constituted the most important event of his life, for he had never accomplished anything else. Since attaining his majority twenty years ago, he claimed jokingly that he had been content to put up with his family.

Mrs. Grant-Taneran readily accepted the idle and dangerous life her son led but, on the other hand, had never forgiven him for marrying a woman from the world he frequented. Although their quarrels were once quickly resolved, with Mrs. Taneran revealing her influence over him each time by calming down almost magically in the face of her son’s growing indignation, this was no longer the case.

Maud sensed their mother’s presence, alone, in the depths of the apartment, entrenched in the kitchen, her last place of refuge. There was no sound coming from the kitchen, but Maud knew the noise of the sobbing cut through Mrs. Taneran’s apparent silence. And considering the time this ordeal had lasted, since three o’clock in the afternoon (and it was already eight o’clock in the evening), the devastating effects of the sobbing must have been considerable.

The doorbell rang. The young woman went to open it. Her half brother, Henry, poked his head in with a childlike movement, barely showing his angular face and brown hair and looking like the spitting image of his father, Mr. Taneran. From Maud’s low voice and the uncustomary calm that reigned, he guessed what was happening. “So it’s over? Leave them alone and come with me. Let’s get out of here.” Maud refused. She turned on a small lamp beside her and waited.

Shortly afterward, with the sound of a grating key, Mr. Taneran emerged from the shadows of the apartment hallway. He had a short mustache, a bit charred-looking, with despondent eyes set in a face carved with wrinkles as pronounced as scars. He was thin and rather stooped.

At one time Taneran had had a respectable career teaching natural sciences at the high school in Auch. Upon retirement, he had married Mrs. Grant, who was living in the city where her first husband had worked as a tax collector.

Taneran was just returning from the Ministry of Education, where, at over sixty years of age, he had been obliged to take up work again in order to meet the heavy demands that, since his marriage, had completely absorbed his personal fortune.

In reality, his family had easily adapted to his sacrifice. It should be added that since he had started working again, Taneran had managed to escape a little from the tyranny of his family and felt quite pleased about it. He had never become used to the inevitable constraints of family life and lived, moreover, in constant fear of his stepson, Jacques Grant. If he had not hesitated to marry Mrs. Grant even though she already had two children, it was because he had assumed that the older one would soon be getting along on his own.

He and Mrs. Taneran had had another son, Henry, for whom he felt a great deal of concealed tenderness, although Taneran quickly had to get used to the idea that his feelings were not at all reciprocated. Thus, to all appearances, Taneran lived a very solitary life.

On entering the apartment, he, too, understood that something unusual was going on and approached his stepdaughter in the hope that she would fill him in. “If you want, I’ll serve you dinner right away,” was all Maud felt like saying. At that moment, Mrs. Taneran called out in a weak, husky voice, “Maud, serve dinner to your father—it’s ready.”

The young woman hurried to unroll a wax tablecloth, set a place, and enter the kitchen. Her mother had finally turned on the light and was reading the newspaper. Without raising her head, Mrs. Taneran repeated in a gloomy tone, “Everything’s ready. You can eat with your father, and if your brother Henry comes back, you can serve him, too.” Maud did not acknowledge that her brother certainly would not come home that night.

Dinner was quick. Taneran wanted nothing more than to retire to his room. Nevertheless, he asked Maud in a low voice, “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Maud nodded, and he added, “Fundamentally, you know, I don’t feel any ill will toward him. It’s very unfortunate.” He was masticating his food, and in the silence of the apartment it made a bizarre, irritating noise. Before going out he turned and said, “I don’t want to disturb your mother. Please say good night to her for me.”

His bedroom and the dining room shared an adjoining wall. Maud could hear him walking in his room for a long time. Under his feet the bare floor made a gentle creaking and cracking noise.

Maud felt at peace. For too long trouble had been brewing, that is, ever since Jacques and his wife had begun to be short of money.

As far back as she could remember, Jacques had been in financial difficulty, except for the first few months of his marriage. He was always in need of cash. This was by far the most important thing in his life. He existed in the center of a whirlwind, his head spinning over money.

Whenever he had any, he became another man. He possessed such an acute sense of his own inanity that he spent recklessly, throwing money out the window, deluding himself by using up funds in a few days that could have lasted a month. He smartened up his wardrobe, invited all his friends, and, with the magnificent disdain that his temporary opulence allowed him, didn’t appear at home for a whole week, avoiding this family who knew how to stretch out money so shamefully, so miserably, like others who hold back on using their full strength or enjoying pleasure, or like a dutiful servant who spares his masters any grief.

When he no longer had anything left but a few bills and some change in his pant pockets, he bitterly measured his slim possibilities. He would set out on the hunt, trying to pawn off a friend’s old jalopy, and, not succeeding, would turn to gambling, going flat broke right away. Finally, worn-out and unapproachable, he would put himself into the hands of the members of the gang that had followed the same leads as he had for years and knew all the rackets. (Perhaps they were the only ones who felt any sympathy for him, although he detested them because they had seen him in the most shameful moments of his life.)

His wife’s money had disappeared as fast as the profits from his shady affairs. For several months, the couple had led what one would call a futile life, because it made no sense, but which, in reality, is very difficult to live: an idle and perfectly egotistical life, even though it appears generous, which consists of an uninterrupted series of moments of pleasure and respite, a continuous exorcism of boredom.

Muriel, who had entrusted her fortune to her husband, always remained ignorant of the ways in which he used it. She “detested expense accounts and never bothered with them.” Jacques was soon rushing around like a madman, trying to cover expenses he had allowed himself to incur.

Soon he began to beg. The little his family could give him had become appreciable of late. “I know you can’t give me much, but do what you can. A hundred-franc bill will be enough. I just need to hang on.”

“I thought your wife was rich,” countered his mother. “Don’t you think I have enough expenses already?”

He didn’t answer so as not to spoil things, guessing that his difficulties were on the rise. And indeed, Mrs. Taneran had let go of less and less money, at the same time that her son’s needs continued to grow. This money, obtained through promises and pleas, represented more and more of the essentials for Muriel: stockings (“she has nothing left to wear”), the rent, or money needed to redeem a piece of jewelry, part of her “family heirlooms,” from the pawn shop. In the end, he stopped coming up with reasons to justify his demands. They had to eat. And again, he found appealing ways of making his requests. “She’s a wonderful cook, poor dear. If only you could taste her cooking. You’ll come, won’t you, Mother, when we have a bit more money?”

“What about me? Don’t I know how to cook? You’re saying you didn’t like my cooking? Go on, say so…” Mrs. Taneran detested him because love contains the dregs of hatred. In the end, she wasn’t unhappy with his romantic misfortune.

It didn’t take long for him to start playing highly emotional scenes. Stretched out as if he were sick, he would wait for someone to come and ask him what was wrong. “Nothing—it’s nothing. But I won’t go back home tonight without a thing. She’s no doubt waiting for me, but I prefer not to see her again, to disappear.” The gang he had left a few months earlier had let him down. And so, acting on a supreme sense of family solidarity, his sister, brother, and stepfather all dug down to the bottom of their purses or pockets—all of them—Maud, Henry, and even Taneran. They gave him, secretly, twenty, thirty, or fifty francs, with a feverish joy. He took pleasure, however, in vexing them. “Mother went along with it?”

“No, she doesn’t want to hear any more about it.”

Unshakeable as well as astute, Mrs. Taneran had thus guided her ship and governed her son’s destiny. Soon loathing his own home with Muriel, he had come back for dinner more and more often. His mother never gave him too much money at once, so that he didn’t have the impression he could control her, but always just enough for him to have the essentials and so that he would return.

Suddenly, however, he disappeared for a couple of weeks. They thought he had succeeded in some business deal. And it was shortly afterward that the saga of the mail with the letterhead from the Tavares Bank had begun. The letters came regularly, every four weeks. Although leaving him indifferent in the beginning, while he still had money, they soon threw him into a terrible state.

Someone who has never experienced the feeling of being at the mercy of creditors cannot imagine the deadly aversion these greedy people inspired in him. The whole family suffered with Jacques when they saw the statements arriving from the Tavares Bank. Normally Jacques received his mail at his wife’s place, but this mail he had addressed to his mother’s. “Have a look on the buffet. There’s a letter for you. I think it’s the request for payment from Tavares.”

He would bury it in his pocket, crumpling it and seemingly digesting the piece of paper for an hour, literally. He sank into sickening daydreams in which it was easy to guess that Tavares himself had become the victim of a massacre. And then, for a certain time, he stopped coming to get his letters, believing he had thus done away with their existence. But he quickly found himself so destitute that he had to accept coming back.

Right away his mother cornered him. “Can’t you tell me what you’ve done, Jacques? After your father’s death I had to borrow, and I know how tough it is.” The only thing he had deigned to reply was, “It’s a debt with short but frequent due dates; in my situation I could never have paid a big amount all at once.”

“Why all this secrecy? Why not tell your wife?” Mrs. Taneran would have liked her daughter-in-law to suffer in turn from the agony of being in debt. But Jacques had not involved his wife in any questions regarding money, and for good reason. By the same token, he had never wanted her to know his family, because it repulsed him. She had died without visiting even once.

No doubt Jacques had loved her more than any other, and in a more sincere and lasting way. For a long time Muriel had kept up the image of the ideal woman that she had had at the beginning of their relationship.

The tragedy had erupted this particular night, brutal and unexpected. It was probably going to resolve the tangled mess they were trapped in and strangely facilitate its elimination. In reality, each one had expected this conclusion throughout the months that Jacques and his mother’s ordeal had lasted.

Toward ten o’clock in the evening, Maud heard her older brother calling her. As she approached, Jacques lifted his swollen face and then sank back into his pillow, finding himself there, as it were, at the heart of his sadness. His suffering absorbed him as much as it prostrated him. He was no doubt amazed that it was possible to go on living with this sorrow.

She sat down beside him and partially opened up his tense fingers, grabbing a strand of hair that he was clenching. Immediately he slumped down, let himself go slack, and moaned in total abandonment. “No doubt about it, she was a true blonde,” said Maud. “Her hair was smooth and fine, like a child’s.” He gave a weak, almost complicit smile, to show her she had fully grasped the direction of his thoughts. He cast off his pain for a moment and smiled at the memory of Muriel.

Maud explained to him at length that he shouldn’t consider this death to be an unusual event. What was extraordinary was that, as she spoke to him, an inner voice repeated her own words, which took on a different meaning than the one she wanted to give them. As for Jacques, he wished only to bring back the memory of the deceased. He described that horrible night when she had been brought to him with her chest crushed.

“The chums who were with her brought her back to me,” he said. “They left her with me because they thought she had had it. But even though she had lost consciousness, she was still breathing, and I kept her all night before taking her to the hospital.”

He stopped from time to time and then resumed, looking absorbed in his thoughts. “She didn’t have any wounds, so I thought she had passed out. I put her under the covers, but little by little she got cold and I felt the warmth of her body leaving her. I thought at a certain point I was going crazy. She was laughing, I swear, the same way as when she made fun of me. I began to talk to her idiotically all night… It was only at daybreak that I understood, when I looked at her in the light. I saw the grimace I had taken for her smile. I took her to the hospital—she didn’t die until this evening.”

“What do you think…?” Maud asked.

“I have no idea, none. She told me she had never been so happy. But there’s no reason to think it was an accident. The street was free of traffic and it wasn’t raining. Even the chums are in doubt. I never caused her the slightest bit of pain, though. She was the only one, the only one I ever loved.”

He readily repeated the last sentence. As soon as he shook himself and stopped being absorbed in a very private contemplation of his sorrow, he began to cry again. “The only one,” he kept repeating, “the only one I ever loved.”

Being embarrassed, he didn’t know quite how to express himself. “I called you because I don’t have a cent… I had to borrow so I could have her better taken care of. And you know I can’t ask Mother for that…” Maud looked at him with his big, lucid eyes, his face devoid of all expression. She thought about the letter from the bank that was waiting on the buffet.

They had already given him so much money! Didn’t he always skillfully extract some benefit from the emotions he caused? In the past minute he had been playing up his misfortune to his advantage. She hesitated, however, to leave the room. It was astonishing to see him lower himself to this point, just to get a bit of cash. And, of course, she might be mistaken. Jacques himself, who seemed so pitiful, probably remained convinced of his own sincerity.

Finding her composure again, she weighed the pros and cons quickly, like someone who is used to these kinds of deals. Already, Jacques’s look had hardened because she had been slow to reply. “How much do you want?”

He specified the amount in a small, humble voice. He felt obliged to add, his eyes glistening as much from crying as from greed, “I rushed around all day trying to hunt down some dough, but there was no way to get hold of any of my buddies. It’s ridiculous, for an amount like that, ridiculous.”

Maud didn’t answer. She got her purse, counted the little money she had, and replied, “You’ll have the rest tomorrow.” Embarrassed, she avoided looking at him. She didn’t hand him the bills, but just put them on his chest.

CHAPTER 2

JACQUES BURIED HIS WIFE THE NEXT DAY. MRS. TANERAN accompanied him. They felt suddenly reconciled upon returning from this bleak ceremony. In the coolness of the morning, the sap made the buds burst open, and puffs of air already carried the odor of hot tarmac and dust. The smell made one’s nose tingle and put winter far behind. Summer was coming, early. Jacques and his mother talked about leaving for Uderan.

“That will put you back on your feet, dear, and at the same time I can keep a closer watch on my own interests. Besides, we haven’t gone for such a long time…”

Jacques didn’t say anything. He already felt his strength returning. Since his childhood illnesses, he had never again appreciated the comfort of convalescence and almost dreaded the moment when his insatiable nature would take over. For now, he let himself glide happily down the gentle slope of the sunny boulevard he was descending on his mother’s arm. He should have been sad, but he wasn’t really, although he didn’t mind being consoled, while his stiff bearing and toneless, dreary voice expressed a decency he felt proper to keep for some time to come. Because he remained quiet, his mother added, “As for Taneran, he’ll get along fine without us, since obviously he won’t want to come, as usual.” (When she mentioned her husband to her older son, she always called him “Taneran.”)

Uderan was in Dordogne. The Tanerans had settled there after their marriage. Henry was born there. Although the purchase of the property had soon proved to be a poor investment for them, they had nevertheless lived there for seven years and had never thought of selling it. When they had gone to live in Paris, despite the low income derived from the tenant farmers, they had kept the place.

Mrs. Taneran remained the only one who occasionally remembered its existence, whenever she feared the future darkened by political events. “Happily we have Uderan! Blessed are those who possess land!” she would proclaim sen-tentiously. They had lived through some long, difficult years confined to a few rooms of the house, which was too big.

For seven years they devoted themselves to restoring the estate. But Uderan had belonged to a whole series of people who, not coming from the region, understood very little about how to cultivate it, and it was extremely dilapidated. The fruit trees, poorly pruned over a long period of time, and the vines, much too old, produced less and less fruit. Only the fields had not suffered too much, as they fed the six cows of the tenant farmer, whereas the woods that encircled the domain, which people had neglected to cut for years, were quite dense.

Mrs. Taneran was soon discouraged, and overnight her enthusiasm for the task vanished. She suddenly got rid of things, like people, after having fiercely loved them, unable to remain deeply attached to the same thing. Her fervor, which generally ended up overcoming all resistance, failed when she attacked Uderan. All her attempts were in vain. The farmers laughed at her desperate efforts, and she left, leaving the property to Dedde, the tenant farmer. This caretaker managed to live off the land, but Mrs. Taneran never received any ground rent and considered herself fortunate that Uderan didn’t cost her anything.

If, this May morning, she was suddenly seized by the desire to return, it was because she felt the need to get over this sad story. For the Grant-Tanerans, Uderan represented, in fact, a kind of high place whose memory haunted them. They believed they had lived and suffered there in a state of hardship but could not look back without a sense of loss at their life there, before living a sad existence in Paris, in which each one was merely the witness of the weaknesses and failures of the others.

When Mrs. Taneran suggested to her son that they leave for Uderan, he did not reply, and she understood that he approved. It was rare that she had him in the palm of her hand like this, attentive to her words, both submissive and charmed. Didn’t he usually flee the house as soon as he woke up? The only thing that brought the Grant-Tanerans together was the table they shared twice a day, around which they continued to detest one another and devour their food while keeping a close eye on one another… However, the presence of her son did not fill this mother with happiness, for she could not bring herself to forget the poor girl they had just buried. Even though Mrs. Taneran was in no way responsible for this misfortune, she couldn’t manage to remain calm.

From time to time she looked at her son, who was tall and handsome, with disconcertingly good looks for a man. What hadn’t she hoped for as a result of her son’s attractiveness? She rediscovered in him the exalted hope that had lifted her spirits when he was born. But after she’d been let down the first time, her other pregnancies, much later, had been less glorious than this one.

Jacques was now forty… She always agreed to his whims, and he always came back to her after each experience, each youthful indiscretion. Her lot in life was to receive him when he felt like running to her, and she never asked for anything but to take care of him like a rich bourgeois. If she tried to give him advice concerning his future, he shot back with his usual fierceness, threatening to leave. Now he was reaching maturity and she was witnessing his decline… And she found herself to be so much at fault when it came to her son that she, too, preferred not to think about it much. Why, for example, hadn’t she been able to warn him about the dangerous game that had brought him to this risky affair, whose outcome could have been disastrous, for she wasn’t sure, in the end, that Muriel hadn’t been killed.

Mrs. Taneran went over the tragedy in her mind, her thoughts naturally coming back to her daughter, Maud, this young woman who was still hers. Wasn’t it Maud who had given the money to her brother? She should have found out how Maud had gotten it, but every step was painful when it came to Maud, and she preferred admitting that she was incapable of being heard by any of her children. Without her, however, the family would not have existed; each one would have fled the others for good, she was sure. Mother of this grown son, of this decidedly mean and ungrateful daughter, of this perverse young man, and wife of this man who didn’t leave on account of her good cooking, she believed, and because he had succeeded in constructing a bastion of indifference on this unstable ground, she owed herself to everyone. For an instant she wished she were a peaceful old woman whose job was over and for whom it would be easy to die or live the way she wanted. She had been dreaming of a quiet life for some time. Why did she keep her children around her, especially her oldest son? Why did she keep him so closely under her supervision? Why did she accustom him to not being able to do without her presence, abnormally prolonging her maternal role? Yes, she should have separated herself from Jacques as quickly as possible. Sometimes this thought crossed her mind like lightning and filled her with fear… One should be careful of children who plunder everything one has… It seemed now that she could no longer even imagine the end of this servitude.

Weariness fell upon her, brutally. The sunny boulevard continued to invite her to taste the joy of a morning in May, yet she suddenly felt deflated. “Let’s take a taxi,” she exclaimed.

But as soon as they were settled in the car, as soon as her son looked at her with a surprised and disapproving look, she sank submissively back into her role.

CHAPTER 3

MAUD OFTEN THOUGHT ABOUT NO LONGER COMING HOME. However, each evening brought her back. Her attitude might have seemed strange, but it was also that of her brothers and stepfather, who, in spite of themselves, never failed to reappear every evening, just as they had for such a long time! Had they been transported to the ends of the earth, they would have come back one day or another, feeling the strong pull of the family circle, where nothing, not even idleness, could lessen the interest they had for one another. In reality, no matter how much they repeated that they were going to leave, none of them really thought about it seriously.

As seldom as they occurred, there were still some good times to be had at the Grant-Tanerans’. Peace settled in on its own, like a lull. The strange antagonism between them would have been more striking had it not alternated with times of respite during which they caught their breath.

Immediately after dinner, the family scattered. Taneran stayed in his room, where he savored his only moments of true happiness. Elsewhere, even in a quiet hotel room where he would have been just as alone, he would have been bored, for he needed to hear the indistinct sounds his family made: Maud giving little coughs on the other side of the wall as she waited for her brothers to leave… his wife, moving about randomly, coming and going with impulsive steps, creating an atmosphere of childish insensibility around her… Taneran had loved her for a long time and still loved her. Since the time of their stay at Uderan, he had hoped that one evening she would reappear and talk to him gently, but since they had stopped sharing a room, she no longer came. Even though she was old and worn-out, having never taken things easy, Taneran kept waiting for her and could not get rid of the hope that one day she would leave her work aside and come…

Taneran listened for the departure of the two brothers.

Jacques Grant’s voice humiliated Taneran and would have made him leap out of his room if he had had the courage. (He was lying when he said that his stepson left him indifferent.) As soon as Jacques left, Taneran asked Henry, in an overly attentive tone that should have flattered him, “Which way are you heading?” The younger son rarely agreed to leave with his older brother. It was another small satisfaction for the father, who nevertheless knew that this son would soon leave, closing the door behind him with the finesse of a cat. For two years, Henry had also gone out and run around in the evenings…

Sometimes, before going out, Henry would knock at his father’s door and Maud knew what he was up to. One had to be scraping the bottom of the barrel, after having been refused by the mother, to ask for money from Taneran. (“Go ask your father, that old cheapskate!”) Taneran, however, was glad to have someone turn to him for help. Foreseeing, though, the danger he would be in if he revealed to his son how anxious he was to help him, he showed none of his pleasure. When his son ran down the stairs four at a time, Taneran naïvely believed that it was the joy of having four hundred francs in his pocket that excited the young man.

When someone said of one of the sons, “He’s with Taneran; he’s asking something of Taneran,” everyone was aware of the fact that a silent drama was being played out, worse than a violent scene, because Taneran was in no way an opponent and nothing more could add to his denigration. The only thing that could bring the Grant-Taneran children down in their own eyes was this final step toward their victim. Only the lack of money could justify it.

Maud could hardly stand these scenes, which nevertheless repeated themselves fairly frequently. Still young, she took part in everyone’s life, suffering for Henry and unable to watch Jacques’s misfortune with passivity. Thus, when her mother worried, at dawn, at not seeing one or the other of her sons come home, the young woman got up and trembled with the same fear.

When Henry left, in turn, the second clacking of the door left the apartment in a silence that Mrs. Taneran’s noisy activity soon dissipated. Maud remained alone, lost in thought in the small sitting room.

At her age, each season brought something new. Thus, for more than a year, Henry hadn’t taken her with him when he went out, and an uneasiness reigned between them, inexplicable to her. Moreover, since the passing of her sister-in-law, they all fled one another, and she herself was not looking for company. It seemed that for a long time they had waited for an event that would put an end to the ascendancy Jacques exercised over the family. They were disappointed. Jacques began going out again and taking back the upper hand he had in the household, from which the death of his wife had momentarily exempted him. Since this event, on the other hand, he had become more and more difficult, hardly being able to stand the presence of Taneran at the table. Even if Jacques went out as much as before, he did not want it to be said that he suffered less for his loss, which is why he feigned an exasperation intended to simulate sorrow.

One would have said that he felt responsible for the family and that the charge he took on gave him exorbitant rights. Mrs. Taneran helped him maintain this belief, moreover, in order to keep him close to her. “You are the oldest one,” she would repeat to him. “If I die, you will have to marry off your sister and take care of Henry. I can’t count on Taneran. You understand the younger ones well and will know how to keep them in check, I know.” If Jacques had not felt useful to his family, perhaps he would not have stood the total inanity of the existence he had led for twenty years.

From time to time, Taneran ventured out of his room after the young men had gone out. The upcoming departure for Uderan now gave him the pretext to talk with his wife of their interests, and he found it pleasant that Mrs. Taneran came to join him every evening in the small sitting room.

The two women let Taneran talk as much as he wanted to, with a voice that ended up tiring them, precisely because it never got past its unhealthy nervousness.

Knowing the topic to be dear to his wife, he once again repeated that “Jacques should take up residence at Uderan instead of hanging around miserably in Paris.” But, unfortunately, one can dream about something for a long time and be disappointed when the opportunity arises for it to be realized, because it’s always less dazzling than one’s hopes. Mrs. Taneran hesitated to suggest that her son take on their property, because she had hoped for a long time that he would come back to it himself, at some point in his life.

But once again her adventurous spirit took over; to convince him to settle down it would be necessary to confront his horribly bad temper. Now, Mrs. Taneran both adored and feared her older son. So she preferred not to listen to her husband.

But he, counting on her silence, insisted even more! “After, it will be too late for him. And as for the others, don’t even talk about them! You realize yourself, my dear Marie, that since our son quit school, he hasn’t done anything. If we don’t stop him in time, he’ll follow the same path as his older brother. And I think that for Maud it’s just as bad, as you well know…”

Taneran believed he could soften the harshness of his words by coating his sentences with verbal varnish. For a long time, moreover, he had spoken like that to confound his step-children, who spoke with great vulgarity, precisely because they detested him. It was also, however, because Maud and Henry had gotten used to Jacques’s vocabulary, which was forever changing and picking up new expressions, depending on the people with whom he rubbed shoulders. Thus, since knowing his wife, and even though she had died, Jacques affected a form of scornful, feminine refinement in his talk.

As soon as she was brought into the conversation, Maud laughed sarcastically, partly closing her eyes and shrugging her shoulders, her head tilted back with a look of unsparing mockery, already taking unconscious womanly pleasure in confusing a man by the inconsistency of her mystery.

“You can laugh!” he retorted. “Who wouldn’t be worried at seeing you act with such freedom? Only this family could show such indifference toward a child.”

Mrs. Taneran got upset. She planned to raise her daughter the way she wanted to. Hadn’t she done that with Henry and avoided the worst with a child like Jacques? “Enough with the girl! As for Jacques, I’ll see when we get there. I won’t leave him at Uderan if he’s going to be bored. After what’s happened, let’s be careful. We have to watch out for the worst.”

The worst was sometimes insignificant, sometimes terrifying, depending on whether it was brought up in distress or in relative calm. It appeared sometimes in the everyday flow of existence, having the well-defined and always discouraging appearance of a crime, a suicide, an important theft. It existed outside the home, like an epidemic that prowls around the city but has not yet touched you. And they were glad to settle for avoiding the worst in life…

“What could happen to him at Uderan, even if he’s bored, Mother?”

The mother stared at the night, considering the omens. “You’re still too young—keep quiet.”

Mrs. Taneran preferred not to put anything into words, troubled by that superstitious fear that adds to the emotions something like a halo of darkness. Taneran, vexed, with his head as low and withered as that of a dead man propped up in a sitting position, stayed quiet in his armchair. So his wife offered him a cup of herbal tea by way of consolation. It reminded them—especially Maud—of many things. When she was little, at Uderan, her brothers took on this task when Taneran had a cold. Mrs. Taneran had to be very angry with her husband to refuse him this small token of happiness, which is something one would do for anyone, even for the first person to come along. Maud was always afraid to walk through the house. Often the cup arrived half-empty in the overflowing saucer, but Taneran would pour it back into the cup and drink it while noisily breathing in. Maud, sitting on a stool, would wait until he was done. While drinking, he would ask himself questions that made him so unhappy that his voice wept.

“I wonder what we came to do here on this woeful property. I was unhappy at that awful school when we lived in Auch, but at least there I was respected, whereas here…” At that time, his wife was no longer concerned about him, totally absorbed by the work of the farm and focused on her children.

He questioned Maud, to keep her near him, in a cutting, complicit tone of voice. “You were afraid to come to Uderan, weren’t you? Do you like it here?”

Yes, Maud liked it. The proof that Taneran wasn’t one of them was that he didn’t like it. For her, their stay at Uderan had no beginning and seemingly no end. As for Auch, she could hardly remember it.

“What are they up to in the kitchen? Tell them they disgust me, do you hear?” She refused to answer Taneran. He finally gave her his cup; she ran as fast as she could to the kitchen door, where her fear vanished. She would then sit near Henry by the fire, silently.

She liked Taneran in this way, just as one becomes attached to certain inanimate objects because they remind one of certain things and prevent the past from entirely disappearing. The terror she used to feel in the hallways of Uderan was reflected in Taneran’s bleary, lost eyes, when she thought back on it. Her first dislike of someone went back to those evenings; it had the smell of lime-blossom tea blended with the sound of his breathing. The words that she alone knew him to say—“What are they up to in the kitchen? Tell them they disgust me”—contained a rare poison: the cowardliness of a man and his misery.

When by chance Jacques came home earlier than usual, before the three accomplices had gone to bed, he was indignant. Jacques Grant had no idea, in fact, that his mother chatted in the evening with her husband and daughter. Because he came home earlier since the death of his wife, he became exasperated, and even more so because he suspected they spoke more freely in that small circle than with him.

He cracked open the door into the sitting room, wearing a bitter smile. Nevertheless, he said calmly to Taneran, “So, you’re there, are you?” Maud didn’t move. A newspaper his stepson carelessly threw in landed at Taneran’s feet. “Here, if you want it, it’s the latest copy of Paris-Soir; it’ll keep you busy if you’re bored.”

The door closed again. In the next room, you could hear someone whistling a popular tune on key. Standing up, Taneran looked at the newspaper at his feet. Before going out, he doled out an idiocy to his wife, taking advantage of the fact that she couldn’t answer him back, for fear of being heard by her son. “My dear, I feel sorry for you. The impropriety of your son toward me leaves me indifferent, but for you it’s a beginning; you have created your own misfortune, and you’re still doing it.”

Then he went into his room, haughtily and miserably. Maud, in turn, snuck into her bedroom without saying a word. She undressed in the dark, quickly and without making a sound, so that no one would recall her forgotten existence, as insignificant as a shipwreck in the middle of the sea. A kind of blind rage threw her onto the small bed, which she grabbed with both arms. But it soon passed, melting like the fear that she felt at Uderan, a fear that seemed inconceivable to her with the coming of the new day.