The Impudent Ones

CHAPTER 4

THE UDERAN DOMAIN WAS LOCATED IN SOUTHWEST LOT, IN the rough and unpopulated part of Upper Quercy, on the edge of Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne.[1]

The two villages of Semoic and The Pardal shared administrative and religious functions; they were both wine-growing and fruit-producing villages, one perched in the pine forests of the plateau, the other down by the water, on the Dior River. Although the domain was under the jurisdiction of the town of Semoic, at the Feast of Corpus Christi it was the priest from The Pardal who came to bless it.

Uderan occupied one of the best-situated slopes of this rugged region, and one of the highest, after the slope of Ostel. The castle of Ostel dated back to the thirteenth century. It dominated a region stretching for fifty kilometers in all directions and remained one of the most powerful seigneuries of Upper Quercy.

Few city dwellers traveled that far for their holidays, but there were some who owned family estates in the region. It was because of the low cost of land that Taneran had been able to move there.

The vines, cultivated for centuries in this region, no longer possessed their former reputation, except in the eyes of those who proudly considered their wines to be better than all those, nonetheless famous, of neighboring regions.

The Tanerans were not able to lodge in their home, which had been abandoned for ten years and had become uninhabitable. The ceilings leaked and grass grew in between the tiles in the bedrooms. Only the wine cellar and the plum dehydrator were in good shape, being for the common use of the farmers leasing the land and the owners.

The positive observations Mrs. Taneran made were limited to the fact that the grounds themselves had not suffered too much from abandonment. The dwelling, which had had most of its furniture carried off to Paris, seemed practically beyond use.

The day of their arrival was gloomy. They had to find temporary lodging. Thus, they did not anticipate what happened next: the Tanerans were obliged to board at the Pecresse home.

The Pecresses were the neighbors closest to Uderan. Their great-grandparents had been tenant farmers on the estate and had bought the tenant farm on which they were working when one of the property owners had been obliged to leave. Since then, the property had regularly become enlarged with each property transfer the owners undertook, one by one, in order to cope with the upkeep of the large dwelling on the second tenant farm.

A beautiful landowner’s home and a big garden now flanked the former tenant farm. The Pecresses, having become wealthy farmers, had not curtailed their ambitions. Unfortunately, they had only one son, and it was around him that they built their ambitions.

People had referred to him, at a certain point, as the most eligible bachelor of the region, as much for the size of the inheritance that awaited him as for his attractive bearing. On top of that, he had completed some studies, which conferred on him a certain intellectual prestige in the village.

However, John turned twenty-five without having made up his mind about marriage. He never put in an appearance anywhere, and his mother saw to it that he did not go out with anyone. He became shy and withdrawn. The young women got discouraged. In his golden solitude, John appeared inaccessible. People thought about him less. Or rather, they began to shudder at the thought of what life must be like for him and his overbearing, redheaded mother, Mrs. Pecresse, at the Old Tenant Farm, as it was called.

When his paternal grandmother died, one September evening, after a glorious day of grape harvesting, tenderness disappeared from John’s life for good. He no longer had anyone but his mother for company, and he suspected that she loved him too much. With no outlet, the passion this mother felt for her son expressed itself as aggressively as if she detested him. The violent feelings of the one and the meek passivity of the other never stopped growing, although in the course of the monotonous life they lived, their sentiments never found any opportunity to manifest themselves. The atmosphere of the Old Tenant Farm became as strange as the somber classical setting of an intimate drama, whose art consists of never bringing together the only two characters representing the very substance of the drama, and whose confrontation would empty it in a single stroke of its psychological interest.

The father of the Pecresse family found happiness in his work. In relation to the other family members, he was the picture of discretion, which consisted of indifference, concern for his own peace, and inexpressible cowardice. This weakness gave the Pecresse father a certain charm, which made him the only inhabitant of the Old Tenant Farm whom people liked to meet. But at home, it expressed itself as treacherously as the worst spirit of intrigue and ended up making him flee the family. Moreover, he did not count in the eyes of his wife and son any more than if he had been feebleminded.

The Old Tenant Farm was as far from Semoic and The Pardal as Uderan itself. But unlike Uderan, no road went by, except for the main road, which turned fifty meters from there toward the village of Rayvre. There were shortcuts to get there from The Pardal, so few farmers took the Old Tenant Farm road to the village.

John must have waited for years for someone to pass by their farm. Their only neighbors, those from Uderan, had not come for a long time, and the silhouette of the pinewood rose before him, untamed. However, his mother still hoped to marry him off according to her own ideas.

John was looked on as a simpleton whom one could easily lead on, a good match for an able young woman, in short, if his mother had not been so vigilant. He was unhappy at home and worked as hard in the fields as an ordinary pieceworker. He could have had workers. But even if the Pecresse family spent their energy in hard labor, they hung on to their money. People soon said that John was stingy and a bit of a driveler.

His mother, who was not lacking in good sense, finally began to worry. John exceeded her hopes, and she wouldn’t have been unhappy if he had been a little more at ease with the girls. To encourage him, she hired a young servant girl, because, all things considered, she would have preferred to see him embroiled in some low-class affair than to see him marry below himself or, indeed, be bitter toward life.

But John refused to touch the servant who slept beside his room. He refused to fall, even once, into the trap that he knew his mother had laid for him.

Three years passed. John was approaching thirty. The servant had stayed. The Pecresses led a laborious and well-to-do, although sad and monotonous, life in the presence of their only son, who seemed to give himself over to this chaste and solitary existence as fervently as if it had been a reprehensible passion.

This state of affairs lasted until one summer evening when, on the edge of the Dior River, where John often spent time, he met a stranger. Immediately he felt like the guilty man who, one fine day, after a long, exhausting journey, arrives in a village where his crime is unknown.

The young woman was cutting bulrushes with a small, brilliant machete. Two long black braids hung from her head down to the tall grass. Her dress of faded red stood out against the dark green of the river like the color burst of a piece of fruit against the foliage. She looked like the young woman of a fictional tale who might have wandered from her home at dusk, haunted by dreams. As soon as she saw the young man, the vision changed. She straightened up, arched her back, and called out to him casually, with an almost vulgar self-assurance. He couldn’t see her face very well, for the shadows blurred its features, but he picked out its calm and mindlessly cheerful expression. He saw someone unafraid and used to talking to one and all, like vagabonds for whom all passersby are friends.

What John experienced for an instant was memorable. It was as if he awoke to the inordinate beauty of love.

Naturally, he answered her ineptly. The young woman, disconcerted, looked at him for a moment and then got back to work. John moved away but looked back quickly with each step, like someone afraid of being followed. He sat down on an alder stump and continued to consider her with a stupid look on his face, in which all human emotions jostled together, although not a single one of them succeeded in coming to the fore and taking over.

Both terrified and touched, he couldn’t move. At a certain point, she began to sing. He couldn’t believe his ears. The song seemed to flow in his veins like poison. Each musical phrase, undulating or piercing, astonished his flesh and turned it into something painfully sensitive.

Like a child waking up, he didn’t really understand what was happening. The spectacle of his existence passed through his mind, incomprehensibly. He felt that he was being born to an unknown state of being. He thought of his chastity with horror. It paralyzed him and he felt himself stagger under its weight.

No one passed by. Only the train from Bordeaux shook the silence, followed by trails of smoke; the light that flashed from its doors streaked the sky with red glimmers.

The young woman moved away, with a bundle of bulrushes on her back and her small machete in her hand. She went in the direction of Semoic. John found himself alone on the bank of the Dior and stayed there until night closed in on him.

The next evening found him in the same place on the alder stump. He felt weakened by lack of sleep and hunger, having neither eaten nor slept since the day before. However, his nerves, like reins, held him back from making the sinuous approach of a man toward a woman.

As soon as she was once again singing and calmly taking the road back to Semoic, he was afraid. Maybe she would never come back. Thrown suddenly out of his dream, out of his fear, he found himself upright and desperately brutal.

He ran and caught up with her, and she recognized him and smiled. But he was unable to look at her face as he told her with a harsh, unsteady voice that she had no right to come and cut the bulrushes in his meadows on the Dior. He became indignant, but his inflamed voice burned only himself. Whoever might have seen these two silhouettes on the road—hers bent over under the bundle of reeds and his gesturing wildly with his two arms—would have taken them for master and slave. And that is what she subsequently became in his hands.

She appeared again the next day, and at the end of a week she gave herself to him at the same place where they had first seen each other, at the bend in the Dior at the edge of the alder woods.

Their love was complicated in the beginning, at least for him, by a sense of romantic fiction and disillusion. She let her family return home and she stayed in Semoic. She didn’t miss her previous wanderings. She earned a good living by offering her services from farm to farm to do washing, harvesting, grape picking, and such.

Their affair lasted for three years. John cheated on his mistress whenever the occasion presented itself, in particular with his servant. He found his mistress cost him a lot of money, but he didn’t think seriously of leaving her. He felt at ease in regard to many things with her. But he had waited for love too long and remained disappointed. He gained weight and turned into a half-wit.

The evening the Tanerans arrived, John felt intimidated. An event of this kind had never happened at the Pecresse home, where they never received anyone. He insisted that they dine in the dining room and not in the kitchen as they were used to doing, in the manner of true farmers. It was a lot of effort, but his mother could find nothing to say about it. As the servant girl moved about with her usual sluggishness that night, John spoke harshly to her, making her cry. He put on the hunting garb he usually wore only on Sundays.

When everything had been prepared according to his wishes, he waited for the Tanerans to come back from their walk over to Uderan. He had barely seen them in the morning. They had surprised him by their simple and natural deportment, and he had enjoyed talking with them. They were supposed to have lunch with the Deddes, their tenant farmers, and the day seemed long to John Pecresse. As it went by, his exuberance grew, without his really knowing why.

They came in one after another, the brothers first, and then Mrs. Taneran and Maud, dazzled by the light, all of them wearing, like a family look, an identical expression of fatigue and disdain on their faces. They no longer appeared as the travelers they had been in the morning, happy to arrive and cheerfully carrying their suitcases, talkative and youthful.

The Pecresses were feeling quite moved. The Tanerans made no attempt at conversation. They took their places on the chairs backed up against the dining room wall. No noises entered the room except those of the kitchen, which one could make out just below, near the stable of the previous home. They were hungry. Jacques yawned with boredom and a feeling of well-being.

Facing the chimney stood a magnificent china cabinet, with its molding and its porcelain gleaming. The immaculate table was shining with an unreal whiteness. A gentle, acidulous odor floated in the air, that of the plonk, or cheap wine, of Lot and the musty-smelling cask treated with sulfur, vaguely reminiscent of human perspiration.

A brief moment went by before Mrs. Pecresse called everyone for dinner. She came and apologized to her guests that everything wasn’t ready and went back to the kitchen. The father must have been in the barn. He discreetly stayed in the background, like a servant. John did not yet dare to appear. Already each of the Pecresses had the same thought, without having shared it with one another. The Tanerans, for their part, found the place warm and pleasant, although rather far from the villages. But they had no precise thoughts in their minds.

Maud went out for a moment on the porch to watch the nightfall.

At the summit of the slope of which Uderan and the Old Tenant Farm occupied the middle, a few farms at The Pardal had feeble oil lamps that were twinkling. It was mild out; there were only occasional gusts of light wind. Although Maud had barely remembered the scenery until this point, she now recognized it in its entirety. All around her, she sensed the land, which rose in tiers—the fields, the farms, the villages, and the Dior—as if they were part of a permanent, harmonious order, guaranteed to outlast the humans, who only came and went in this small corner of the world. The incessant passing of creatures that inhabited the area made this eternity accessible to the soul. One felt it slowly, ardently, and sensitively unfolding, like a road forever warm with the steps of the last passersby and still with a silence forever hollowed out by the sound of steps to come and bodies on their way.

The road cut across the dark slope of the terrain. Immobile and milky white, it crossed the countryside, strangely absent, like a courier coming from afar who thinks only of his goal.

Although it was difficult to see anything, one could sense that many lives still carried on at night, now calmer and voiceless, yet existing more powerfully, perhaps, than during the day, which no longer dispersed them with its light. This was how Maud perceived The Pardal, perched on the summit of the incline, and below it the hamlet of Semoic, down by the Dior, which was murmuring with fresh and silky sounds.

Cries, distant noises, barking dogs, and the voices of young people calling to one another arrived isolated from their source and in a familiar way, as gentle to the ear as the sound of the sea.

Farmers had their supper early. They ate, no doubt, in a silence composed of tiredness and peace. They would soon go to bed, worn out by the fatigue of the day that had just gone by, and by the denser and heavier fatigue that imperceptibly swallowed up each day of their lives a bit more. And all the forms of tiredness that came together at the end of the day left certain fragrances in the air, those of the earth and of stone, which does not die, those of herds, and those of man, gentle and touching.

John Pecresse thought he would find Maud on the porch of the dining room. He came to join her there and, without saying a word, leaned up against the other side of the door. Maud was barely able to make him out now, done up in his hunting outfit, tall and a little thickset, like a man who is getting older, and not like the youngster she had known in the past. She thought about his life in this house, in the middle of this farmland that belonged to him and on which he lived with ease, without having to count the cost. He irritated her, because she felt he was always keyed up, concerned about the effect he was making, painfully forcing himself to appear something other than what he was.

John felt worried. “What effect does it have on her to be here, at my place, on the porch of the house from which one can see, far off, at least half of my lands bordering on Uderan and the Dior?” He blamed himself for the girl’s silence; the feeling of a huge emptiness already overwhelmed him when he was near her. The mistresses that he had had by chance had always found him full of a trying sentimentality, but they attached very little importance to it because they were from the country and full of common sense; they let him both speak and write to them to his heart’s content.

The Pecresse father left the stable and released his griffons, who took off like arrows in the black night. The dogs barked for quite a while, exasperated with joy and showing a childlike impatience. Even without seeing them, one could follow their pointless and disorganized comings and goings. Mrs. Taneran, Jacques, Henry, and Mrs. Pecresse also came out on the porch before dinner. Mrs. Taneran wanted to say something to Mrs. Pecresse in order to be friendly. “It feels good here; it feels better than Paris. The air is so fresh!”

Very pleased, Mrs. Pecresse agreed, answering in the same vein. Then no one said another word. Mr. Pecresse spoke to his dogs to keep them close to the house.

Maud heard Jacques yawning nervously behind her. Jacques! She thought of him suddenly with as much detachment as if he had been dead or absent for many years. For the first time in a long time, he was not in the familiar setting of their apartment. It was as if he had stopped living for a few days. He lost all interest and looked like an actor who is lifeless and superficial soon after the show.

The perspective of holidays bored Jacques. After one has taken a boat from Uderan down to the water mill of Mirasmes, what else is there to do in an area where small game is as rare as the girls? For ten years, his illusory existence had opened up new avenues of pleasure for him every day. Here, everything slipped away. The silence terrified him. He knew his mother’s plans for him, but despite the fact that he had let himself be forced into a decision he now regretted, he told himself that it did not bind him in the least.

Like fog, boredom covered Jacques’s life, and in this haze, reality faded and became elusive. He was very intelligent without ever having known the pleasures of the mind. His thought life, lazy as it was, never rose above his everyday preoccupations. It led him to his pleasures and then abandoned him, like the matchmaker who has fulfilled her duty. For a year he had given himself one reason to live: to hide the truth from his wife concerning the use of the money she had entrusted to him. He had no doubt held it against her that she was the source of his problems, without knowing it, and that had contributed to hastening the end of his love. It now spoiled his memories.

These memories, in reality, continued on in the form of payment dates from the Tavares Bank, which had to be respected no matter what. No doubt he did not love the deceased enough to suffer for a long time. Her death let him down because it no longer allowed him to hope for anything. He felt abandoned. All that was left was his empty heart and the statements from the bank.

The Pecresse father whistled for his griffons, who came regretfully into the house. The Tanerans and their hosts sat down to dinner later than usual. But even if the atmosphere picked up on account of the good food, the Pecresses remained vaguely worried and disconcerted by the Tanerans.

CHAPTER 5

MRS. PECRESSE WAS A SINGULAR WOMAN. AT THE PARDAL, SHE was looked on as a woman with a good head on her shoulders, and she was respected. Having only a few friends, however, she was concerned about people’s opinion. She knew people criticized her in relation to her son, and even though she realized that the slander being spread in The Pardal was inspired by jealousy, she let herself be tormented by the unspoken worries it caused.

As soon as the Tanerans arrived, her concern grew. Although the idea of marriage had germinated in her mind prematurely, the feelings of her son for Maud Grant only confirmed it. She had never thought that there would be a link between marriage and the final acquisition of Uderan. Now this possibility arose in her mind in such an obvious way that she thought she had always foreseen it.

Even if the Grant-Tanerans were only bourgeois folk without distinction, Uderan, their land, conferred on them a kind of nobility. And it was precisely because the property was in a state of disrepair that Mrs. Pecresse wanted it so strongly. The prospect of action intoxicated this woman. She wanted to act and to drag her son John into the adventure. What could be more exciting than to join in a common cause with the one who is dear to you? No one ever knew how far this hope led Mrs. Pecresse and in what delectations it caused her to bask in advance.

But she knew how to put the brakes on her imagination, which had never blinded her. Her passion took on an air of reflection naturally and expressed itself skillfully. The only error to which she fell prey was to attribute to Maud Grant the value and attraction of the land the young woman possessed. Without having done any calculations, from one day to the next, Maud appeared worthy of Mrs. Pecresse’s covetous ambitions for her son.

Even if Maud was not all that beautiful in the opinion of the Pardalians, did she not possess, in fact, traces of a race that was different from her own? She walked down the fruit path slowly, with an erect posture, without rushing, as if no one or nothing were waiting for her; no obligation bowed her down, except that of living life as it came. And Mrs. Pecresse, who attended to so many tasks that she wouldn’t have known what to do with a moment of leisure, found in that the true mark of an essential difference. The fact that she thought Maud was of a superior quality to her flattered her modesty and kindled even more her desire to see Maud marry her son.

Soon all of The Pardal had made the inevitable connection: the Grant daughter, with nothing to do from morning till night, was certainly looking for a husband. And after all, it was better that a good man from The Pardal get that uncultivated land in shape, especially because, of the Grant-Tanerans’ two sons, one was too young and the other incompetent…

Mrs. Taneran sensed these calculations, or rather these hopes. She didn’t want to displease either Mrs. Pecresse or the local farmers. Whenever she happened to be alone with her daughter, she kept herself from saying anything. But she had spoken about it to Jacques, as she always did with things concerning the family.

“So, who will you marry her to?” he had replied. “I’d be generous. I’d go away; I’d take a pass on the question of the land, which doesn’t bring in any profit and loses value every year; Pecresse would pay me something…”

Perhaps he thought that a solution of this kind would arrange his affairs. But his mother, usually so weak, so amenable, dug in her heels. She claimed she would prefer to see Maud become an old maid than marry her to a Pecresse. Since her arrival, moreover, his mother was easy to irritate. When obliged to defend her child, she was surprised that she cared so strongly about Maud, who didn’t show her any tenderness. In contrast to the spinelessness of her sons, this reticence comforted her, especially recently, since she had noticed that Henry, too, was getting worse. This was why, in the face of the danger Mrs. Taneran was discovering, Maud seemed to be so disarmed and so innocent that her mother felt all her energy was necessary to save her daughter.

Soon the rumors were flying. People became emboldened, for, either thoughtlessly or because they found it so comfortable, the Tanerans did not leave the Pecresse house for their own. Was it to give credibility to the general opinion? Mrs. Pecresse suggested to the Tanerans that they give a dinner at Uderan itself for all the Pardalians.

In reality, Mrs. Pecresse feared that her idea was crazy. “If it is,” she told herself, “I’ll see it clearly that night by the way they act…”

Although she lived apart from the Pardalians, whose daughters seemed too commonplace for her heir, she clung to them now, because she suspected that her idea was not just the fruit of the imagination of a disillusioned woman. Her dream frightened her, considering that it might happen, and considering that she might see John beside Maud, in the yard or at the table. She entertained this dream and marveled at it like a young girl who has not yet begun to live in reality. “Things don’t happen by themselves,” she repeated to herself. “You have to act on them.”

But nothing seemed to happen that was decisive or even seemed like the beginning of a realization. Thus, she naïvely put hope in this dinner…

Though they were already into May, they lit the fireplaces in all the main-floor rooms at Uderan two days in advance. The house lost some of its sad, musty smell. There was still one room somewhat inhabitable, furnished with a canopy-covered bed, too bulky to have been moved. Beside the big bed was another, a child’s bed, left because it was not usable. Maud, as a little girl, and then Henry had slept there. This room was at the extreme edge of the grounds, at the end of a pathway of linden trees. One of its walls overlooked an old greenhouse, which, for as long as anyone could recall, had been abandoned and left to hobos, who often spent the night there when passing through the region.

Maud decided to sleep at Uderan. Mrs. Dedde arranged the bedroom for her. Although Mrs. Taneran found Maud’s idea a bit preposterous, she didn’t remark on it. She let Maud do what she wanted, showing her incredible leniency…

It was decided that the Pecresses’ son would accompany Maud to Uderan that same evening. Having become extremely considerate, John guided her along the narrow road with a hurricane lamp, and she preceded him in the stream of light cast by the lantern. She wanted to thank him but didn’t find anything to say.

They had almost arrived when John Pecresse made the effort to ask her, “My mother hasn’t said anything to you, Maud Grant?”

Maud was unaware of all the intrigue that swirled around her. When she turned around, she saw his worried eyes shining. “No, nothing! I don’t know what she could have said to me. Good-bye. No need to go any farther. I know the road here, because from the hedge on we’re at Uderan. When I was little, I never went any farther. Thank you anyway…”

She went on her way. He was stupefied for a moment, but then ran back. His mother, who must have been following the light of the lamp, closed the shutters of her bedroom with such force that the din went as far as Maud. Mrs. Pecresse had no doubt put a lot of hope in this walk. It was her first disappointment, and her nervousness kept her from sleeping for a long time…

Maud, for her part, felt reassured as soon as she reached the grounds. She walked briefly down the pathways that crossed the premises and came back gently. The silence, which would have made anyone else flee, dense and mysterious as it was, enchanted her instead. Around her, the huge box hedges bristled, the pine trees took on gigantic proportions, and their summits wept gently, even though their moaning spread no sadness.

Maud heard her heart beating curiously at a certain point, as if it had been outside her chest. She heard it and made out another sound farther away that mixed with her heartbeat, sometimes becoming very perceptible and sometimes getting lost in the night, depending on the whims of the wind. With her hand on her chest, she held her breath. The noise soon plunged into the sunken road and circumvented the high, dark cliff formed by the grounds on that side.

“It’s a horse…,” she said to herself. “I don’t know anyone around here who has one. The farmers at Uderan don’t know how to ride a horse…”

When the horse and rider drew near, she remained motionless, as if the stranger, in merely sensing her presence, might have felt wary. She knew nothing of him but decided he was courageous because he wasn’t moving any more quickly than he had been before arriving at this road, which was black like an oven and overhung with tightly knit hedgerows. For an instant, Maud seemed to be attached to the hoofbeats, which descended toward the village. Once they reached the main road, they became clearer. Then no other noise troubled the silence, in which they left a kind of sound trail that seemed to fade with difficulty.

Maud went back into the house, leaving the large front door open to the grounds, which the light of the moon was probing. But the breeze that had earlier revealed the passing of the stranger kept her from sleeping for a long time. Maud fell asleep as soon as the breeze died down of itself in the forest, as if it had lost its strength, but she woke up abruptly as soon as a fresh breath of wind carrying all the surrounding fragrances returned and made the curtains shudder. It had swept the great depths of the valley, carrying with it, as a result, the scent of bitter algae and decayed leaves.

CHAPTER 6

THE DOOR OF THE LARGE DINING ROOM AT UDERAN HAD been left open. The day workers and tenant farmers were eating in the kitchen. Their wives and daughters served the meal, barely finding a minute, here and there, to eat themselves. They brought out the dishes, their mouths full, their foreheads damp with perspiration, flushed and happy with their exhaustion, which wasn’t the same as their everyday fatigue.

In the dining room, the notables and farmers lined each side of the long table in a dignified fashion. The latter, being landowners of The Pardal, were born there and would probably die there; in their view, the tenant farmers were of an inferior status, similar to that of mercenaries who worked the land. Thus, being conscious of the respect being paid to the permanence and stability of their own condition, the farmers sat there proudly, although a little awkwardly, in their best clothes. In total, there were at least thirty who had come as a group. Under their eyelids, creased by the sun, they wore a mocking look, showing that they mainly regarded this invitation as the windfall of a good meal. Certainly, they would never have thought of doing this themselves. At the time of the grape harvests, when the people of The Pardal went to one another’s places to eat, it was always with the expectation of something to be done in return, usually the exchange of a few days of work; but of course, you didn’t just invite people over for nothing, for the pleasure of it…

At the beginning of the meal, they felt ill at ease, and even if some of the bolder ones tried to make a few jokes, they got little back for their efforts. The noise they made in loudly slurping their soup barely made up for the seemingly endless silence.

Caught up with the scene, Maud clearly recalled a past as lasting and inalterable as the features of their faces, which for the most part had not changed. Despite the efforts made to gain her attention by the young Pecresse, seated near her, she remained distracted.

At each end of the table, two big oil lamps lit up the guests who presided over the dinner. Mrs. Taneran chatted with the pharmacist of The Pardal, a big man whose hands appeared pale in comparison with the sun-scorched hands of the farmers. On the other side, in the middle, in consideration of his status, was the schoolteacher of The Pardal. His former pupil Henry Taneran, placed at his left, interacted with him with as much feigned or naïve sweetness as before, when he was a child.

It wasn’t long before everyone started talking with his neighbor, although no one dared speak to the whole group yet. In the growing buzz of the conversation, one could pick out a few asides muttered in the thick dialect of the Dordogne area.

The Pecresse mother, sitting at Maud’s right, was twisting and turning with nervousness. From time to time, she murmured a few words to her son, who immediately started in on Maud with his stuffy politeness. But his nasal voice, covered up by the other voices, failed to hold Maud’s attention.

The rowdiness grew. When it got to be a terrible racket, with people raising their voices as loudly as they could, the din became deafening and monotonous, and yet Maud was no more overwhelmed than the night before, in the tremendous quiet of the grounds.

They were all there around the table, stingy, lumbering, unsociable workers, from the tall, good-natured Pellegrain, whose colossal stature dominated the crowd, right down to Dedde, the short tenant farmer. But they knew how to have fun by alluding to something or telling a story. To loosen up their tongues, which were usually tied (as if speaking during the week were a sin), the wine of Uderan worked wonders—a white wine, a bit dry, that had taken on the mineral taste of the plateau. Mr. Dedde had kept it for ten years, it seemed, in readiness for the return of the Tanerans; with time it had acquired a deep and treacherous sweetness. As rough as they were, the farmers tasted the wine with finesse; after each swig, they sniffed it and claimed they would have recognized it anywhere; they compared it to this or that other wine and gave advice to Dedde: “Be careful. You shouldn’t let it age for more than five years. It’s delicate—you may lose it.”

After they had begun, it became a sparring match in which each one claimed some authority the others didn’t have, launching into nuances that would have seemed insignificant to the uninitiated. At the end of an hour, however, there was a bit of a lull in the conversation, as they began to lack for topics.

“Now they’re going to start talking about Uderan,” thought Maud. They were going to repeat stories she knew word for word, which would serve to tie together scenes that the customary progress of their jubilation or state of well-being called to mind, one by one.

“Do you remember, Maud?” one of the men began… “Maud, someone’s speaking to you! Do you remember the terrible fear you had, ten years ago…?”

She gave a start. What was happening? Everyone was looking at her. Mrs. Pecresse, at her right, and John Pecresse were overjoyed to have drawn all the guests’ attention toward her. Everyone was quiet, suddenly ashamed that they had shown a lack of propriety by forgetting to turn the conversation toward Miss Grant that night. Mrs. Taneran, for her part, was annoyed at the stupefaction one could read in her daughter’s eyes. As for her brothers, they shrugged their shoulders in a barely noticeable way, whose meaning only she could guess. “What an idiot!” was what it meant. “What I think about it is just for the family!”

When Maud answered at last, a bit of defiance punctuated each of her words. “Oh, I remember! But there’s a lot you don’t know. Picture this! It happened one day when I was bringing back the cows from the field by the Dior and the train went by in the middle of the herd. Brownie was left with a huge red hole in place of one of her horns, and she pooped and bellowed. My teeth were chattering with fear. You thought I was very courageous. But after the accident, I spent the night crying, because they were going to put the animal down. You’re the one that told me, Alexis, that evening. You were drunk, but I believed you anyway.”

Alexis, who had the head of a Gascon, with a narrow mustache, blushed with delight at hearing his name mentioned, but, recalling his drinking binges, everyone made fun of him. Mercilessly, Maud continued, finding a cruel pleasure in her words. Why did she persist this way?

“Christmas night, do you remember, Alexis? It was in the woods at the Paulins’. You were lying in the mud, hanging on to your shotgun as if it would actually keep you from falling into an abyss. We bumped into you with our feet and you hollered like a crazy man. Was it the cold that got you fired up like that, eh, Alexis?”

“Yes, Miss Grant,” he answered, his eyes pleading with her.

But the others now sided instinctively with Alexis. They all felt exposed by the subtle irony of this girl who until now had remained silent and all at once showed herself to be so aggressive. What she said baffled and embarrassed them at the same time. So Maud gave up that approach from that point on, and only joined in the conversation to liven it up, giving a word of praise or approval here or there that would cause people to listen to the person with whom she was talking. She already knew the weight of her smile, of her attentive look, and immediately they were grateful for the goodwill that she showed.

Little by little, the gaiety died down, as it had come. Everyone pushed his or her chair out from the table. The fires that had half died down were crackling, and, to ward off any omens, the Deddes’ daughter extinguished them completely with the poker…

The dress of flowered cotton that Maud was wearing, which appeared a little faded in the glimmer of the lamps, distinguished her from the farm women, who were still wrapped up in their woolen garb. It occurred to the young woman that once the hearths had been extinguished, the cold coming from the other rooms would slowly invade the big dining room. Gradually, even though they had had a lot to drink, the guests would soon be on their way. Thus, she threw another armful of vine shoots into the fireplace, and the fire, in a sudden burst, began purring again, devouring the dry twigs.

All of a sudden, she pricked up her ears. Although silence seemed to reign over the grounds and the whole Uderan domain, she knew before anyone else that it had just been broken. The same gallop she had perceived the night before came to her distinctly, and from the same direction. Soon the noise was so obvious that everyone stopped talking to listen to it.

“It’s George Durieux,” declared the young Pecresse. “I can imagine the look he’ll have on his face when he sees the windows lit up. It’s certainly the first time in years.”

“Where’s he going like that?” asked Maud.

“Who knows? It depends on the one he’s with at the moment. For now, it’s Semoic.”

“Oh, that’s it,” said Mrs. Pecresse, shaking her head back and forth. And right away her son imitated her gesture, which said everything.

Mrs. Taneran was anxious to have some details on George Durieux.

“A fellow from Bordeaux. He bought back a piece of property near Semoic and comes here on holidays. You know, the one you can’t see from the road. There’s a long pathway of cypress trees that leads to it. He wanted something in the region because his father had lived here for a long time; he even thought of buying Uderan.”

“Hallo, Mr. Durieux!” The parish priest had opened the window, and everyone was astonished to see that the rider was already in the yard, holding his horse by its bridle.

“I thought I was dreaming,” the rider shouted. “From the top of the road I could see the lights of Uderan.”

He finished tying up his animal and came into the room. He was a tall, dark-haired man who didn’t appear to Maud to be particularly good-looking. His careless dress highlighted instead a native elegance that struck one immediately because of the ease of his movements, which showed off a dexterity like that of an animal. He seemed a bit dazzled, with the expression on his face passing from indifference to a childlike curiosity. He looked at everyone attentively, spoke to them in a friendly way, but didn’t listen to them very long and seemed after a moment or so not to notice them anymore. From his first glance, he had fixed all the attendees in his mind and could easily pick out the landowners, even though he was far from knowing everyone in The Pardal. His politeness tinged with disdain once again gave people a sense of their social standing; sensitive to his charm, Mrs. Taneran gave such a feminine smile as soon as he entered that she appeared younger. With the arrival of George Durieux, moreover, the real meaning of the gathering appeared to Maud as an unbearable, self-evident fact.

“She’s the one people in the area are talking about and who may end up staying at Uderan,” the stranger must have thought. “One of these nights this lout will take her to his place, with her mother wishing they had gotten away. They must be seriously short of money…”

Maud lifted her eyes. They were a very light gray. Her look quickly met that of the young man, a look as clear as hers and hardened by the same will, but more practiced. In speaking, he didn’t stop staring at her. When he realized that people noticed, he turned away for a few minutes, but almost immediately began again. However, he didn’t stop talking.

“Every day,” he said to Mrs. Taneran, “I ride along the side of your property, madame”—he stressed these words as if he were mocking her—“and I know it very well. Your vines, on the side of the Pellegrains’, especially the big one that spreads out over the two slopes of the plateau, are not worth much anymore, unfortunately. It’s useless to fertilize them. All that’s left is to tear them out!”

“I thought,” argued the tall Pellegrain, “that by grafting them…” Soon everyone came to the rescue, that is, those of The Pardal. The Pecresses murmured something in their corner, wanting to play their part as well. What George Durieux was saying did not disadvantage people’s interests directly, but they felt nevertheless that their collective faith in the value of Uderan was shaken.

“No, believe me,” the young man continued, “except for burning the whole plateau and then replanting… But what good would that do—isn’t that true, madame? You never come here. When you bought it, it was already depleted to the maximum. It’s been like that for decades. You can’t do anything but leave Uderan as it is. Woe to the person who tries to change something. The region is infested with ruined landowners who used to own your domain. There’s no one but you, farmers of The Pardal, who hold on to hope for this desolate land…”

Mrs. Taneran continued smiling blissfully for no obvious reason…

“You see,” he continued, “this soil is so impoverished that you would have to invest a fortune in it to make up for lost time. Furthermore, one can live very well at Uderan, in a sense, provided that one asks of it only what it can give: a few cuttings of wood, some fruit, some fodder.”

Apparently he wanted to discourage the desire of the people of The Pardal to acquire the land. Was he lying? He expressed himself with a gentle indifference that would have fooled the most discerning, but that contrasted with the intensity of his look. When he felt that the disillusionment had begun to undermine their point of view, he spoke to them about other things. Today, moreover, he had almost won the match. Tomorrow, certainly, with the day’s dawning, when they would once more cross Uderan bathed in mists, the desire to possess it would seize them again. George knew that, but for tonight, it was enough to have put a dent in their covetousness.

John Pecresse, on the other hand, didn’t really care what George Durieux had to say. He believed that he loved Maud, but in reality found himself as much a stranger to her as George Durieux, for his part, appeared already to be part of her private life. Effectively, Maud listened to the words of the latter with passionate interest. The dancing light of the fire dug shadows under her slight shoulders, and her face possessed a beauty that Pecresse felt confusedly escaped him. Besides killing his desire, this revelation drove him to despair. Unconsciously, he held it against his mother for defending what she called her interests with such vulgarity. From that evening on, he knew he was defeated in advance, but he understood how dangerous it would have been to let Maud see it, for although she wasn’t cruel, she looked at him with empty eyes as soon as he tried to speak of himself, as if she had been struck with an insurmountable stupidity. He felt he could no longer stand the presence of Durieux and stood up.

He left. His mother followed him automatically, while her heart, like his, was overcome with anguish and vague worry. Everyone from The Pardal left behind them, as an apparent protest. But basically, people just felt tired, as happens naturally after a late evening out.

CHAPTER 7

DURING THE TWO WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED THE DINNER, George Durieux dropped in to Uderan almost every day. These days, which appeared to be so similar, were marked by unpleasant periods of waiting for Maud. In the afternoon, Mrs. Taneran went to Uderan in order to organize things she had left behind the last time and wanted to take back to Paris. Although she was always up and about in the city, she claimed that her nerves had collapsed, and most of the time, worn out in advance at the idea of furnishing the least bit of effort, she would stretch out in the easy chair on the lawn that separated the yard from the vegetable garden. There, in the warm, checkered shade of an arbor, she would sometimes sleep.

Maud, during the afternoon, would be on the lookout for George Durieux. After a few days she realized something that didn’t surprise her at all: Jacques, who was bored, was also waiting for the young man.

As different as the Grants and Tanerans were from each other, and as different as their passions were, an identical tendency in each of their natures caused them to resemble each other: the friend of one, unless he was repelled by the role (and in that case they quickly lost interest in listening or speaking to him), became, shortly after his entrance into the clan, the confidant of the whole family. Each time a new person appeared, having been brought in by one or the other, a kind of communicative passion caused each of them to warm up to him in their own way and to try to monopolize him. But soon the newcomer, perceiving that in reality an irresolvable conflict reigned among the family members, was obliged to choose. If he took one side or the other, he would experience singular moments and the illusion of arbitrating in an exceptionally unjust and fascinating situation, filling him with enthusiasm and causing him to experience, for a time, heroic ecstasy. Then, very rapidly, he realized that nobody put forth any goodwill toward reconciliation. So while he thought he had arranged everything, those involved escaped him, and for reasons he was unable to grasp. It was then up to him to make the effort to adjust once again to the rhythm, ultimately monotonous, of this kind of perpetual movement of discord and heartrending emotion. Most of the time, he got tired of it. Thus, the Grant-Tanerans didn’t have any real friends and found themselves, at the end of the day, still alone.

Durieux ignored the fact that it was in this context that they were waiting for him at Uderan. Though he seemed to be losing interest in Maud, he quite often stopped at the domain anyway.

Sitting on a pine-tree branch that was hewn in the shape of a bench and easy to reach, Maud read absentmindedly. At the end of the yard, Jacques, in shirtsleeves, was working on a flower bed that overlooked the road. (He had decided to stay at Uderan. His friendship with Durieux no doubt counted for a lot in this unexpected decision.) Mrs. Taneran, happy to see her son working at something, if only a child’s task, concluded magnanimously that “basically, he had always had a love for the earth.”

Except for a few little clashes with Mrs. Pecresse since their arrival at Uderan, Maud noticed that things were turning out better for her family than she had expected.

Jacques didn’t seem worried, except during breakfast at the Pecresse home, when the mailman came. On leaving Paris, he had asked the concierge to send back the letters from the Tavares Bank, for fear that the family be discovered and that he be harassed once again. But after a couple of weeks, of course, the letters arrived in a pile—warning letters with bailiff fees. Mrs. Taneran lent her son a considerable sum. After that there was silence, which should have worried Jacques, but he thought he had been forgotten. Pleased with this lull and doing better, he showed a politeness toward everyone that he rarely used in Paris.

He would dig without lifting his head, while Henry was fishing with his chums on the banks of the Dior. From time to time, they would joyfully announce what they had caught. Jacques didn’t stop digging except to reply. And Mrs. Taneran, who was afraid that it looked as if she were dozing off, would call out in a voice laden with sleep, “Don’t stay in the shade! It’s chilly and unhealthy. Do you hear, Maud?”

The passing of the two trains from Bordeaux was the big event of the day. George came by after the first and, in the space of two weeks, had never come by after the second. Between the two, the time that passed was inestimable. They waited for George. In the dry air, the sounds came as far as the grounds, taking on the aura of their successive echoes in the woods and valleys, and in the humid shadow of the pine woods, it felt as if they were witnessing the magic of summer.

Sometimes the local train cruelly thwarted Maud’s expectations and reminded her of the possibility that George might not come. Before the second train passed, John Pecresse would arrive, all out of breath, coming from the Dior right up to the pine tree where Maud was sitting.

Like a good farmer, he judged the Grant-Tanerans to be weak and frivolous, but he did his best to live as they did in order to gain Maud’s confidence. Since the arrival of his neighbors, he didn’t work as hard in the fields and lamentably hung around with Henry and his bunch of friends, who were much younger than John. “Come on,” he said to Maud, “we’re all going to the mill, and then we’ll take a ride in Terry’s car—hurry up!”

“Is it Henry who sent you?” asked Maud distrustfully.

“No,” he replied, “but he won’t mind. If I’m speaking softly, it’s because of Jacques… If he comes, it’s all over. Come on, hurry up, I’m pleading with you…”

Sometimes, in his impatience, John pulled on her ankles, while in the valley Henry rallied his buddies and called the young man with a worried voice.

“I’m not interested! Let go of me or you’ll be sorry,” she warned, sending him away brutally.

Once, she had broken into an irritated laugh, so unexpected that Jacques threatened to come and get involved. John had known Maud since her childhood and still acted with her in childish ways that allowed him to approach her more easily than he otherwise should have. She jostled him in such a rough yet familiar way that he couldn’t get angry, becoming, with each passing day, more eager and more forceful toward her.

George arrived on foot or on horseback, according to his mood. As soon as he turned onto the road, Jacques would call to him, “Could you come here a moment? I’m almost done. Could we go down together?”

Before going down to Semoic with his friend, George climbed the stairs, pushed open the small gate, and walked under the pine tree. There he lifted his head, his hands in his pockets, but without ever stopping. Then he walked back up the grounds, toward the esplanade, whistling or coughing discreetly before reaching Mrs. Taneran, so that she would wake up without being embarrassed that he had found her napping.

Maud, who had been waiting for hours, forced herself to remain calm with such an effort of the will that it destroyed the pleasure she should have felt. She jumped from her bench and walked slowly toward the esplanade. A sort of inner obligation pushed her every day to make this useless move toward George.

“Can you imagine that, Mr. Durieux? My daughter always stays there under the pine tree, in the shade. As if there weren’t a thousand things to do in the country!”

Jacques shrugged his shoulders and, without meaning to, diverted the suspicions that could have been directed toward George in regard to Maud. “It’s a style she wants to give herself. She’s sentimental; she wants to be noticed.”

Maud’s eyelids fluttered very slightly, changing the immobility of her face. She sat down on the bench that ran along the kitchen wall, somewhat away from the group. George Durieux, held back by Mrs. Taneran, took a seat on the chair she now had the habit of bringing him.

He intentionally avoided addressing the young woman, and she understood that he would have liked to do so. He hesitated to look at her, as if prevented by an actual impediment, and each time his eyes met Maud’s, he turned away, disturbed. To give himself some composure, he played with the first cherries that had fallen from the tree, still green. He grouped them in twos, then threes, examining them attentively without appearing to see them, then, with his fingernails, carving them up one by one. His black, shiny hair was parted in big tufts, like heavy grass that the wind blows flat and gathers up into bunches that show, long afterward, traces of the storm. Despite the short-sleeved shirt he wore, his long body could be made out in its entirety by the color of his arms, by their lean, oblong form, and by that of his nervous ankles, where the tendons moved visibly under the skin.

One could sense that he was young and agile in his movements, but always ready to indulge in laziness or pleasure. His relaxed attitude and limber body captivated people, drawing them to him. In his face, which reflected a childlike gentleness, his eyes remained alert, curious about everything Mrs. Taneran was telling him. Though intelligent, he had to take the trouble to speak in order for people to judge for themselves; he never forced himself to please others, which is why he managed to do it naturally, and why people around him made an effort to seek out his friendship. He liked to swim in the Dior, to hunt, and to have a roaring good time all night long at Semoic.

“I wounded a rabbit just above your woods this morning,” he said. “It’s the Deddes’ dog that probably got it. In fact, I saw their daughter, who told me something I didn’t know.” He had turned toward Jacques, who, impatient to leave with him, kept getting up from his bench. “You’re planning to move in to Uderan.”

“One of my mother’s ideas, my friend. I just go along with it.” He laughed, but deep down, he was bothered by the way people were astonished when it came to him. His biting tone of voice made it clear that if people were expecting him to settle down, they would be more than disappointed. But George’s tone, simple and natural, calmed his suspicions. Jacques began again, with studied politeness. “The tenant farmhouse is charming, with its steps between every room. It’s more cheerful than here, so that’s where I’ll stay. We’ll be closer to each other.”

“Yes, it’s much nicer,” agreed Mrs. Taneran, “especially because the Deddes will take care of him when we’re away. Have you heard anything about the tenant house, Mr. Durieux?”

“People say it’s very old and has lasted more years than all the homes of The Pardal put together. It was joined to Uderan a long time after its construction. My father could give you all the information you need on it. In fact…”

Jacques got up. “Are you going down to Semoic, Durieux?” Not as tall as George, Jacques was good-looking in a more harmonious way, thanks to his well-proportioned body, even though he was still lacking his beautiful brown sheen of summers gone by.

At Semoic, thought Maud, a following was probably building up around them, fatally. Now, every evening they went down there together, and even though Jacques had proposed this outing to George in an indifferent tone, one felt that nothing would have kept him from it…

A similarity existed between George and her brother, and Maud discerned it from the nuances, the unspoken complicity between them. “You’re going to Semoic?”

George got up from his chair, all the while continuing to talk to Jacques. “I hope that if you make up your mind to spend some money and fix up your tenant farm, it won’t be because of the superstitions flying around. As far as I’m concerned, I’m delighted. I’m here until October every year, and sometimes at Christmas I come back to hunt.”

At last Mrs. Taneran got up and smoothed out her dress with the back of her hand. Maud felt no joy in seeing George, because he remained so indifferent. In her silent confrontation, she employed all the willpower of a woman who has decided to triumph at all costs over a refusal for which she has no explanation. She applied herself to the task without pride. Keeping George from leaving for a few moments, prolonging her torture, attached him to her even more, without his knowing it.

Thus, she made a last attempt to keep the conversation going. “You don’t believe the superstitions spread around by the farmers?” Everyone turned around. Mrs. Taneran smiled.

George took on a mocking tone in addressing her. “Of course not. Why? Do you believe them? People around here claim, anyway, that you have no fear.”

Jacques grabbed George by the arm. “It’s because she always sleeps here alone, so she’ll get noticed. She gets even more credit because these frightening tales are flying around. Do you understand?”

George looked at the ground like someone who is remembering something, and broke into laughter. “That reminds me of a ridiculous story I’ll tell you someday.”

Maud tried one last time to grab the interest of the young men. “But who says, who says that I’m not afraid?”

“Don’t mind her, Mr. Durieux. She’s both nervous and shy…” The two women accompanied the visitor down to the gate.

The second train whistled. A car flew by the property on the way to Semoic. While they were expressing their astonishment and wondering who the crazy driver was, Maud identified him as Henry’s friend Terry. Jacques, who refrained from uttering an insult out of respect for George, whom he didn’t know well enough yet, pointed out that the car could have stopped to pick them up, knowing they were going down to Semoic.

They left. While Mrs. Taneran closed up the house, Maud stretched out on the grass surrounding a bush of wild roses, suddenly worn out by such a long wait.

The afternoon was coming to an end. No more sounds came from the valley except, occasionally, the loud calls of the Deddes’ daughter, who took the cows down to drink in the ponds of the Dior meadow when those on the plateau were dried up.

The birds were putting down for the night; they filled the grounds with their cries, mellow with tiredness. Mrs. Taner-an reappeared. “Did you say, Maud, that your brother Henry left with Terry? I’m afraid of an accident. Do you know why they all go to Semoic?”

Maud didn’t know. Mrs. Taneran once again slowed down the moment of departure, walking along the short, broad paths that wound around the grounds. In the evening at Uderan, the slightest sound impressed her, whether a footstep on the road or the echo of an oar on the Dior. “What’s that? Listen, Maud…” As they listened, everything seemed inhabited with strange sounds, especially the empty house.

Soon the roses became purple, and a color like that of blood began to rise around the clumps of trees. “It’s strange, as soon as evening comes, I wouldn’t stay here for anything in the world,” said the mother. “It’s true you have courage, Maud!”

Oh, what did these words matter, because George was no longer there…? Maud felt that if George got along so well with her brother, it was because they resembled each other in a certain aspect of their nature. The same fundamental laziness and their penchant for pleasure drew them together.

Finally Mrs. Taneran joined up with Maud on the side of the hill, near the flowers. “What’s the matter? Are you sick? Let’s get going. I’m not saying that I enjoy going back to the Pecresses’; we should never have moved in there. But now it’s too late to leave there and too soon to come back. Your brothers are making the most of being in the countryside.”

She wanted to share her sacrifice with her daughter, in order to show her affection. Since the life of the family no longer weighed her down as much, she suffered from being neglected by her children…

One evening when they were together, loud knocks at the entrance gate on the side of the vegetable garden startled them. Soon the knocking was so forceful they felt afraid. Without answering, they descended the side of the hill toward the metal gate. But when they opened it, the voice of Mrs. Pecresse, sugary and familiar, calmed them down. “I thought you were at the tenant farm. I came looking for you to talk a bit on the way home.” In a few seconds Mrs. Taneran got over her fear, and turning toward her daughter with her usual authority, she ordered, “Go home by the main road, and above all don’t worry.”

Boredom reigned at Uderan—dense and oppressive. In order not to slow down their arrival at the Barque Inn in Semoic, Jacques Grant preferred to meet George Durieux midway between the village and the property. For this reason the latter came to Uderan less and less frequently. The last time had been two weeks earlier, and it was on this occasion that he seemed to be interested in Maud.

“Every summer I organize a fishing party for crayfish. I’d like to have the three of you with me. I’ll let you know when,” he had said. His cordial tone indicated that he owed a certain politeness to the Tanerans and that he was simply fulfilling his duty. Since that time, he had not come back to the estate; he took the loop of The Pardal to connect with the road to Semoic and also avoided taking the shortcut across the property. Clearly, he was withdrawing from their company, and it seemed unimaginable they would see him again someday.

Mrs. Taneran, who greatly missed him, was worried. “How is it that we don’t see Durieux anymore? Is he still going to Barque’s?” Then, noticing that Jacques now left for Semoic without waiting for his friend, she vehemently reproached him. “Your sister and I are dying of boredom here. You’ve taken away the least bit of company from us, as usual. If I see Durieux I’ll tell him what I think.”

Mrs. Taneran did nothing at Uderan. Her lack of activity had become all the more unsupportable because not only Mrs. Pecresse, but all the Pardalians, kept her at a disdainful distance, as much because of her own attitude toward her neighbors as because of that of her son. But Jacques had laughed at his mother’s reproaches. “You think he enjoyed coming here! He just came to be polite, poor Durieux. You’re wrong about people; you don’t know what kind of man he is, that Durieux…”

At the end of her patience, Maud finally stopped spending her afternoons in the yard, and, to give herself some purpose, she went looking for the Deddes’ daughter, who kept the cows near the Riotor. But the tenant farmer’s daughter, whom she questioned somewhat obliquely, revealed very little about George. The Deddes’ daughter also frequented Barque’s. “You should come, Miss Grant. What’s nice there is that nobody pays any attention to you. I’m taking advantage of it before winter.” But Maud was no more inclined to go there than she was to come out of her habitual solitude.

They began to rearrange the three rooms of the tenant farmer’s home where Jacques was going to live, and Maud helped a little, although she didn’t like finding herself with her mother, whose recent, inexplicable tenderness embarrassed her (she didn’t know what Mrs. Pecresse could have told her, the evening she knocked at the gate, but Maud had avoided coming back to their neighbor’s until later that evening, at mealtime, in order not to be alone with her mother). And soon, judging that it was even more worthless to take care of her brother’s affairs than to wander around, she did nothing.

Toward the middle of June it rained for a week. The Deddes’ daughter no longer took the cows out. Jacques’s furniture arrived from Bordeaux, but it was impossible to go and get it at the Semoic train station because the weather was so bad. The persistent rain clogged up the roads and fell listlessly in sudden bursts. On the hillside streaming with water, the grass was crushed, beaten down and licked by numerous rivulets. Maud gave up walking in that area.

They didn’t know where Henry was, whereas Jacques, finding it more convenient to live in his new quarters, slept there until it was time to leave for Semoic.

The farmers were upset with the rain. “It’s bad for the plums,” they moaned. “It takes away their taste…”

At Barque’s, however, everything continued at a lively pace, according to the Deddes’ daughter. The bad weather benefited the owner and attracted more and more people to his place. Maud, wearing a cape borrowed from the tenant farmer’s daughter, roamed the roads and lanes, trying to meet up with George. This incessant searching took up entire days, right up until evening, and soon became a personal obligation, although she never fully understood that she was no longer expecting much from her search.

She didn’t hold it against her brother in the least for monopolizing the man she loved. Fate had decided it. What could she do, in fact, against a form of seduction that always astonished her? In her brother’s circles, passions were always being ignited and then quenched, and someone was always absorbed by them. She could guess the reasons why her brother monopolized George, because they were the same ones that drew her to him: first of all, his shameless desire, like Jacques, to live the way he wanted to, half farmer, half delinquent. He gave you the feeling of scoring a victory if you succeeded in pleasing him. Neither Jacques nor George had an occupation, but Maud thought it would have been deplorable to see George tied up by some kind of job. If he loved her, one day he would devote all his moments, all his leisure time, to her…

One afternoon, she got a glimpse of him. He passed by next to her, dressed like a farmer, in a velvet vest, looking down, with his hands in his pockets and his features drawn and weary, unaware of the fact that Maud was observing him from behind the hawthorn bushes. Wasn’t he as far removed from thinking about her as she imagined him to be concerned with her? Under the endless rain, it must have been his own life, rather, that filled him with anxiety, and, as different as he was from Jacques, he resembled him, by virtue of the same battered look on his face brought on by the same kind of disgust.

Instead of bringing her joy, this apparition filled Maud with concern, and she didn’t take a single step to meet him. But as soon as he disappeared down the road, she regretted her cowardice. She ran as fast as she could across the fields, where her shoes got bogged down like noisy suction cups, and along the Riotor, which swept muddy water along, right up to the edge of its banks. The pressing desire to end the sinister drama of her love kept her on tenterhooks.

At the tenant farmer’s home, she found her mother sitting alone in an empty room, moaning. “I’m losing my mind, Maud. Can you believe that the furniture hasn’t arrived and Jacques isn’t looking after it any more than we are?” She noticed the expression on the face of her daughter, who was weeping nervously, like someone who is trying to keep from sobbing. Mrs. Taneran wasn’t overly surprised.

“It’s this weather, and I don’t know what it is we feel here; I’m worried, too, as if something were about to happen…” And then, reflecting a bit, she commented, “If you’re too bored, I can tell Henry to take you along with him…”

Around the tenant farm, the rain was falling straight down like hail. On the dark green pond, whose surface was riddled with raindrops, the two grindstones, already on their last legs, projected their shadows. The rain still pointed to summer’s nonchalance, expressing its opulence in the swollen foliage, the intense, impenetrable heat, and the fallen fruit that covered the paths with its freshly rotting flesh. Under the porch awning, the light perfume of honeysuckle filled the air with its fragrance, mixed with the odor of the wet sandstone and the subtle, slightly salted savor of the shower. In the distance, the roof of Uderan displayed its numerous chimneys, majestically framed by the tops of the pinewood.

But little by little the storm lost its strength. Soon the rain fell only in light bursts. The sky cleared; the exertion of the clouds in the sky took on a calmer appearance. Here and there, in the middle, the sky opened up to an intense and brilliant blue that one might have called wet.

At the end of the afternoon, a white vapor coming from the oak woods and the Pellegrain plateau descended gently along the Riotor. It raced toward the Dior valley, where it would soon blend with a thick fog. The Dedde girl exited the barn with a basket on her arm and headed to the west field, toward The Pardal, to pick some vegetables. “When the mist descends like that, it’s because the bad weather is over. Look how beautiful it is. On the other side you can hardly see,” she said to Maud.

The tall poplars of the Riotor, frosted by the mist, stood still as she passed by. The estate found itself isolated from the surrounding region, which seemed to melt into the fog.

Mrs. Taneran came out of the house, headed toward the pond, and stood in front of the hollow road that remained the only way out toward the main route. She was nervous and murmured with a sigh, “Who knows where your brothers are? In an hour we won’t be able to see anything with this fog, and Henry’s out roaming the roads in Terry’s car. I prefer not to know.”

Maud had the desire, after this break, to stretch her legs. “I’m going to the main road to see if he’s fishing on the banks of the Dior.”

She put her hooded cape back on and took to the road with a quick step. It was true, she had forgotten the cause of her apprehension a bit earlier. In the weather’s emerging calm, the memory of George softened and lost some of its importance.

Perhaps the man’s indifference had seemed so insurmountable that she had given up hope. Why, following the dinner at Uderan, had she persuaded herself so easily that he would seek her out? Even if, for a few moments, he had looked at her, she had to be crazy to jump to the conclusion that he loved her. And then, perhaps she had also behaved awkwardly during his visits…

When she got to the road, she was surprised by the silence that had followed the outburst of the storm in the Dior valley. One would think oneself to be in the bottom of a damp well. “Henry!” Her voice reverberated in a brief echo that was unrecognizable. With no desire to return to the tenant farm, she sat down on a border stone at the corner of the property. “He’s at Barque’s, too,” she thought.

Beside her, with enormous jolts, the trees shed the water weighing down their branches, though Maud could perceive no particular cause for their sudden upheavals. Soon a kind of gentle babbling emerged from the silence. Rivulets slid down the hill to the road, crossing at Maud’s feet with twists and turns.

Maud realized that she was no longer thinking about George. Frightened by what she thought to be her fickleness, she determined to go to Barque’s that very evening and was comforted by her decision.

After a moment, she called out for her brother again. A silence, as hard to break through as a wall would have been, responded to her call, while on the grounds the same fairylike sounds of water continued to play. Listening to them, Maud thought she heard sweet, melodious voices. “I’ll go all the way to the Dior,” she told herself, “but it will soon be night.” She firmly resisted fear.

In the elm enclosure, at the corner of the field along the border of their property, Maud had once played. The memory suddenly came back to her: at ten years old she had played with Henry and Louise Rivière every Thursday. Taneran would come to lovingly watch his little boy. He wore an old khaki jacket and his hunting gaiters and already looked old, even then. When Jacques arrived, he would chase away his stepfather like a scarecrow and then would organize the games, stretched out on the grass, cheerful and charming as a prince who does as he wishes. The children, flattered by Jacques’s involvement, meekly accepted his reprimands. The mood was peaceful; no one had any pity on Taneran; Jacques was king.

The mist, bitter and cold, enveloped everything now. Maud was quite sure that her younger brother was not fishing on the banks of the Dior; she felt the need, nevertheless, to go down to the edge of the stream. By hanging on to the acacia trunks in order to avoid sliding, she reached the railroad tracks. At the bottom of the hill on which the property was situated, a spring ran swiftly, surging up by leaps and bounds. As Maud crossed the field, the second train, whose whistle she could hear from Semoic onward, went by very quickly in the fog.

Then, in the jumble of reeds that bordered the banks, between the two mills of Semoic and Ostel, Maud perceived, as vague as a shadow, but nevertheless frighteningly precise, a woman’s dead body floating by in the water. She cried out and instinctively ran back up the slope as quickly as she could.

Halfway up she stopped, suddenly clearheaded again, as if she felt abruptly outside of fear’s bounds. Who was this woman…? She hadn’t recognized her face, having only seen her through the semidarkness. Clearly the stranger had died in the waters coming from the direction of the Semoic mill, alongside the fields that extended to the valley of the Uderan domain. This idea was suddenly unbearable, and she could not make up her mind to leave.

An instant later she realized that her cry had not been heard. A moment of reflection cautioned her not to notify anyone. What if she went to make sure the woman’s floating body hadn’t been stopped by the reeds in front of their property? And if it had been, what could Maud do? More than anything Maud had to see.

What was most difficult was to go back down the field she now crossed as calmly as if someone were watching her. Arriving at the embankment, she knelt on the ground in order to see as far as possible down the river.

Sometimes haltingly, sometimes moving with docility, the dead woman was being carried by the current. Maud followed her with her eyes until the floating body went beyond their fields and slowly penetrated into the alder woods that separated the Pecresse lands from their own. Just before the river’s bend, by the day’s last glimmer, Maud made out two black braids dragging along beside the corpse…

When she arrived at the road level, Maud saw a shape that made her step back: her mother! She felt acutely how much Mrs. Taneran, more sensitive and impressionable than her children, needed to be spared.

“I’ve been waiting and calling for quite a while. Where are you coming from?” The trembling voice of the older woman revealed her weakness.

“From the Dior, seeing if Henry wasn’t there. He must be at Barque’s.”

“Mrs. Dedde invited both of us,” added Mrs. Taneran. “I have to admit that it makes a nice change from the Pecresses.”

Partially reassured, Maud’s mother started off again on the conversation she had had with their neighbor the other night. “Believe it or not, that crazy Pecresse woman came to ask your hand in marriage for her son. The people around here don’t suspect a thing! On top of that, she’d get a double deal. John is having an affair around here, the Deddes’ daughter probably told you.”

Maud was barely listening, not taking it in. The words whizzed by her ears, striking her head, which was already dizzy. She kept herself from showing the terrible revulsion she felt, not knowing its source.

“What’s the matter, Maud? It’s better than it was a while ago, my dear…” Her mother took her arm, but Maud shook it off in anger and walked more quickly. Mrs. Taneran followed her with sadness and repeated, without understanding the full scope of her words, “What holidays, my dear! We’re two unhappy women, it seems, and sometimes I tell myself that if you weren’t there it would be worse…”

When she was seated at the table in the bright light, Maud appeared overcome with fatigue, as if she had accomplished a task beyond her strength. In her weariness, everything became simpler. Her anxiety did not prevent her from chatting and eating heartily, though. Reassured, Mrs. Taneran entertained the tenant farmers.

At the end of the meal, someone knocked at the door. It was Alexis, Pellegrain’s servant. He was returning from Semoic rather drunk and carrying a hurricane lamp. “It looks like Pecresse’s lovebird has done herself in. You know who I mean, the one who was a waitress at Barque’s?”

Maud didn’t flinch. When Alexis had gone, Mrs. Dedde turned toward her. “Everyone knows that you’ve discouraged the young man’s interest. Don’t worry about it, Miss Grant. Anyway, he was waiting for an excuse to leave her. She was a poor young thing. Knowing Mrs. Pecresse, she’ll be breathing more easily now!”

That evening, instead of returning to Uderan, Maud went to Barque’s, as she had planned.

CHAPTER 8

THE BARQUE INN, NAMED FOR ITS NEW OWNER, WAS LOCATED in an old mill, just at the entrance to Semoic. The tall, dilapidated building had hardly changed since the mill had closed down. It was brightened up only by a small outside café overlooking the Dior, before the dam, at the widest part of the river. People came from The Pardal, Mirasmes, and Ostel to enjoy themselves in the evening; it was a way of getting fresh air and taking a walk along the Dior.

The main room was situated above the water, accessed by means of a little wooden bridge. Barque had decorated it in a country style: tables covered with heavy cotton cloths surrounded the tiled central area, where people occasionally danced. Across from the door that opened onto the balcony, a small modern counter in aluminum, with stools, made the place resemble the outdoor dancing cafés in Paris. Behind the counter stood Barque, still young, dressed in an impeccable short-sleeved shirt. He spent the three summer months in Semoic for his health and then returned to Paris, where he had a bar.

From the road, Maud heard the cries of the rescue workers scouring the thickets and those of the rowers calling out to one another as they got closer in the fog. The scandal that kept everyone on the alert that evening seemed to her to be a good excuse for finding George again.

Behind closed doors, people were dancing at Barque’s. A thick smoke in the room created a kind of anonymity. Among the dancers, she recognized her two brothers, and at a table opposite the entrance was George Durieux.

Leaning up against the wall, he looked at her as he smoked. His nervous gestures and the expression on his face indicated that he had trouble containing a joyous impatience. He gave the impression that he, too, had waited for her, without actually trying to see her again, for reasons still unknown to Maud. She had never understood it so clearly before this night.

As everyone was watching out for newcomers, the young woman’s entrance was noticed, and Jacques cast an inquiring glance her way, which in times past would have made her shudder.

As soon as she saw Jacques, she noticed her brother’s agitation. Neither women nor dancing could give him this look of living intensely in the moment. He resembled a wild animal that stalks the forest, incessantly on the lookout for danger. Whatever he was doing, the entrance door fascinated him; he continuously looked over at Barque with the naïve confidence of a fearful child.

The gramophone played without breaks, and the dancers hardly took time to rest in between dances. However, at the first break, Jacques and Henry came toward their sister, intrigued. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, I was getting bored, that’s all.”

Her brothers were not happy with this answer. Henry shrugged his shoulders and Jacques called to the bartender, in an embarrassed voice, “Are you going to take care of my sister, Barque?” For a moment people scrutinized her with curiosity and distrust. Barque brought her a glass of alcohol and without a word took up his place behind the counter again.

The atmosphere between the dances was strangely silent and not at all reassuring, as if the music covered up a general malaise. People danced, rested, and drank, carried along by a sort of rhythm as regular as that of gymnastics. Maud noticed that her older brother and George never spoke to each other.

Although younger than Jacques, George appeared to be his age. Jacques Grant had that look of apparent youth that one sees in losers, pleasure seekers, and those who have never had any real responsibility to cause them to age, or any habit to gentrify them. His passion for women incited him to pursue one affair after another and prevented him from getting stuck in any particular relationship.

Their age difference was felt even less because Durieux had experienced much in his life. He was neither proud nor cynical of the soft life he lived, whereas Jacques showed off his idleness in front of just about anyone. He claimed that he preferred not to devote himself to any of the many possibilities he saw for himself, for fear of upsetting others or putting them down. He liked feeling at each instant of his life that childlike illusion of still being able to undertake anything.

“I should write, but you see, when you write, you are half-done. You are diminished, worn-out, it’s disgusting… and really, what for?” Perhaps it was not only laziness that put these words in Jacques Grant’s mouth. The inanity of human existence had become an article of faith for him.

No doubt nothing significant had ever crossed George Durieux’s path. He obviously suffered from that and had made a habit of entrenching himself, silently, behind his disappointment. He appeared to take so little interest in life and people that they thought him to be rich with dreams and gifted with a kind of inner contentment.

This evening, all of that revealed itself suddenly to Maud, even though she had thought for a long time that Durieux and Jacques were fundamentally similar.

Young women sat on the barstools. Henry probably knew them. He spoke to them with a great deal of familiarity, calling them by their first name and grabbing them by the waist. These were not the farm girls, but young women from Bordeaux who spent their holidays in the area. Even if Henry led a degenerate life, he inspired confidence and was likable. No constraints had built up his distrust or slowed down his winged race toward pleasure. One felt, even though he was young, that he already possessed a real experience of love; he loved chastely and with the tenderness of a child.

Jacques managed the whole scene, paying for the dances, requesting the musical numbers. At a certain point he came up to Henry and said something to him with an exasperated look, while pointing at Maud. But his younger brother shrugged his shoulders and kept on dancing.

Jacques then went up to the second floor by means of a small staircase that Maud had taken for a door hidden by the counter. It was Barque’s apartment. People got together there in more intimate circles, either because they didn’t want to dance or because the music prevented them from talking. Before going up, although he seemed to have shown no interest in Maud until then, he spoke to her sharply: “You’d better get going now, you hear? I paid for your drink…”

But she had no desire to leave or to obey him. The glass of alcohol that Barque had served her gave her a refreshing boldness. Her brother went away without insisting. People began to dance again in the smoke-filled semidarkness.

When George got up in turn, Maud thought he was getting ready to leave. Deciding to follow him and ignoring the awkwardness it could create, she made a move to get up. Perhaps he understood, but he didn’t look as if he had noticed.

She told him she had come to see him. From time to time she had moments of incredible audacity. “Why, from one day to the next, did you stop coming? People just don’t do that…”

He appeared to take her remark as one of those overblown social niceties people think it is proper to use. No, he didn’t want to sit down. “I’ll walk you home in a bit if you would like me to.”

She saw by the look in his eyes that he was so troubled by a violent desire for her presence that he lost his normal composure and firmness. All of a sudden, a long habit of restraint exploded on his face: until now he had dominated it and had held himself, lightly and airily, at the summit of the powerful wave of his suppressed ardor. Maud understood that he was now letting himself be submerged by the very same defense he had imposed upon himself, was suddenly losing his sense of unreality, and was abandoning himself all at once to the deep and bitter wave of his desire. This appeared and vanished like a shock wave when they looked at each other, in the space of a second. George went back to his place. The instant left Maud with warm, bright glimmers inside. She had the feeling of being happy and believed that happiness was the prerogative of those magic moments when difficulties all disappear, even in the midst of the disorder created by a catastrophe.

In reality, he had thought less about Maud in the last while because a man, in order to remember, needs the beginning of a sense of possession, a commitment. While he had noticed her at the dinner at Uderan, this was also apparent to Jacques, who couldn’t stand losing a friend. To distance her from George he had invented a story: “You didn’t know that my sister was engaged to John Pecresse? They’re getting married in the fall.” (Jacques secretly wished it was true. Pecresse would have provided some revenue for the use of Uderan, which would have served Jacques well.)

It took a certain amount of time before Durieux stopped coming back to the domain. He eventually avoided taking the way through Uderan. The farmers confirmed what Jacques Grant had said. This marriage seemed odious to him; however, he stayed away because Maud didn’t belong to him, by either a word or even a kiss.

Now that she was here, this evening, he felt liberated from the interdiction he had imposed on himself. And all of a sudden, he felt diabolically happy that this misunderstanding had occurred, because it gave an unexpected depth to his romantic venture.

Just when nobody expected it, John Pecresse entered the room. Barque quickly rushed over and stopped the gramophone. People came running, the women in front, with thoughtless cries.

“So, nothing?”

“My poor fellow, sit down…”

John Pecresse stared at them with a haggard look. “Nothing,” he said.

On seeing Maud, he no doubt had the wrong idea as to her presence there and thought she was there for him… Leaving aside good manners, as is permitted in certain circumstances, he sat down across from her. He had the distorted face of someone who has just been shaken by fear (the most astonishing of fears, that of having caused a death).

Treacherously, the music covered up his entry, and people were dancing again. It must have been around midnight. George Durieux didn’t budge, but only ordered a drink from time to time.

John Pecresse told Maud how happy he was to see her. It displeased the young woman that John had come to her table, benefiting distastefully from the situation—and all the more so because he was drinking a lot, with the alcohol acting quickly on his overextended nerves.

“You didn’t know that she was a servant here? You wouldn’t think so, would you, seeing people dance like that with no respect? I hadn’t come here for a while; I have no idea what happened.”

Maud thought about her brother’s embarrassed look when she entered, the complicity of the whole room, and George’s more or less obvious complicity…, but no, she believed that John Pecresse, frightened by the death of his mistress, sought to unload a heavy responsibility on someone else. “If I ask Jacques for explanations,” continued the young man, “he’ll jump on me. But we’ll know the truth; I’ll tell it to the whole region.”

Pecresse drank coarsely, glass after glass, like a fellow from the countryside, licking his lips after each swig, calling to Barque continuously in an angry and vulgar voice. But no one provoked him, and people avoided speaking to him. Maud alone stayed near him, caught between the desire to keep him from speaking badly of her family and not wanting to miss George again.

“Why do you say that it’s my brother who pushed her to the edge? It’s cowardly not to recognize that you had dropped her a long time ago. If my brother got her a job here, it’s to his credit.”

“Did you hear that, Barque? It’s to Monsieur Jacques’s credit if he got rid of the girl for me! What family solidarity! To think that you probably didn’t even pay her, you old bastard, Barque! Go on, give me a couple more, you owe it to me!” Barque complied right away, swiftly, determined to resist all the provocations.

Leaning toward Maud, John added, “What if we drank to our engagement? Don’t you know that it’s for the love of you that I dropped her?” He repeatedly got up and sat down clumsily. She noticed with relief that a number of clients were leaving. Barque behind his counter and George at the back of the room seemed not to notice anything. The music had stopped.

“You realize that if you refuse, it will go badly for you. Your mother has even borrowed the money for your brother’s furniture from my mother. That’s pride, all right! We know what you’re worth around here…” Maud didn’t know this detail, but it didn’t surprise her.

John Pecresse collapsed, his head in his arms and breathing heavily. Maud barely had time to reflect on the young man’s revelations. The sound of a voice could be heard on the second floor, and the door at the top of the stairway opened with a noise that, in comparison to the silence now reigning in the room, exploded like a thunderbolt. Barque rushed to warn Jacques. Pecresse woke up, crying out insults in a thick, menacing voice.

At that moment, George stood up facing the stairway and Maud placed herself in front of him, facing the stairs. Fearfully, the last guests grouped themselves behind the two of them. Maud saw her brother on the landing and understood that there were people begging him not to go down.

Maud realized that George stood behind her, ready to touch her, but she suddenly felt such a desire to see her brother come down that she was not moved. Was Jacques able to take off in front of Pecresse? She alone, over whom he had reigned for so many years as elder brother, as lord of the family, felt that she was able to reach him in his vanity. “I think it’s time to go home, Jacques.”

He replied in a loud, expressionless voice, “My sister is right, it’s time to go home, my old Barque…”

Jacques came down and appeared so pale in the light that he was unrecognizable. Slowly, he went up to Pecresse, gaining back his courage when he saw the young man was drunk. In a noble gesture, he put his hand on John’s shoulder. “What’s happened to you is terrible, John, and I truly understand your misfortune. See what it is to encourage a woman? Your anger doesn’t make any sense, Pecresse. You know I did everything to help her out. Remember what you told me a couple of weeks ago. I’m a good man, you know it yourself. We’ve known each other for fifteen years…”

The iron fist that clasped his shoulder prevented Pecresse from getting up. With a wavering hand he seemed to dodge Jacques Grant’s words, but he didn’t say anything back. Jacques took advantage of the situation with admirable composure and skill. “Come on, let’s drink a glass together to forget this nasty affair! Maud, come and drink with us! Don’t worry, Pecresse, I know your thoughts about my sister, and I can help you out more than you think.” Nobody came to sit at their table. The clients surrounded and encouraged Pecresse, who continued to drink.

As Maud was about to leave, a clamor was heard outside and some men came in. One of them went toward the miller and took off his cap. The man was perspiring heavily, his puttees wet and his uniform damp. It was one of the search-and-rescue workers. He glanced at the onlookers with a certain disdain and spoke to Barque. “We found her past the woods, in front of the Pecresses’ field, caught in the reeds at the bend in the Dior where there’s no current.”

In a flash, Pecresse and Jacques Grant were on their feet. Pecresse looked at the rescue workers, one after the other. He hopped oddly from one foot to the other, and finally broke down in tears, repeating with a dull voice and such shamelessness that no one pitied him, “At the same place where we met for four years, following my military service…”

Soon other search-and-rescue farmers entered. They didn’t deign to answer the patrons’ questions. The only one they knew was Pecresse. To him they explained, “We left her on the riverbank. Tomorrow the mayor will come and make the official report. There’s no reason, because she was alone…”

Maud thought she had been seen in the field by the Dior, but it soon became obvious: no one was looking at her and the farmers’ words were not at all ambiguous. She regained her calm, a calm that prevented her from feeling the least bit of emotion. She finally dared to look at her brother; he was leaving his friends. A look of satisfaction, discreet but obvious, showed on his face.

The Barque Inn closed up. Maud found herself alone on the road while the night was still pitch-black, having left before everyone else.

The more she tried to put together the drama of the night, the more she was afraid of her brother’s attitude, which appeared cowardly and intense at the same time. How strangely conciliatory he had shown himself to be! The face he was wearing as he came down the stairs kept passing before her eyes, both mocking and terrified, although she could not grasp the meaning of it.

Hadn’t she just helped Jacques out without knowing it, by not revealing that the young woman had certainly not committed suicide in front of the Pecresse place? She didn’t regret having encouraged her brother in that way to confront John, but she understood at the same time that she would have no rest before having some kind of certainty about the reasons for the young woman’s demise. Maud sank into senseless hypotheses, and sometimes her doubts carried her quite far; evil took on a form so far removed from anything she had known until now that she could hardly stand its view.

It was at the crossroads of the highway to Bordeaux and the road to Semoic that George caught up with her. She was neither happy nor surprised. George confronted her abruptly. “What John Pecresse said was true; your brother made life impossible for that poor girl. He began to hate her after shamelessly possessing her; I know too much now to keep quiet. There are things that are appalling even if they don’t affect one directly. I did everything I could to keep him from acting the way he did, out of respect for you and your mother, but Jacques is a nasty fellow…”

Maud was not ignorant of the kind of torture Jacques could inflict on a woman who had begun to displease him. However, she wondered why George had wanted to be there that evening, knowing the circumstances. Instinctively, she tried again to defend her brother.

“Why do you attack Jacques? I thought you were his friend. Furthermore, if he were as guilty as you say he is, he would not have gone up to Pecresse so confidently, earlier on.”

George’s voice quickly lost its habitual indifference. It took on a tone that Maud did not recognize, expressing his anger laden with hurt. “Jacques wasn’t proud; you know it yourself, Maud. The young woman was also involved with Barque, whose child she was expecting. She was never paid, and your brother figured out a way to push her over the edge… I don’t deny that John Pecresse had a lousy role in it, far from that. But I’ve known John for a long time. He would never have made her suffer like that—he doesn’t have Jacques’s ingenuity and temperament…”

Maud wanted George to stop talking about her brother.

“Moreover, you better be careful yourself, Maud,” he continued. “God knows what Jacques will come up with to gain Pecresse’s confidence back! I don’t know you well, but when I saw you encouraging your brother this evening, I saw how important he is to you, and how your family is united around him.”

George wanted to go back to Uderan with Maud. He was now speaking without her encouraging him, either by word or by action.

Once they were in the dining room at Uderan, there was a long stretch of silence before she knew what to say to him. She had the impression he was there on account of weakness, so he wouldn’t have to go home alone after this night. She had waited for this moment for so long but didn’t feel any happiness in being with him, as if from now on it was too late to continue loving each other. She thought once again that she didn’t feel anything for George and that everything was destroyed: her illusions, her will to be happy, her strength, without her knowing why.

George was smoking, leaning up against the chimney and speaking to Maud from time to time, continuing to clarify his thoughts. They both put on formal airs; despite themselves, they took on the embarrassed, somber look of people who find themselves caught in misfortune.

Maud believed that the time to admit what she knew would not come again. She had to tell George now. Such an unexpected confidence would create a shock and break the bad spell that had been over them this night, and would perhaps bring him back.

She murmured, “Last night, after the storm, I discovered her in front of our field, below the railroad tracks. I’m sure she drowned there. I suppose it would have been possible to think she had ended up there, but it would have been unlikely after coming from the mill.”

George did not reply right away. “It doesn’t surprise me that you kept silent. You won’t always be able to keep him out of trouble, fortunately…”

She had thought that George would judge her to have self-esteem and was vexed. Now the unbelievable moment of his departure was approaching, and even if she knew she had charm, she felt she no longer had the means to hold on to him…

Suddenly someone knocked several times on the shutter. A moment went by and the muffled, oppressed voice of Jacques Grant could be heard. “Maud, open up!” The voice was pleading, with childlike gentleness.

Maud stepped toward the door. George held her back and covered her mouth with his hand to prevent her from responding. They waited for a moment like that, and, even though it was no longer necessary, George didn’t let go; tears dropped onto his hand and he drew Maud close, holding her tight against him. The young woman understood that he felt the same deliverance that she did: together they came out of a dark and difficult night.

George leaned over and said very quietly, “I’ve loved you for a long time, Maud. Can you believe that Jacques claimed you were engaged to Pecresse? That’s why I fled…”

Jacques walked around the house. They heard him knocking on the shutters of the bedrooms, discreetly, without impatience. Coming back to the dining room, he began to call his sister again. While still speaking in a low voice, he wrote something against the shutter. For a moment, the scratching of a pencil broke the silence; then Jacques slid a note into the crack of the door and walked away.

They rushed to get it, and Maud read aloud from her brother’s small and almost undecipherable writing: “My dear Maud, I advise you to keep to yourself everything you have seen and heard tonight. You are old enough to understand that our mother must know nothing about this.—Jacques.”

George said in a softened tone, “I know he loves your mother deeply, in his own way…” He was struck by the exultant expression on the young woman’s face when she responded.

“We all love Jacques, as extraordinary as that may seem, even Taneran, his first victim. Although Jacques makes people unhappy, he also manages to suffer for it sometimes and regret not being better. He’ll probably walk around all night like a madman; he came to talk to me. When he’s like that, he’s afraid of himself.”

For an instant she had the desire to call out to her brother, but George held her back.

CHAPTER 9

AS THEY HAD IN THE PAST, THE TANERANS SPENT THEIR SUNDAYS at the place of an old friend, Mr. Briol, a retired teacher who lived in The Pardal. That morning, for the fourth time since their arrival, they crossed their large property.

In the Sunday calm, one could barely hear the Riotor babbling below the plateau, reduced as it was to a tiny stream in the wake of the big drought that had followed the week of the storm. The Tanerans set out through the old prune orchards, and the vines, caught up in a sort of vegetal madness, sent out long shoots on every side.

Before crossing the oak woods that stretched out at the end of their property on the south, they went alongside the estate’s tenant farmhouse. The Dedde girl was standing in the doorway, ready to leave for mass. She fidgeted and smiled at Henry in a way that expressed so vulgarly a recent involvement that the youngest of the Tanerans turned his head away.

When they were on the road, he used the pretext of a flock of birds flying high in the sunlit sky to hide his embarrassment. “Look, Maud!” In the dark, slanted eyes of her young brother, Maud saw the shadow of the wood pigeons reflected. His head back, he followed their flight until the moment when it blended into the azure sky.

When they got to the rocky road that wound through the vineyards, Mrs. Taneran had difficulty going forward. She had gained some weight during her leisurely holidays, and, despite the morning freshness, she felt tired and out of breath. “I’m not used to doing anything anymore. I’m getting heavy,” she moaned, wiping her forehead.

Her plaintive tone garnered no sympathy from any of her children. Her sons walked in front of her. Henry sauntered from one side of the path to the other, like a young boy. Jacques, already tired of the pleasures of the country, stopped now and then to get his mother going again with the impatient call, “Well, are you coming?”

The moment he felt an insult bubbling up in him, it came out of his mouth. That was his way of being honest. And if he detested Maud’s approach to things, it was precisely because she never expressed her feelings as spontaneously as he did. He never knew what effect his insults or attitude had on his sister, for his reproaches disappeared inside her in a mysterious murkiness, like a lake without currents. His mother always said of her son that as long as he was candid, he wasn’t as bad as people claimed him to be. No doubt it was true, to the degree to which Jacques was not any harder than he appeared.

He had just received a long letter from the Tavares Bank, which he had refused to show to his mother. He said he was very worried and spoke about going back home. Could one read into that a pretext for leaving Uderan, where he had been more or less cast aside for the last while?

Since the waitress’s suicide, Maud saw Jacques only at meals. He never spoke to her anymore. He was probably not unaware of the fact that George spent his evenings with his sister. At Barque’s, he missed this friend who had slipped away from him and was secretly humiliated by it. Maud guessed that Jacques didn’t have much fun anymore at Semoic and that a shameful feeling of distress had been torturing him since this affair. She knew through the Deddes’ daughter that fewer people than before came to the inn.

Without admitting it to himself, Jacques feared his sister because he suspected her to be his most indomitable enemy. He wasn’t sure that she would refrain from revealing anything to their mother if he dared to reproach her for monopolizing George Durieux, and all the more so because Jacques wasn’t sure if his sister was George’s mistress.

In the soft Sunday morning light, his mother considered her son with a sad tenderness, and one could guess by her look that she asked herself endless, tormenting questions about him. For the first time she doubted that he still wanted to settle down at Uderan, and she admitted it to him. She could be incredibly tactless at times, as she knew, but she could not hold her tongue, believing that it was her motherly duty to question him.

“In the beginning, we’ll help you,” she told him gently. “I’m sure that Taneran will help you. I can guarantee that this old estate is worth something these days…” Encouraged by his silence, she continued. “You’ll come to see that I did well not to have sold it. I would like you to reassure me, Jacques. I have already incurred tremendous expense to set you up here.”

Scornfully, he yelled at her to “keep Uderan” if she wanted to die there, but in that case, he would look for something else. An ugly discussion sprang up but soon ended, for both of them judged it useless to go any deeper. By her senseless devotion, Mrs. Taneran destroyed any desire her son might have had to escape. Her constant fervor irritated Jacques. One would have said, at times, that he reproached his mother for her very tenderness, realizing that her accommodating ways were making him grow softer. Nevertheless, he did not leave his family, because the blowups, as scandalous as they may have been, between Mrs. Taneran and her son, did not indicate anything more than the state of their nerves.

Mrs. Taneran and her children took a shortcut through the Pellegrains’ property. Mrs. Pellegrain, who was watching out for them, came and joined them. She was Mrs. Pecresse’s first cousin. Her Sunday “transformation” was to wear a bright-colored bonnet whose color contrasted with her scarlet complexion and wrinkled features, giving her a questionable look of extended youth and making this farm woman look like a lady of the night. They exchanged a few words.

“And your brother? Still doing well?” Mrs. Taneran inquired. Mrs. Pellegrain’s brother was a deaf-mute she had agreed to take in, despite the natural aversion she had for this unfortunate man. He was reputed, though, to be the best worker in the region. He was known to be capable of doing the work of two men, which is why his brother-in-law never failed to hire him. Even if Mrs. Pellegrain did her best to show her affection for her brother, everyone in the village was aware that he never ate at the family table and slept in a closet under the stairs.

Maud tried to move away from her mother chatting with the farm woman, but the latter addressed Maud in a strong southern accent. “So, miss, it’s nice to sleep at Uderan?” Maud felt herself reddening as if under the lash of a whip but responded boldly that, indeed, she enjoyed staying at the domain. She noticed that Jacques had stopped and was watching her in a half-mocking, disdainful way.

The deaf man came up to them, dressed in the clean, collarless shirt his sister made him wear on Sundays. When he saw the Tanerans, a big smile covered his face and curled his lips up over his enormous teeth. A sad, smothered sound came from his throat, expressing, no doubt, his contentment. But he didn’t stop and quickly walked away with his mouth open.

They passed by the Big Oak Farm and then arrived at The Pardal. Although the village was much farther away from Uderan than Semoic, the Tanerans had the habit of going to mass at The Pardal because of the parish priest, whom they knew. During the service, Maud noticed that her brothers were as furious as they were embarrassed to have been led to such a place. Sunday invariably ended in dispute; Jacques and Henry saw that by attending mass they always fell into the trap their mother succeeded in laying for them. Already, young Henry used the same arguments as his older brother in accusing his mother of tricking them into another dreadfully boring Sunday. This insignificant detail perfectly illustrated one of the family’s character traits: an incredible ability to forget! Indeed, what were they expecting and why did they have any illusions as to the day’s unchanging flow? They betrayed in that way their incurable weakness. They had barely started out for The Pardal when they suddenly seemed to recall the boredom they would encounter. Yet they never turned around and, out of spite, contrived to make the day as infernal as possible. Still, they knew how to preserve a certain dignity, for they were as cowardly in regard to scandal as they were daring in front of their subdued mother. Thus, during the service, they sat in the first row of the chancel with a slightly humble and contented look, in order to honor the confidence of the Pardalians, who gave them the best place in the church. The village folk moved back even farther behind them, it seemed, to acknowledge the Tanerans’ social standing.

As for Mrs. Taneran, she prayed only at intervals, letting herself be easily distracted by the people she recognized and at whom she smiled. The day’s outlook didn’t bother her at all.

Maud once again gauged the difference between this woman, with her rested and distracted look, and the overburdened creature whom their mother would become upon their return, when her sons would load her down like a donkey with the weight of their ill mood. Mrs. Taneran possessed an amazing energy that she saved up during these brief moments of profound diversion. Grace resulted from the habit of an existence whose blows she evaded daily.

All the farmers of The Pardal attended high mass. The women, to the right of the chancel, were mainly dressed in black sateen, which stretched out over their rounded backs, curved by their hard labor; the men, to the left, were fewer in number. Although the weather was beautiful outside, the sun filtered in faintly through the stained-glass windows. The choir sang around an old harmonium set up on the podium. The mother of the priest, the seamstress who had worked in The Pardal for twenty years, and the latest member, the kindergarten assistant, composed The Pardal’s choir.

Maud thought about George Durieux. Since the event at Barque’s, he came to Uderan secretly every evening. They met in the dining room, behind closed doors. She had difficulty accepting the fear George felt for her brother. At the same time, she had just as much difficulty understanding George’s attitude toward her. She would have preferred to see him as she imagined him, violent and unscrupulous and taking over her brother’s role in dominating her life. It was her first love, and she didn’t doubt that it would be the only one, as she could not do without the presence of this man. However, when he spoke to her about marriage, she found the idea to be naïve. Something in George seemed unassailable to her, and that was a faith in her that he had created on his own and for which she found no basis; this lack of judgment shocked her and made her impatient at the same time.

The house belonging to Mr. Briol, the retired schoolteacher, was on a series of terraces, with the church occupying the lowest one and the presbytery the highest. The reinforced terrace, transformed into a vegetable garden, was the continuation of an abandoned cemetery, which made up the base. From there, the view stretched out quite far, for the landscape descended in a gentle incline not impeded by any obstacle, except, in the middle, a little river lined with elm trees. Crossing the slope was a very white road, hidden in part by the landmass of The Pardal.

In the sheltered garden, with no shade, it was very hot. While Henry and Jacques went back and forth on the little wall-walk along the terrace, Mrs. Taneran and Maud leaned on the small wall that overlooked the valley. When Jacques arrived at the level of his mother, he declared through clenched teeth, “It’s the last time, do you hear, the last time!”

Mrs. Taneran didn’t reply. She only tried to appease him with a forced smile. The poor woman had never noticed how this exasperated her son even more. Maud, whose eyes were somewhat blinded by the midday sun, appeared anxious. Why did her brother’s words permeate her in such a way? He paced the road nervously, like an animal in a cage that couldn’t find a way out.

Even more than the other night, she formed a brutal inner judgment of Jacques, which would have dismayed him if he had guessed it. He believed himself to be, in fact, the nicest of men, the worthiest of the responsibilities of his family. Never before had Maud calculated so precisely the degree of contempt that he merited. Since she had come to know George Durieux, she was able to grasp the underlying temperament of her brother, first because she and George often talked about it, and then because it presently seemed of little consequence for Jacques to be contemptible or not. Her love for George freed her mind from a last, fragile obligation, and she now held the key to this mystery.

She finally understood the nature of what she had vaguely endured as an indisputable reality. This victory of enlightenment intoxicated her. Overwhelming arguments formed in her mind, and she thought she would share them with George that very evening, and that his love for her would gain some new depth, some new perversity, by welcoming such revelations…

Anger made her temples throb, but she managed to retain her joyous enthusiasm. All of a sudden, the strength she felt made her take pity on her mother, who was still suffering as blindly as ever under a tyranny that should have been so easy to cast off. Maud put her hand on her mother’s hand. Mrs. Taneran did not understand the exact meaning of this gesture, but having turned around, she met her daughter’s eyes and withdrew her hand…

The schoolteacher’s sister arrived. Almost blind, she walked with a heavy step, and in the daylight her clothing looked disgustingly dirty. In each wrinkle of her elderly face was etched a fine black furrow that made it look deeper. “You’re looking at the garden?” she said. “Oh, it’s gotten very unruly since the lad died! Since the fall I haven’t touched it…” The lad was their younger brother, also a teacher in a nearby village, who had passed away the previous year.

The woman looked annoyed. Every Sunday the Tanerans’ visit caused her extra work. The only one to understand, much later, was Maud: the old woman would have preferred not to see them, because Mrs. Taneran’s impetuosity and solicitude had never pleased her. She preferred Henry, who as a child had come to take Latin lessons from her son.

Mr. Briol had aged. He came in singing and went courteously toward his mother to encourage her. The good woman muttered something and then they all sat down at the table. Dinner was gloomy. Usually they didn’t sit in the dining room, where the furniture seemed to be covered in a thin, gauzelike veil of dust. Flies, intoxicated by the sun, rushed violently toward the ceiling…

Her eyes glazed over, Maud stared at the garden without seeing it, as birds flew over in joyful throngs, while Mrs. Taneran spoke intermittently. At a certain point, old Mr. Briol tried to amuse Henry with memories they had in common, but the teacher quickly understood that whatever had amused his student in the past didn’t grab his attention anymore. Henry, like Jacques, had become indifferent to anything that didn’t serve his pleasure.

After vespers the Tanerans went home tired. The day was ending. As soon as The Pardal disappeared, Mrs. Taneran said, to avoid repeating the same old scene, “I think that if all goes well, we’ll leave by the end of the week…”

They remained silent. She had just expressed the resolution her sons vaguely hoped for. Nothing, at present, nothing could have kept them at Uderan. Maud felt invaded by a bitterness that was mitigated, it was true, by a feeling of detachment so immense that she felt she had never loved them.

The road stretched out under their feet. The silent form of Uderan appeared. They walked around it and headed toward the hostile home of Mrs. Pecresse.

CHAPTER 10

AT DINNER THAT NIGHT, MRS. TANERAN ANNOUNCED HER departure with such insistence that it seemed almost inappropriate. Mrs. Pecresse wasn’t expecting it and immediately envisioned the catastrophe that was about to descend upon her family. Once Maud was gone, what would happen to her son? Not only did Maud avoid him, but since the suicide of his girlfriend, John was looked upon in The Pardal as a dishonest young man to whom people would hesitate to give their daughter in marriage.

In the mind of the Pecresse woman, it was because of his love for Maud that John had given up his mistress. She didn’t know that Jacques, in turn, had abandoned and mistreated the young woman. Mrs. Pecresse continued to cling to the first part of the story, believing in her son’s guilt. Happily for the Tanerans, she went about moping with disappointment and made no effort to find out the truth.

Mrs. Pecresse knew about her son’s weakness, like her own, for stubbornly insisting on getting what he wanted. Thus, since that tragic night, she feared the worst—for example, that John would leave her. The disdain her son had shown her in the last little while was as terrible for the Pecresse woman as the thought of her own death. Wasn’t the only way of fixing things up to keep Maud at Uderan? Even if Miss Grant turned out to be a young woman whose reputation was no longer intact, even if she had become of late the object of public scandal, she certainly remained desirable, and John did not stop wanting her even more than before.

However, during the dinner, the Pecresse woman did not show her concern in the least. She did her best to appear friendly and to cause the faults she found in the Tanerans to be forgotten. Completely focused on her own designs, she didn’t stop to ask herself whether her plans compromised the very existence of the Taneran family, which already appeared so disunited. But even if she had realized, she would not have hesitated to move ahead, because her behavior was completely dictated by her passions.

That night, Maud Grant left very early for Uderan. She headed straight for the loquat hedge, where weeks earlier she had turned away John Pecresse. There, she stopped a moment to catch her breath. It was light outside, even though the moon hadn’t yet risen. On her right, in the Dior valley, the mist was gathering with the weightlessness of foam. On the other side of the path, the Uderan plateau stretched out as far as the eye could see, bare and motionless.

What a despicable Sunday! From the morning onward something had been hovering over them—their final determination to leave Uderan. Concluding such a day couldn’t have been any different. After that, how light they had felt in returning to the Pecresses’!

As soon as she was alone, however, Maud felt as awake as if she had been sleeping all day. All of a sudden, Sunday was far behind her, and she inhaled the perfume of her regained solitude, which blended with the pungent fragrance of the night. “What an awful day! How they disgust me,” she repeated to herself. “They would disgust anyone…”

But she was already mulling over her words without feeling their reality. Indeed, she was getting closer to George, whom she was dying to see. The young man was supposed to be waiting for her at Uderan, under the linden trees. He would be coming on foot, no doubt, and would be smoking while waiting for her. Under the trees she would be able to discern him only by the light of his cigarette. He would be nervous and ill-disposed, but she was glad, because he concealed his real self less and less with her. She set out again quickly, fearing he might leave before she got back to Uderan.

There was no one under the linden trees, and no noise, except that of the wind in the pine trees, rough and monotonous, like the sound of the sea on the beach pebbles. No matter how much she searched, there was no one.

She went into her room, not knowing what to do, and finally sat down near the pedestal table. “He should come, all the same, at this time…” From the top of the road she would hear him. Even before hearing him, she would discern the sound of his steps, she thought.

Almost immediately, her impatience knew no bounds. Would he come on foot or on horseback? The sound of galloping seemed to come from everywhere at once, tiring her mind and throwing her off center. The man was coming from every direction, from all the roads filled with night, and she didn’t know where to place her hope. How tormenting was this multiple approach, which closed in on her as if she were in the middle of a circle that grew ever tighter and menacing!

Didn’t he usually come earlier? My God, what did this mean? In thinking about their encounter the night before, she thought he must be suffering from the strictness he so naïvely imposed upon himself. “If you don’t mind,” he had said, “I won’t keep coming as often; it’s difficult, given the conditions in which we’re seeing each other… I think it would be more fitting on my part to speak to your mother…”

She had laughed at the obstacles that he himself created, observing with satisfaction how much the temptation to go further tortured him more and more each day.

Even though she was breathing deeply, the air she took in got lost in her body as if through a leak at the bottom of her lungs, making her suffocate. She looked intensely through the barred window, scrutinizing the path through the linden trees, where gusts of wind were stirring up the leaves. “He’s having fun making me wait. I know him…”

She spoke out loud, no longer able to overcome her impatience. The sound of her voice surprised her, and it seemed as if everything around her sent it back in successive echoes. “He’s having fun; he’s having fun making me wait; I know him; he’s having fun…”

There were a hundred ways to understand it. He was having fun. He was having fun, no doubt a bit brutally, like the children of the region who pluck fish from under the rocks, barefoot in the torrents (maybe he was in the greenhouse, watching her). Perhaps he was also playing the odious game of the man who heightens his pleasure through an exasperating wait.

At this thought, her impatience became frenzied. Her attraction to George had grown as he had made himself scarcer these last few days. She got up, turned off the light, and went out.

The moon had now risen, and Maud’s hunched-up shadow danced beside her like a little animal, happy to follow her. On the plateau, the wind was barely blowing, and the smell of hay floated over the pasturelands of the Dior. There was still nobody on the roads.

Maud walked very quickly. Her freedom intoxicated her, all the more so because it was only an apparent freedom. Her own folly amused her. How surprised he would be to see her! She was going to trap him, and he couldn’t escape back to his own place, the way he fled Uderan every night.

She turned off toward the village. Only a few windows were still lit up, the blinds closed; the labored breathing coming from a few houses was evidence of the torpidity of this summer night. Maud moved away from the inhabited areas and went by an abandoned building—the home of a man who had hanged himself. The tragic event had taken place shortly after they had moved into Uderan; she remembered it well. Fear seized her, as it always did in going past the house, but a force stronger than fear compelled her to go on.

When she reached the lane lined with cypress trees she stopped. The house was lit up; she was no longer in danger of missing George. She felt a bit of shame in coming here. Her heart was beating so wildly she could hardly stand the pounding in her temples and throughout her whole body.

For a moment, the image of her mother sleeping in the large guest room at the Pecresses’ passed before her eyes. Maud feared the moment she was in and also loathed the idea that she was hiding herself.

Tomorrow—what would tomorrow be like if her mother learned something? Standing still, she tried to bring back the image of her mother in a fit of rage, terrible and ugly. But her attempt to scare herself was in vain. Her mother was still sleeping with the humble and tired face of a vanquished woman, and Maud could not picture her in the heat of anger or an emotional outbreak. “She’ll never know I came; how would she know? That’s the only thing that counts…”

She thought about her brothers, who, like her, “ran around.” Taneran was right—she felt like them. This resemblance that she had vaguely foreseen up until now was reinforced today. She believed she was no longer bringing her love to George, but avowing a base and shameful sentiment.

The landscape stretched out before her, vast and unclouded, and nothing could stop her from continuing on. Her enormous freedom remained as an invitation. Moreover, for the last while she’d noticed that all potential barriers came tumbling down as she approached them. Even Jacques did not dare do anything against her, and didn’t she hold George in her power?

At the stomping of the horse in the yard, she realized that George was about to go out. She bumped gently into the door panel as she slid the palm of her hand over the rough door. A footstep could be heard in the room and George appeared. “You were going down to Semoic?” she inquired.

“No, I was just getting ready to come and see you. How did you…”

She didn’t answer and he immediately understood the reason for her late-night escapade. Her goal achieved, she lost interest in what would follow. She headed to the back of the room, near the empty fireplace. On a little table, a lamp was burning low. She looked all around her like someone who doesn’t recognize anything and wants to escape. At that point he took her lightly by the arm and pushed her back onto an easy chair. She allowed him to do it without saying anything, then once again scrutinized the apartment.

At her right stood a narrow couch with a broken edge on which some old, dog-eared books, clearly read more than once, had slipped from a bookcase. A stairway went up from the room itself, as in English country homes, and part of the ceiling, lower than the rest, must have represented the bedroom. A few dissimilar but good-quality pieces of furniture gave the place a surprising look of luxury, although each piece seemed to have been chosen for its own beauty and not in relation to the whole.

George was leaning against the entrance door. He didn’t speak but contemplated this young girl who came to him so naturally, as if he had transported her with his gaze. The light of the lamp grew brighter. His shirt was partly open; he was breathing irregularly as he forced himself to keep calm. His dark eyes, fairly close together, and his broad forehead gave his face a determined look. “I’ll bring in the horse and then I’ll be right back,” he said at last.

She said sweetly that he shouldn’t go out of his way for her. She understood from his look that he was giving her time to get away if she wanted to. But as soon as he went out, she was seized with the same impatience to see him as before. The horse went by close to the wall. There was a moment of profound silence, during which she wrung her hands with irritation while repeating in a tortured voice, “What can he be doing? What on earth can he be doing?”

When he came back, she calmed down right away. He sat on the couch with his hands behind him; she sensed he was still giving her the freedom to decide on their fate, and this extreme sensitivity annoyed her.

“I came because I’ve had enough,” she said suddenly. “Again today, they’ve been unbearable.”

“I realize that,” he replied.

“We’re leaving next week—did you know that?” she added.

He didn’t flinch. Next week? He suddenly felt the strength to change the course of events… “I doubt it,” he muttered. She eyed him suspiciously.

“That poor schoolteacher Briol,” Maud continued. “If you had seen the trouble he goes to in order to entertain my family… it was painful. What’s extraordinary is that people bend over backward to please them, while…” Whenever she talked about her family, she always let herself get caught up in her own words. “While in fact they don’t count, they’re nobodies, you know, what people call nobodies…” She punctuated her comments with excessive gestures. He wasn’t surprised that she had come so far to tell him things like that.

At Uderan, too, the two of them hadn’t stopped talking about Jacques since the affair with the young waitress, but tonight it seemed as if she kept repeating a lesson poorly learned. (Even though they were upset with Jacques, they didn’t betray him and stood by passively when the Pecresses were unjustly criticized in town.) “Quiet, my dear. Calm down,” said George.

As soon as he came in, she had understood. George’s irritation, his persistence in always wanting to leave her, had mysteriously stopped. A storm had passed over this man, but now he was there before her, perfectly calm. With short sentences he tried to calm her, even though he didn’t believe she was truly angry.

He had struggled in order not to come to this point, but from the moment he felt vanquished, he was grateful for her victory, yielding to a gentleness full of abandon and appreciation; it showed as much in his eyes as in his drained voice, in his closed hands. “I wasn’t expecting you,” said George. “Every evening, and from morning onward, I wait patiently for the time to come and see you.”

The familiar tone of his voice drew her closer to him. From now on they understood each other totally—from the simple beginning of their gestures, which became unnecessary to complete, to their most banal words, which they no longer deemed necessary to finish. An adorably full silence began to be possible. They had ceased being two.

All at once he got up. She guessed he was going to approach her. As short as this instant was, she could not stand the imminence of his approach. For a second, as she returned to an individual state again, her modesty reappeared intact, along with a self-defensive instinct that frightened her. She closed her eyes. She just had the time to hear herself pleading inwardly with herself to be weak, and very quickly gave in to this voice, succeeding in detaching herself from her will, like a leaf in the wind being torn away from the tree and allowing itself to be carried off, accomplishing finally its desire to die.

• • •

When she woke up, a bit of daylight had begun, laboriously, to show. It was true, they had forgotten to close the shutters.

She remained completely motionless for a time, unable to make a move. Between the sheets she felt her naked body, which she was no longer ashamed of, and which became a living form, like her face. In the past, she had used her body to counter unhappiness, requiring it, for example, to carry her out of the house, to laugh, to console her, or to weep comforting tears…

However, this particular morning, her body stayed in total harmony with her spirit, inert. Nothing was making an effort in this complicity and she thought very calmly of violent things.

George slept beside her; hair sprung from his bare arms, which he had wrapped around his head. He was handsome, as such, and the forearms of his tanned skin were marked by sunburns and all the traces and scars left behind by swimming, hunting, and other adventures. His sleep was childlike—confident and peaceful.

He appeared to Maud full of both strength and innocence. He had resisted, and now he rested, with abandon, at her side.

How would they see each other after this encounter? She avoided touching him; she watched him sleep. Yet she felt the need to roll up against him and go back to sleep, to gradually lose consciousness again beside him, on condition that he didn’t move or ask her any questions.

She couldn’t resist putting out her hand and stroking his shoulder, perhaps to bring him back a bit into reality. But instead she drifted off again into her dreams; he didn’t move.

Did he still love her? She kept herself at the surface of her sleep, light and annoying, like an irritating fly. He sensed that she was there, at his side, for he grunted and murmured something incomprehensible and sank into sleep once again. What brought her suffering, she would have to endure alone.

It was now almost day. She arose and got dressed. Once she had made this first effort, she was in a hurry to get it over with. She had no trouble letting herself out, for everything had been left open in the rush of the night before. The road seemed long, she was shivering, and a stabbing pain in her lower body prevented her from running.

As she left the cypress lane, she looked back and considered George’s home, drab in the early morning. Was she dreaming? She thought she saw a human form briskly leave the road. She pushed aside the suspicion that came to her, as she would have done a bad omen one conjures up without thinking about it again. When she caught sight of Uderan, she could not repress a strange smile.

In the mirror she noticed her pale coloring and haggard eyes. Once undressed, her naked body took on a beauty of which she had just become conscious and that left her both sad and proud. George had said so much about it to her, and his sentences came back to her in fragments. She tried in vain to bring them back in their warmth and spontaneity.

She had a hard time putting her ideas together. Soon she wasn’t thinking of anything, except her mother, who might come to Uderan at any moment. She remained, however, unperturbed. “Bah! It’s just foolishness, all that, just foolishness…”

A pain rose from her lower parts, warmly emanating like the memory of her pleasure. She buried herself in the freezing-cold sheets and quickly succumbed to a vertiginous sleep that left her without dreams.

CHAPTER 11

MAUD DID NOT GO BACK TO THE PECRESSE HOME UNTIL EVENING, after roaming all day down by the Riotor. As soon as she entered, she realized that no one in the room was speaking. It seemed that nobody noticed her presence and that they were all preoccupied by the same concern. Even Mr. Pecresse, after pulling up a chair for her, returned to his motionless position by the fireplace, between his dogs.

Mrs. Taneran wasn’t there. Maud was struck by the absence of her mother, for the usual time for dinner had gone by without anyone paying any heed. A kind of suppressed fear rose in Maud. What did she come looking for at the Pecresses? Shouldn’t she have stayed at George Durieux’s place instead of fleeing in the morning? She sat down, seemingly calm.

From time to time the two griffons lying near the fireplace vigorously scratched their sides; Maud remembered that the odor of racing dogs sickened her mother, who invariably asked, every evening, that they open the windows a little. (This evening the windows were closed, in the absence of their mother.)

Through the windows one could see the Dior in the distance, smoking like a brush fire and spreading a refreshing humidity, as if it had exhaled, with the coming of evening, a vapor carefully contained during the day. Sitting beside the window, the Pecresse son was looking at the view without really seeing it, while continuously redirecting his gaze toward Maud, to show her that her indifference tortured him.

Jacques and Henry, sitting close enough to touch each other, remained idle. After a moment, Maud went up to her younger brother: “What’s going on? Can you tell me where Mother is?”

Henry gave her an angry look, stiffened his mouth in an expression of forced indignation, while Jacques appeared to be waiting for his sister to come to him. In Jacques’s hollow cheeks his muscles played, round and hard like marbles. His lips were pale from being stretched over his teeth, and a blank stare, characteristic of his bad times, filtered through his half-closed eyes.

The Pecresse woman was exultant. By her look, by her sinuous walk through the room, one could make out an expression of satisfaction that she could barely keep inside. She, at least, found herself at home in this room where a dismal silence persisted. With a light step she went from one to the other, engaging them. Her southern accent, usually so unpleasant, softened and gave her voice an unexpected sweetness.

She flattered them with her gestures, her looks. One minute she spoke to her son: “John, dear, if you would like to smile a bit you would make your mother happy.” The next moment she spoke to Henry Taneran: “Pick up the newspaper and let us know what’s going on. My poor son, John, won’t be the one to do that right now. Ah! John. Ah! John…” No one deigned to reply because, in spite of it all, her pretense did not escape them, and it revolted them.

Maud scrutinized them all insistently and asked once again where her mother was. Time was passing and Mrs. Taneran had not yet appeared, although usually she came back early from the tenant farm.

But an obstinate silence met the young woman’s words. They were clearly refraining from speaking to her, and their attitude soon became so evident that she was frightened. She suddenly thought she grasped the reason for their anger and felt invaded by a sense of shame that totally crushed her. Her obsession with seeing her fears come to fruition made her recoil as if she were in the path of an object coming toward her at a dizzying speed. But just at the moment when she thought she understood, she fell back into doubt. She would have liked to have asked them a question that would have enlightened her, but nothing came to mind. They had been dwelling on their anger for too long to be able to listen to her. She realized that and decided it was more prudent to remain silent.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Pecresse could no longer contain her impatience. She leaned over Maud and hissed right in her face, “Where is your mother? She’s looking for you, the poor woman! She must be very worn-out. She was already dragging herself around before that. It’s because you haven’t shown up the entire day, Miss Grant…”

Mrs. Pecresse added, cleverly calculating the effects in order to stir up shame and remorse in Maud, “In fact, she’s been gone since noon hour…”

Maud backed away from Mrs. Pecresse, her arms stiffened in a gesture of defense, but the woman stared her down and it was the young woman who closed her eyes… Suddenly she saw the shadow that had crossed the cypress lane just as she was leaving George’s place. Hadn’t it been round and gray like the Pecresse woman herself…? Was it possible that was related to what she was currently experiencing? Maud reviewed her day spent wandering near the Riotor. How had she not foreseen that during that time her brothers would remain with the Pecresses and that their desire to catch her red-handed would grow? No doubt her mother wasn’t aware of anything. But they knew what they were doing. With that, there was Jacques’s need to distract himself and to make her pay for the audacity she had had at Barque’s the other evening.

That the Pecresse woman would collaborate with Jacques to find her guilty was unexpected, to say the least! What impudence Jacques had! He wasn’t reluctant to associate with the Pecresse woman, even though he had deceived her twice, in not accepting his share of responsibility for the suicide of the young woman and in pushing his mother to leave Uderan definitively. He had clearly latched onto the first excuse to strike back at Maud, happy that she had provided him with such an ideal pretext. Up until now, he had hesitated to use sensitive arguments against her that would have also compromised himself. Since the event at Barque’s, he had hung around, not finding himself at home anywhere. He felt alone and needed someone else to do something wrong in order to distract him from his own obsessive guilt…

Her brother knew. Maud felt lost and wanted to flee.

At that very moment, something unexpected occurred to forcefully sweep away their anger. From the heights of Uderan came a weak, strangled voice that seemed to fear being heard, and that immediately produced silence: “Mrs. Pe-cre-sse!”

The seriousness of that call brought them together and made them feel irrelevant themselves. All of a sudden no trace of resentment was left.

“Mrs. Pe-cre-sse!” Although Mrs. Pecresse herself was the only one still taking pleasure in what she was doing, she, too, grew pale, and little by little the smile left her face. The dogs rose and perked up their ears.

When the voice grew silent, Jacques settled for shrugging his shoulders awkwardly. He didn’t dare look at anyone or answer the call.

The voice came closer. “Where is my darling, my God, where is she?” After each of her cries, the voice returned to the night, like a wave returning to the sea and leaving its trace, a humid fringe.

What a failure for the Grant-Taneran brothers! They appeared stupefied that their mother would worry about their lot, even though they had let her leave without reassuring her. They became aware of their blunder, and neither of them had the strength to address this mourning expressed without indignation. “My dear Maud, my child!”

Suddenly, Henry Taneran let his jaw drop open like a deaf person who wants to hear better and said timidly, “We’d better answer her. We should have let her know… I myself…” But he didn’t dare do what he was suggesting and stayed glued to his chair.

Maud didn’t budge. She understood that her mother had been calling her for hours, walking along the roads, through the fields, along the Dior.

Soon it was Maud herself who was taking to the roads, walking through tall, wet grass, following the railroad tracks… The heat and fatigue had finally gotten the best of Mrs. Taneran, and then, to finish it off, there was the walk along the river that evening, which buried her in the fog rising from the Dior… It was then that she began to call at random. Perhaps they had crossed paths without seeing each other? Without recognizing each other? With strange lucidity, Maud followed the painful path her mother had taken and could not turn aside from the sight she saw.

The voice now picked up again, first gasping for air and then filled with a tenderness that opened up like a floodgate. “My dear Maud, my child!” Maud remained petrified, having no other fear except that of feeling alive. She thought she was present at her own demise.

Soon she was back there, of course, between those white walls, with those four immovable faces, but also elsewhere, in the dark of night beside her mother. Why, though, did her mother keep on calling? Why, since she had met up with her? Maud was kissing her. She came back holding her, snuggled up against her mother’s body…

All of a sudden, the voice was there in the yard.

Maud plugged her ears so she wouldn’t hear it anymore, then let out a scream. In the instant that followed, all noise was suspended. The griffons began to bark. Maud fell. As she lost consciousness, she still heard the two dogs, but from afar, as if she had slowly sunken into death.

CHAPTER 12

WHEN SHE WOKE UP IN HER MOTHER’S BED, UPSTAIRS IN THE Pecresses’ big, beautiful bedroom, it was almost dark. On the night table, a little lamp hidden by a newspaper offered a faint light. Maud noticed that they had put her to bed completely dressed, removing only her shoes.

She felt calm but forced herself not to think about anything, sensing that her nervousness would come back at the same time as a clear consciousness of the situation in which she found herself.

The sky, through the windows, stood out against the somber background of the bedroom and appeared as an intense blue. Gray clouds moved across it and sped toward the east, bordered by a horizon as bare as that of the high sea. A fairly strong wind was blowing and working on the trees of the yard, shaking their tops. No doubt a summer storm was brewing, which would soon erupt into a warm rain, but tomorrow the day would be as clear as ever.

When it was time to get up, Maud had to lean back against the bed, her legs limp, her head empty. Her whole body was trembling, and she felt a profound weakness. When she opened the door, the voices of the Pecresses hit her in the face and she quickly stepped backward. Hesitating, she went from one window to the next, as if plunged in deep reflection, but in reality she wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, not able to understand the sudden and fearful disarray that had overtaken her.

Soon the night had set in completely. No other noise except that of the wind came to her. The moon rose little by little in the sky, a stranger to the agitation of the earth and to the violence of the storm in the valley.

Maud suddenly felt incapable of overcoming her distress. She let herself go as if she were a drowned person floating along a river. The sound of an ongoing conversation came to her through the partially open door; she could pick up only some isolated words. No illusion was now possible: Mrs. Taneran had been advised of her daughter’s flight from home.

In any case, as soon as she had been reassured concerning Maud’s state, her mother must have given herself over to one of her rages that separated her from everyone else. Maud went back and looked at the lamp, whose overly bright light was subdued by the newspaper. “They didn’t dare tell her right away,” she thought. A feeling of great solitude heightened her emotional pain.

All at once she heard someone in clogs walking along the outer wall. The steps resonated on the hardened soil and the noise reassured her a bit, because it alone indicated that life continued with its calming, everyday activities. The heavy barn door squeaked on its hinges and shut with a huge ruckus that shook the whole house. “It must be nine o’clock,” she muttered. “Mr. Pecresse is closing up his barn.”

She understood all at once that she could no longer put off going downstairs, or they would lock the entrance door and she would be a prisoner until the next day. This idea brought new anxiety. “They’re not going to let me out of here, not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever…”

Her suffering was relegated to second place in relation to this instinctive fear of being imprisoned here with them. She began to moan, with her mouth closed tightly; a groan she could not keep inside escaped from her lips, so softly that one might have thought she was humming. However, she did not stop making rapid calculations: the entranceway was unthinkable. And as for the door off the hallway, she knew it was practically sealed off. The window? It, too, was extremely high. She leaned out and quickly stepped back.

The horror she felt at finding herself once again with her family left her mind entirely clear. “There’s no other way but to go downstairs,” she calmly decided. Certainly, she could no longer face them with her head held high the way she used to do. But she wanted to flee from them, above all, to avoid the repulsive intimacy to which she would still be summoned, no doubt, once their anger had passed.

Her mind made up, she leaned on the windowsill a moment. The image of her lover came back to her at that point, distinct and frozen. She had no desire to see him again, sensing how useless it would be; the aversion she felt for people touched even him. His complete ignorance of what she was going through right now diminished him in her eyes, without her making the slightest effort to fight off this unjust thought.

The memory of the pleasure she had had in making love did not come back clearly, because only her memory strove to recall it, against her will. What an illusion she had had!

She imagined Durieux learning about this; she pictured the expression of worry on his face. Even if he was sincere the first few days, he would soon tire of defending her, and boredom would eat up his love to the point of leaving only the appearances. Automatically she closed the window, and at the same time the picture of her lover disappeared, after her vain effort to bring back his memory.

She groped her way downstairs and stopped behind the kitchen door. In order to find the courage to open it, she repeated to herself, “None of this is important… in a little while no one will be talking about it…”

Then she was into the room. The immediate silence swept down on her and left her disconcerted. The light was so bright that she instinctively shaded her eyes with her hand.

As everyone was sitting somewhat back from the table, they must have finished dinner. Without looking at him, she picked out Jacques, who was rolling pieces of bread between his fingers and throwing them into the fire. Near him, Mrs. Taneran probably wore the “ashen face” that her children well knew. The Pecresse woman was the first to speak. “You’re going to eat something, Miss Grant…” The little servant girl went to get a plate, which she put on the edge of the table, and then she put some wood in the stove.

Maud wended her way toward the fireplace and leaned on it, facing the hearth, so she would no longer have to look at them. Everyone was observing a silence that became intolerable the longer it lasted, and that rose and rose, like water rising in a sinking boat. A single word would have been enough to ignite their fury, causing this deadly inertia to explode. Maud would have liked to disappear in the puddle of her shadow, dwindling until she became, like the shadow itself, nothing.

Mindlessly she tried to pet the griffon closest to her, but the dog growled, and her nervousness became such that she blushed and lost her bearings, as if this failure with the dog discredited her even more in their eyes. “Come, it’s ready,” said Mrs. Pecresse, “Come along, Miss Grant…”

Maud remained motionless, contemplating the white oval table, which sparkled in the brightness of the ceiling light, then the empty chair, and on the table, the steaming plate. Nearby, two closed, trembling hands tapped on the table: two hands with the same bone structure, palm width, and, more than anything, the distinctively inverted thumb, a sign of violence, that she bore as well. The faces in the room, plunged in the shadow of the lampshade, escaped her. The Pecresse woman pushed her toward the table, and she found herself in front of the plate.

They devoured her pitilessly with their gaze, with the curiosity inspired by every scandalous act. They followed her gestures, awaited her mistakes. The simple movement she had to make in order to eat required such an effort that, at times, she was no longer in control of her arm, which literally became paralyzed.

She would have given her life to hear them speak, at last, and say a single word that would have revealed the meaning of their anger. She knew so well the dark roads they enjoyed taking, where they got lost…

In the barn, which was near the kitchen, they could hear the animals crushing their bedding and rummaging around their empty feeding troughs. This familiar sound surprised Maud a little, in that it was peaceful and habitual.

Suddenly, John Pecresse got up and left. His mother, with feigned discretion, imitated him and acted as if she were following him without actually making up her mind. “You can stay, Mrs. Pecresse, you know…” It was the voice of Mrs. Taneran. It had a somewhat contemptuous sound to it, and more than weariness came through; it revealed such a deep discouragement that everything sank into it and disappeared like a wisp of straw.

Maud, for her part, could only fixate on her plate rather stupidly.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Do you think we have nothing else to do but watch and wait for you?” This voice, with its skillful inflections, was that of Jacques. Maud didn’t bat an eyelid.

The servant had gone to bed and Mrs. Pecresse made a move to get up and clear the table, thus feigning a noble disinterest in the whole affair. The Tanerans’ disagreement was blowing up so violently that this miserable woman was very pleased and could move away from it without any effort, now that she had caused it.

“Please stay seated, Mrs. Pecresse. Maud, could you clear the table?” A feeling of hope filled the young woman, who recognized this tone of tender scolding her mother sometimes used with her.

Without a word, Maud went toward the sink. Jacques followed her closely; she heard his breathing, right there, at her back. What excuse would he come up with? The lowest, the most banal, the most ridiculous, the most shameful…

“So you’re going to wash your plate? I’ll teach you to sneak off. You don’t care about anything and you’ve figured out how to run around… I won’t allow it much longer…”

Maud kept herself from speaking or moving. The plate she held in her two hands suddenly changed its appearance, so that she no longer saw it as it was, but broken and bloody with a face coming through it, like the face of a clown bursting through a sheet of paper.

“Jacques, leave her alone; that’s what she deserves,” Henry chimed in.

But Jacques was in full form and impossible to stop. “We’ve left her alone too long! When I think of how we all indulged her, of how we trusted her… Do you want to know something, something I hid from you, because I had pity on her?” He stretched out his arms toward his mother in a solemn gesture. “It disgusts me that it’s come to this, I must say. Do you remember? The money, when Muriel died?”

He interrupted himself, finally delivered from this very minimal obligation toward his sister. Mrs. Taneran seemed petrified. In a quick calculation, Maud measured the distance that separated her from the door. She would slip along the wall, lift the latch… Before rushing over, though, she summoned whatever reason she had left.

“Don’t believe him; I borrowed three hundred and fifty francs in exchange for my chain bracelet—you see, I don’t have it anymore…” She showed her bare arm and cunningly slid toward the door.

Jacques yelled like someone possessed, “It’s not true, liar!”

But Maud was already outside. She hurtled down the road at such speed that the stones flew out from under her feet. When she got to the valley, near the Dior, she stopped. Insults were still being hurled at her from above. The open door shed a big square of light on the countryside. Several voices mixed together with Jacques’s—that of the Pecresse woman, who yelled her name with the loud, drawling accent she had when she called her dogs in the evening. And then Henry’s.

“Hey! Maud! Come back! Come stay here! If you don’t, Mother won’t sleep a wink. You know that, don’t you…” Stiff, biting her lips to keep from answering, she silently shook her head—no. The first tears finally flowed from her eyes. She was soon able to see that the square of light disappeared from above.

She lay down on the riverbank. One of her hands held her head and the other hung down in the water current, making a frail and bubbly melody.

CHAPTER 13

THE WATER WAS SO COLD THAT AFTER A MOMENT MAUD could no longer feel her fingers. She withdrew her hand and put it on the thick grass, which felt warm by comparison. In the silence that reigned near the river, she heard the sound of her own sobbing. An instant later she wanted to draw up her legs, but it hurt too much; she felt the same thing when she tried to get up. Very carefully she brought her limbs in close, into the hollow of her curled-up body, discovering a gentleness in her actions that made her feel as if she had compassion for herself.

Although it was June, it was still very difficult for Maud to warm herself in this flowing rift of the Dior, where the earth softened at night like a humid sponge. Her dress and clothing stuck to her body, but it was only when she was no longer immobile that the cold penetrated her all of a sudden and made her shiver. She wasn’t sad, but weary, with a weariness made painful by the cold.

Soon, the first drops of rain from the storm began to fall. She had to go in. She thought, with a stupid obstinacy, of the bed in which she had found herself after she had fainted. Was her bedroom at Uderan open? Could she go to George Durieux’s place? No, anything except a return like that, which he would misinterpret.

Go to the tenant farm? Wake up the tenant farmer’s daughter by knocking on the shutters? But the domestic help would get up to welcome her in, and inventing an excuse seemed beyond her capabilities.

Thus she concluded there was no other shelter but the night, right up until the morning. She didn’t for a minute think about returning to the Pecresses’. This now seemed so impossible that it didn’t even cross her mind.

The Dior was running beside her, young and virile, against its faithful banks. All she had to do was roll over. She would have been caught up and carried away in a moment. But that was not in her thoughts, and she would have been astonished if someone had spoken to her about suicide, because she didn’t associate her despair with any thoughts of heroism. With difficulty she rose and climbed up the small hillock of the railway tracks. The rain was falling and blinding her. She took huge steps forward, stumbling and bracing herself against the moist clumps of earth; she crossed the tracks and then the road. A bright light caught her for an instant in its beam and went by quickly, as an engine roared. She didn’t straighten up but continued to drag herself toward Uderan. Just as she was headed up the sloped path of the yard, she thought she sensed the presence of someone around the house. She continued, unconcerned, and stopped in front of the closed door. “I knew it—they locked it this afternoon to keep me from going back in.”

She tried in vain to turn the handle. Leaning against the door panel, she began to hit it with all her might. After every blow she waited, knowing, however, that no one would answer and how foolish her continued effort was.

All at once, a name came out of nowhere—a voice taking care not to frighten her. She stopped to answer, her voice barely registering surprise. A vague worry swept over her attentive, frozen face.

“Maud. What are you doing here? Are you crazy? I’ve been waiting for you all day. You left like a thief this morning.” George Durieux. He was laughing, happy to have found her again, but she looked at him gravely, not understanding why he was there.

“Oh, thank goodness it’s you. I wasn’t expecting you, you know.”

In the glow of his flashlight, he saw that she was pale, with a gaze that revealed an extreme fatigue. His laugh was suddenly cut short.

She took refuge against the door, as if expressing with her body what she didn’t have the strength to say. He was embarrassed by her odd behavior. “What do you want? Say something!”

“George, I would like you to open this door. I promise that tomorrow I will explain everything to you, but for the moment, open this door. They’ve closed it, and I’m tired.”

He rattled the door without succeeding in opening it. “You can see it’s not going to open,” he said, shaking his head. “Listen, listen to me, will you…” She left after making a sign for him to wait.

He heard her go down the path that led to the abandoned greenhouse in the main part of the building and ferret around in the big mass of scrap metal and wood below the shed. He stayed where he was, unable to resist her request.

It was late. What was she doing still outside? Wasn’t it clear? She’d been running around with someone. John, perhaps…? He suddenly wanted to leave. When he recalled how naturally she had offered herself to him the night before, he was overwhelmed by disillusionment.

She appeared, moreover, not very concerned about him. As she hadn’t come back up, he imagined she must be groping around in the dark. Suddenly remembering the logs that the tenant famer had piled above the scrap metal, he worried that the pile might have fallen on her. He imagined her struggling under the wood and ran toward the stairs. Then, by the feeble light of his flashlight, he saw her come back up, with a bar of iron in her hand. “Here, do it with this!”

George shoved the bar into the crack that separated the two door panels, and it opened with a loud bang that echoed into the empty rooms. When he saw her in the bright light, he noticed the upheaval in her features and the change that had brusquely occurred in their expression. Maud’s gray eyes had almost disappeared under her swollen eyelids, and the very appearance of her face seemed ruined. Her mouth, pale and chapped, wet strands of hair strewn all over, and the big dirty stain that soiled her damp dress all made her unrecognizable.

His feelings for her were no match for this challenge. He didn’t even try to understand. He stood in front of her without moving.

She lay down, pulling the sheet up under her chin in a childlike, egotistical movement that shoved him firmly out of her thoughts. She asked him something, her eyes half-closed. He drew the heavy curtains, then lit a little oil lamp on the night table, filling the room with a flickering glow.

At last he sat down near the pedestal table and, as Maud had done the night before, examined the room, looking mechanically at this sad, luxurious decor. Usually she received him in the dining room. Everywhere a thick layer of dust was visible, from the canopy on the four-poster bed to the garnet-colored curtains.

She didn’t say anything more. Her breathing was so regular that he thought she was asleep, and suddenly this sleep represented all of human perversion for him. She was hiding from his questions. “Maud, are you ever going to say something to me?”

She stretched painfully but smiled, refreshed by this first plunge into sleep. “I’m sure it’s the Pecresse woman; I saw her this morning at the end of the lane when I was leaving your place…” He jumped up and pushed her to answer his questions in a voice that was curt and crisp.

“At what time did you leave…? How did they make you understand that…?”

He didn’t wait for the answer, finally deducing, through his questions, what she had hidden from him. Then, with a gentler voice, he queried, “You ran away from them, didn’t you?” Without speaking, she hid her face in her pillow.

Standing at the foot of her bed, he watched her sleep. His long silhouette leaned over to see her better. She seemed to be watching him ironically, through her thick eyelashes, the shadow of which the light of the little lamp lengthened right down to her cheeks. He would never have thought that a sleeping face could have such a moving profile. The thought that she had slept a whole night at his side troubled him as much as if he hadn’t known her.

She had been courting danger for weeks now, but what had he done to deserve her silence? He naturally shied away from her.

Occasionally the room was refreshed by a waft of air from the poorly shut door. Maud turned over and over again in bed. From time to time she smiled or murmured some indistinct words.

For the first time, George thought wearily about the next day. He calculated precisely the violence of the crossfire that The Pardal and the Pecresse woman were aiming at Maud and would have liked to escape it.

A deep peace still reigned over the countryside and the grounds. George left, suddenly worried that with the arrival of dawn someone might find him there. The frosty air gave off an earthy smell. He breathed it in with all his might. A feeling of freedom overtook him. Wasn’t he being a little ridiculous? He was going to have some problems with the family, but it was in Jacques’s best interest to spare him… the unfolding of events would help him; the Tanerans would not take long to leave. Uderan would be sold. Maud would disappear.

Yet for an instant, he wished that she would reappear one more time before their departure.

CHAPTER 14

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY. MAUD HAD SPRUCED HERSELF UP, washed the stain off her dress, and arranged her hair. As soon as she was outside the house, the heat soaked into her body and did her good.

On the road to the tenant farmer’s home, the trees projected rounded and already shortened shadows, indicating it was close to noon. On each side of the road, a series of small hills stretched out, of which the pathway lined with fruit trees in the middle of the Uderan plateau constituted the central backbone.

The old Uderan house was partially hidden from Maud by the curve in the road. Too big, almost unusable, it featured sprawling bare walls on which, at regular intervals, high windows with blinds were lined up. On account of these walls, no longer in alignment, and the bumpy roof, one might have said that it had succumbed to the pressure of an inner force that it once resisted. Fundamentally, though, it was still quite solid. It had been built by wealthy farmers from The Pardal and represented the patience and frugality of farm folk. People in The Pardal said that five brothers and sisters had contributed to the cost of its construction at the end of the seventeenth century. Much later, the property had been bought by a bourgeois landowner who had planted the grounds around it.

Now the local farmers laughed at it because Uderan had never fallen into good hands. What they were envious of was the land around it, because little by little, through the centuries, they had become indifferent to all forms of riches but those that yield a profit. “I ask you, who would want to live in it! It would hold ten families, not to speak of the land. But you would have to look pretty far to find a buyer for the house…” Only the Pecresse woman wanted to move her son there, not finding anything worthy of this genius in the towns of Semoic and The Pardal.

The tenant farmer’s wife spotted Maud and promptly came toward her. Mrs. Dedde was dark-haired and still young, with a glowing, fine-featured face revealing minuscule veins crisscrossing her cheeks. She had aged considerably and lost weight in the last ten years, and the softened flesh around her arms looked like a piece of overripe fruit, while on her neck, small, silky creases now formed when she spoke.

She was rather surprised to see Maud at such an unusual hour but kept from showing her curiosity… “Can I offer you something, Miss Maud?”

“That would be lovely, Mrs. Dedde, whatever you have.” Maud blushed in spite of herself.

The woman served her and was happy to see her drink down a cup of café au lait with such satisfaction. While attending to her work, she kept glancing over at Maud. She had known Maud as a child and liked her well enough, although the girl probably wasn’t too much to her fancy. She preferred Henry to her, because the tenant farmer’s wife had been there when he was born and had nursed him at the same time as her daughter.

“What’s that sound?” asked Maud. “Is that the animals?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Dedde replied, “my daughter is at mass, and the animals are anxious to get outside in this beautiful weather.” Then, in the most natural way, she went on, “By the way, I think your mother was looking for you yesterday; she seemed very worried, the poor woman; she had no reason to, as I told her. How nervous she is these days!”

“It’s because my brother changed his mind,” Maud said brusquely. “He no longer intends to stay here. Hadn’t you heard? You can understand that it bothers Mother, after all the expenses we have incurred recently… As for me, I think we should sell now.”

“I don’t like to say it, miss, but your mother lacks authority. Don’t you think she should have realized it was time to sell? And those pieces of furniture waiting at Semoic? It hurts us, too, to hear what people are saying… Mrs. Pecresse came to tell Dedde that she herself had paid for them and doesn’t want anyone going after them. If she had only said it to us… But that Pecresse woman is doing everything she can to harm you. It surprises me that she does that, because she’s intelligent and it’s not in her interest to let you go.”

Maud didn’t leave, even though she had finished eating. The farmer’s wife noticed her staring at the Pecresse place. The young woman thought it useless to explain why she wasn’t at mass, that she was afraid of running into her family there.

Mrs. Dedde went out for a moment and came back with a big bucket, the contents of which she poured into a pot. “Look! My girl’s coming back already from the first mass!” She seemed to be reflecting and struck the joyful tone of someone who has found the exact words she wants to express. “I forgot to tell you, Miss Maud, that your friend Louise Rivière is on holidays here. Maybe you could go and see her.”

As Maud headed slowly toward the door, Mrs. Dedde muttered, “You know, when it comes to eating, whenever you like, miss…” Maud turned around and forced herself to smile. The farmer’s wife had guessed something, and the young woman was troubled.

She decided to go and see Louise Rivière. Since her arrival, Maud had not really visited with anyone, and for lack of anything better to do, this visit would take up her afternoon. Mrs. Dedde was right.

Maud arrived at the edge of the descent formed by the Uderan fields above the Riotor. Instinctively she began to run, but finding it useless to run like that, she slowed down to a walk. The little home of Mrs. Rivière, hanging solidly onto the other side of the valley, did not attract her very much.

Louise was the daughter of a war veteran’s widow, who, by dint of sacrifice, had brought her up very respectably. In fact, she was the only child of the village to have spent time with Maud Grant. And, although Louise had come to Uderan every Thursday, it was possible that it hadn’t interested her that much.

Maud retained a fading memory of this pallid child in her schoolgirl pinafore. Louise missed the fields and the surrounding meadows where she would have liked to play and mingle with the other village children. By means of trickery, Maud would try to detain this girl who frequented the school and amassed in her little pug-nosed head endless pieces of schoolgirl gossip. Maud, for her part, had not yet gone to school and only studied haphazardly with her mother. When she was with the young Uderan girl, Louise remained locked up and silent, her arms crossed behind her back, waiting to be amused. She barely consented, toward the end of the afternoon, to rock a doll, but nervously, as if she were just clowning about. When it came time to return home, she took off excitedly. Maud accompanied her friend to the Riotor and then climbed back up the hill, sauntering around until nightfall.

She didn’t feel any curiosity now at seeing Louise again, only some embarrassment… The two women were finishing lunch. Mrs. Rivière was busy in the dining room and Louise was humming in a rocking chair. Perfect order and simplistic taste revealed the presence of two women alone in the house. Mrs. Rivière stopped short and said with a lack of surprise in her voice, “Well! Here’s Maud.”

She offered Maud two pale and slightly greasy cheeks above the pile of dishes she was carrying. Louise gave a cry of surprise and jumped up noisily, assuming an exaggerated look of contentment. Despite the makeup, which no doubt enhanced Louise’s looks, Maud would have had no trouble anywhere recognizing this small face with its unhealthy complexion, cold eyes, and tight mouth that twisted when she spoke.

“Mrs. Dedde told me that you had come home from Bordeaux, so I came over,” said Maud. Without being invited, she fell into a chair and wiped her forehead with the back of her bare, cool arm.

“How nice of you,” exclaimed Louise. “In fact, I had promised myself to go and see you at the Pecresses’. That’s where you’re staying, isn’t it?”

They exchanged small talk. Between each topic of conversation that was quickly exhausted, the time passed stifling and heavy for Maud. Some stray flies flew around, periodically hitting the windows and falling lifeless below. The oppressiveness of summer bore down upon the house and its surroundings, motionless, almost white with intensity. She would have to wait until the most trying moment of the day had passed, the peak of the heat. Maud didn’t have the strength to leave. And this powerlessness to flee even farther away disheartened her.

Mrs. Rivière and her daughter were amazed to see Maud so silent. They exchanged surprised glances. The mother asked Maud for news of Mrs. Taneran. Maud scrutinized their faces to gauge the sincerity of their smiles, which reminded her of the fixed reading on a barometer. She replied that her mother had never been better.

She then dutifully reminded Louise of their common memories. Did she remember their Thursdays at Uderan, those sad Thursdays? Yes, she had changed, and looked prettier, certainly. The sentences and laughs of the two women flew over Maud’s head like birds you can’t identify but are part of the landscape. She had a hard time registering their words and only succeeded from time to time.

Louise stood out against the window as she continued to rock in her chair. The heat and the sun that had begun to creep underneath the blind on the door rendered her cheeks bright red. She glittered with all sorts of jewelry. She was perhaps only noticeable on account of this showy paraphernalia, and maybe also her well-proportioned body, exceptionally slender and agile, with a supple waist, which seemed to invite the touch of a hand.

Beyond the permanent characteristics of her face, Maud finally detected a change in Louise. Likable for no particular reason, Louise had increased in falseness, in flirtatiousness. She overflowed with a fawning affability, already as ingrained in her as in the manners of a grown woman. One felt she had matured through powers of reflection and calculation uncommon in a young woman. At twenty-two, she was not yet married, though two years older than Maud. In the two villages, few claimants would have suited her, on the one hand in terms of her education, which outclassed them, and on the other, in terms of her finances, which were slim, even nonexistent. Still young, she already suffered atrociously from the fear of growing old. She was torn between excessive ambition and the despair of not living up to it. Her evident nervousness made this dilemma both tragic and irritating.

Louise wanted to go to The Pardal and began skillfully trying to persuade Maud to accompany her. The idea of this outing obviously did not please Mrs. Rivière. Louise led her friend outside and briefly explained: “I have to go. It’s really lucky that you came. You have to agree…”

Maud accepted. Louise ran up to the house and when she returned threw herself flat out on the grass. The permission she had just obtained filled her with such violent satisfaction that she felt faint, as well as happy and relaxed, at the prospect of her pleasure.

The hottest hours had passed and the breeze picked up. “You understand, Maud, it’s at the end of vespers. I can’t miss the moment people are coming out… You’ll never guess…” Maud didn’t press her to continue or try to draw out any confidences. She felt calm and her mind was a blank. Stretched out with her arms folded as a pillow under her head, she listened. “You know, Maud, you’re going to be surprised and likely not all that happy. It’s your brother Jacques who is going to be waiting for me at the end of vespers…” Louise’s face became serious, and a certain ferocity appeared.

“It’s all the same to me, Louise; why should I care?” replied Maud.

“Imagine, he came by in the afternoon yesterday. I was watching the cow. He asked me specifically if I had seen you…” Louise paused. Maud didn’t respond, and Louise began again, in a confidential tone of voice. “We talked, and he asked me to come at the end of vespers. We’re going to take a walk together…” Lying flat on her stomach, Louise reveled in her feelings of delight.

Maud, who was looking up, didn’t blink in the sun. Fluffy clouds were gathering in the pure blue sky, which kept changing toward the south. Just contemplating it was a cause for joy. Louise’s voice, frail and piercing, didn’t stop. “Oh, your brother’s a pretty swell guy, you know… And chic! Not like the simpletons around here!”

“What are you trying to say to me?” asked Maud. “If it’s about Durieux, you can go ahead…” Louise smiled stupidly and blushed a little. In reality, that interested her less than her own story.

“Mother doesn’t believe it—she likes you a lot. I do too, in fact, but I would understand certain things very well. I’m very liberated, you know. And then people say such bizarre things about you folks, about you…” She didn’t add anything because Maud found it pointless to encourage her.

Louise rolled over on her back and looked at the sky, her eyes blinking. They really didn’t have anything to say to each other. Both recognized that their friendship no longer existed, that since their childhood, and in spite of what they may have done to encourage it, their feelings had turned into an extreme dislike.

It was a fine day in June, despite the heat. Because of the recent rains, the grass was thick and luscious, and the air gave off the fragrance of sap. Thrushes flew low over the fields and the velvety whir of their wings made a rustling noise. From the tops of the tall poplar trees of the Riotor, goldfinches were singing, infusing the azure sky with their voluptuous, triumphant notes. The cries of other birds rang out far and near, piercing or modulating, and one had to listen carefully to distinguish a single cry from so many. Surrounded by the woods of Uderan, the silence seemed to repose on these innumerable murmurs of birds. Sometimes, similar to the unfolding of a dying wave, puffs of warm air traversed the foliage of the trees.

Without warning, the bells of The Pardal rang out. Not a particle of air escaped their vibration; not a blade of grass or a leaf failed to quiver. As Maud didn’t move, Louise sat up, this time authoritatively. Her mouth tightened with sudden anger, and she cried out, “Well? Vespers are sounding; don’t forget what you promised. If I want to be there when people are leaving, we have to leave right away.”

Maud said simply, “If I hadn’t come, what would you have done? Just run! I’ll take care of your mother if she asks for you.” Louise hesitated and then made up her mind. But before leaving she asked a question she had kept to herself until then, for fear of losing Maud’s complicity.

“Is it true that you’re selling the property?” Maud made an evasive sign. “And it’s because of you? You can pretend the contrary; it’s Jacques who told me. I’m warning you, everyone here is on his side—we know him well. Oh, I know you’re full of pride.”

Standing tall, she glared at Maud, who was still lying down at her feet; never before would she have spoken with such boldness. Now she took such intense pleasure in it that she went beyond her own intention to be mean. She heard herself speak and closed her eyes rapturously after every sentence that she spewed out.

“And John Pecresse’s fiancée? That poor abandoned girl? Do you think she fell into the Dior from Barque’s deck, foolishly, just like that? You’re lucky she has no one looking out for her, filthy lucky…”

Maud felt that Louise was poised at the height of her rage, as if at the summit of a balcony from which she was contemplating her victim. Louise then left abruptly, after having tried in vain to strike a final, masterful blow. “After all, I feel sorry for you! So long!”

Louise ran toward The Pardal, her arms swinging, not once looking back. Maud blinked softly and watched her leave. She again pictured Louise’s small, vicious face, plastered against the sky, vomiting the insult.

CHAPTER 15

LITTLE BY LITTLE, AFTER LOUISE’S DEPARTURE, THE DAY, TOO, began to slip away. On the other side of the Riotor, smoke from the chimneys of The Pardal and the Uderan tenant farm delicately wafted up into the calm sky; after stretching out for an instant, it turned and climbed over the oak forest that overshadowed the village.

The dinner hour was approaching, and Sunday ended at the very moment when the men went in and didn’t come back out. Louise still hadn’t returned, even though vespers had been over for a long time.

Maud wondered what this gentleness that arose with the evening was, so hard on her heart. Without really seeing it, she looked at this landscape where her childhood had unfolded: the majestic pinewood with its stringent layout, as high as a church nave; the Riotor that sank down into the lower prairies like a blade. One could hear its rapid, muffled babbling fill the valley right up to the edge.

Maud thought about the fact that her mother and brothers would soon be coming back from The Pardal. But she was too far away to see them go by. She heard Mrs. Rivière’s door close and the shutters being folded in. The woman didn’t call, but Maud guessed that she came from time to time to the threshold of the door to check the road from The Pardal. She didn’t see Maud, who was waiting in the field behind the house, down below.

How had Maud’s story become common knowledge? Despite what Louise had said, Maud thought it was the Pecresse woman who had been spreading it around. She felt such repugnance for this woman that her own family suddenly appeared gifted with unexpected qualities in comparison. She was sure they hadn’t said anything. Jacques himself remained discreet when it came to his family. They were united by a secret solidarity that made them a real family…

And she herself was part of this clan, no matter what she did. She was tempted to go back, to bring an end to her stupid, wandering attempt to run away. But stubbornness fastened her to the ground. Even more important, she didn’t see what she could do to find her place again in the midst of her family, or how to hold her own beside Jacques and her mother.

What would become of her? Without the daily problems she encountered living at home, she would have difficulty getting used to a peaceful existence. Their general condemnation didn’t frighten her. On the contrary, she believed it to be justified. People who were indifferent and fickle now scared her more.

Her isolation had a greater impact on her than her brother’s meanness, or the unflattering treatment she received from Taneran, whose verbal attacks she could easily ward off. She would have come back to her mother, but Jacques, a formidable opponent, was probably standing guard against the new enemy, emboldened by her mistake.

Disgust kept her from returning, disgust for her brother and for the legitimate grievance he now had against her. What place did this man have in their familiar world, exercising more control every day! Since they had left Paris, he no longer inspired terror in her, because she judged him in a more detached way. It was hard to imagine how this aging child could ever leave his mother and the family that defined him, or the care and honor that surrounded him there. Elsewhere, he lacked boldness, letting himself be terrorized by other people.

It was difficult for Maud to think about Jacques without still feeling a sudden surge of horror. She couldn’t remember being able to look him once in the eyes or daring to confront him alone without trembling. He failed to perceive the repulsion his sister felt for him. Once his anger passed, he always willingly returned to her. This disarming forgetfulness, this self-satisfaction that nothing could disturb, exasperated Maud even more than his insults.

Since the death of his wife, their mutual animosity had worsened to the point that, in a way, their lives were simplified. The memory of the loan Jacques had never repaid and that Maud never talked about irritated Jacques like an unpardonable fault on his part. The night before, lacking in valid arguments, he had used this pretext, unable to countenance the idea that Maud could claim to have anything at all against him.

Until then, no excuse had seemed enough to justify the explosion of a hatred that grew more violent every day. What excuses would have been powerful enough to justify a resentment that had no need of motives? Jacques’s bitterness had become partially unreal or imaginary for them, and they had been ready to accept it, as one does in adopting dreadful but convenient hypotheses that leave one feeling comfortable if they are not examined too closely.

Maud was somewhat unhappy with her own futile behavior, which troubled the peace formerly existing between Jacques and herself.

Louise came back alone from The Pardal, and Maud understood by her demeanor that something upsetting had taken place. She walked toward Maud, cynical and determined. Louise’s eyes were swollen, and her face, bathed now in tears, was changed into a startlingly angry mask, bearing little resemblance to her normal appearance. All radiance had disappeared, suggesting that the glow that usually transfigured her was due only to the feverish expectation of pleasure.

“He didn’t even look at me!” Louise cried out. “He only had eyes for that big, silly goose, the Dedde girl, who was with him and your mother…” Louise’s pronouncement tore Maud from her daydream, obliging her to look at Louise and opine on what had just happened.

“Sit down a moment,” Maud finally said. “You can’t go in looking like that. You were saying that he was with the Dedde girl?”

Louise confirmed her account, shamelessly exhibiting her disappointment. It wasn’t her first letdown. The young people mocked her, and she sought in vain ways to get back at them. “Still, nobody has done that to me. He turned his eyes toward me, yet he didn’t even seem to see me. I didn’t dare approach him, because of your mother.” Maud guessed that Mrs. Dedde, the tenant farmer’s wife, had sent her daughter to inform Jacques and Mrs. Taneran of Maud’s visit. As to Jacques’s uncouthness, it had long ceased to amaze her.

“Don’t cry,” Maud said. “He’ll soon be tired of the Dedde girl and won’t be long in coming back to you. In two or three days at the most, if that’s what you want.” But Louise stood up. “You make me sick!” she screamed. “Maybe you would accept that! Of course you would, because you run around with Durieux, who’s had all the girls in the region after him. Oh, you people have no dignity, you’re just trash…”

On that note, Louise left. Any other words would have surprised Maud, but the sincerity, violence, and spontaneity of this way of talking satisfied her.

After Louise’s departure, solitude once again filled the narrow prairie invaded by shadows. In reality night was slow in coming, but for Maud its onslaught was brutal and decisive. She felt she was suddenly waking up in the dark. Lights shone in the distance on the horizon. The birds had stopped their chorus, but from the surrounding thickets came the chirping of crickets and mysterious sounds of flight. She heard a train whistle in the distance: the last train from Bordeaux, the one that left at nine o’clock. In her childhood, it was usually from a warm kitchen or during a peaceful evening that she heard the call of the engine. It whistled several times at regular intervals, separated by veritable gulfs of silence, at the bottom of which obscure dangers and muffled threats seemed to lurk. The train cars descended the slope of the plateau toward Semoic with the infernal screeching of metal. The curve was dangerous, as it was always enveloped in fog and hidden by the alders of Uderan. One could imagine the sudden appearance of this locomotive monster born of the mist and the woods.

Durieux’s house was reasonably far from where Maud found herself. To reach it she was obliged to descend and then go back up the pastures of the Riotor. She then took the sunken road along the flat part, cut across the fields of alfalfa, and crossed the village.

CHAPTER 16

ARRIVING IN FRONT OF GEORGE DURIEUX’S HOUSE, MAUD stopped short, as abruptly as a machine. At the end of the lane of cypress trees, hiding the front door, a car was waiting. Friends, no doubt, having come from Bordeaux on this beautiful Sunday.

Maud hesitated. No valid pretext to justify her visit to George’s came to mind. Moreover, what excuses could shelter her from the perceptiveness of the visitors, who would guess, she believed, if only from her appearance, her pitiful affair. Her misery seemed to cling to her body like a stubborn smell. Her wrinkled dress, her dirty shoes, proclaimed her situation as well as her face, which she felt was tired and drawn.

Yet she couldn’t make up her mind to leave. Where would she go? She fearfully imagined the coming night, which she would spend trudging through the countryside. The thought of her stuffy bedroom at Uderan made her shudder with disgust. Hunger and fatigue were already tormenting her mind and body. Didn’t she overcome fear, just a short while ago, in climbing back up from the Riotor? After being alone, her own presence tortured her, and she wanted to be with George again.

Making her way halfway up the lane, she waited. George didn’t come out, and time went by without Maud admitting her impatience to herself. A moment passed and the moon appeared. Maud left the middle of the lane and went to lean against the side of the house. After the darkness of the twilight, the gentle light that suddenly illuminated the landscape comforted her.

On the side of the house opposite the one she was on, light shone out the open windows. Inside, people were talking and laughing, but she had trouble picking out George’s voice, which rarely mixed with the conversation. Her weariness was so great that whenever laughter broke out, she felt its impact viscerally in her body, painfully.

No specific thought engaged her mind, but rather, numerous contrary impressions arose, one after the other, disconnected and out of control on account of her weak, confused state. But as all these feelings flowed through her, they left her each time with a greater sense of calm and understanding.

Thus, even though she didn’t consider turning back, her brother’s attitude took on a different meaning in the new order of things she had just discovered. Circumstances alone had defined the man he was, hard and abnormal, capable of all kinds of base acts. She finally grasped the weakness of his defenses against her, against an imaginary danger that possessed him.

Suddenly dogs barked joyfully in the distance and she recognized the twin voices of the Pecresses’ griffons. The pale light of a storm lantern appeared at the top of the path joining Uderan to the Pecresse property. If they were looking for her, she had ample time to flee. The idea that someone was worried about her touched her a little. Tears filled her eyes and traced fresh furrows on her cheeks. They weren’t happy either, over there. No one had ever been happy in her family. They lived in disorder, and their passions gave the simplest events a tragic, singular twist, which increasingly took away the hope of ever possessing happiness.

After making one another suffer, they sought one another out and brought each one back, by will or by force. This final remorse alone demonstrated that they held each other in a certain regard, and that one’s absence would leave a void in the home. These thoughts touched her at first, but it didn’t take long for her to resist her emotions.

No, she wouldn’t go back. It was totally useless now that she understood how their attachment manifested itself. Jacques took pleasure in humiliating his victims; then he did his best to reassure them, so that he would not completely lose them. No, she would never, ever go back.

But hadn’t they called her? The specter of her mother passed through her mind, so tender in her memory, warm like the thought of summer’s return when one is still in winter. Maud didn’t move, but she couldn’t prevent a few tears from falling.

Soon, moreover, the light of the lamp disappeared from the Uderan grounds. A fairly long time passed before it reappeared on the plateau. Those searching for her were probably coming back below the road, along the Dior.

“We’ll see if she’s at Uderan or somewhere on the road,” Mrs. Taneran must have said. “If she’s elsewhere, too bad…” They wouldn’t look for her at George Durieux’s, she knew that much.

Her courage returned all of a sudden. She knocked on the door. As no one answered, she pushed it open and stood without moving on the doorstep, immediately seized by the desire to flee.

In the light that blinded her, she could not pick out anyone at first. After a few seconds, someone noticed her and gave a little cry of surprise. At that point, George came up to her. In his mind, he quickly calculated the immensity of the distress that must have brought her back to him. He had always hoped she would come back, but embarrassed for the moment, he set those reasons aside. As she didn’t say anything, he feared she would escape before he could reach her.

“Come and sit down, come,” he said quietly. The authority of his voice was concealed by the familiarity of his tone.

Once Maud was in the light, he realized that she was beautiful and that people would find her so, despite her strange attitude. He had often picked up wounded animals when he was hunting in the woods. Their expression was identical to Maud’s: a lost, surprised look, with mysterious intensity. It was as if they wanted to communicate an infinitely valuable discovery as they were losing consciousness, and understood the life they could have lived had they been aware of the evil that threatened them and had just killed them.

George felt proud of Maud’s beauty. Even though, in his cruel and thoughtless ways as a man, he might have killed her too, he felt joy to have conquered her again, and he introduced her with confidence. “Miss Grant, you know, from the Uderan estate.”

Maud did her best to try to please him. She stayed quiet and wore a smile on her face like a mask, without it touching her eyes. Now that she found herself at George’s, at the end of her mad dash to get away, she felt good. The guests didn’t interest her; she barely saw them, in fact, but waited patiently for their departure…

CHAPTER 17

THE AFTERNOON WAS THE BEST PART OF THE DAY.

In front of her, the landscape rose in a broad, slow movement right up to the crest of Uderan, and the house looked as if it were staggering under the assault of this wave of land. As she was getting up, Maud caught sight of Uderan in the foreground of this landscape, and beyond it, the Dior valley and the Pecresse home, of which only the roof appeared. The Pardal was below the wave, so to speak, and not visible to her.

She held in her hands a book she wasn’t reading. If perchance someone passed by the gap at the end of the lane of cypress trees, she automatically withdrew from the window, emotionless, and hid behind the wall for a moment; then she took her regular place again…

When George had left, at the beginning of the afternoon, there was no one left but the old servant, who made monotonous noises in the kitchen, downstairs on the main floor. Sometimes she spoke to herself, and it was reassuring to hear her, even if Maud knew the woman was complaining about her. But the woman soon left too, closing the door with the turn of a key, and Maud very clearly heard the muffled sound of her footsteps moving alongside the wall…

The heat stagnated around the house, like a pond. In the beginning, Maud had tried to stay in the main room downstairs, but she quickly gave up and went back upstairs. She desperately needed to see this landscape, which, though partly obscured, reached a distant horizon, and beyond the Dior River, a land flat and full of light, abounding in poplars. On certain days, the heat was such that it literally rose like smoke from the wheat fields and glowed in a huge, vertical expanse of shimmering color through which the landscape seemed to weep.

From time to time, Maud was seized with fleeting anxiety. Someone was knocking on the door downstairs or else the dogs were barking. She woke up from her torpor. The feeling of approaching danger had become a kind of unnerving distraction for her in this undisturbed calm. When she succeeded in reading a little or in concentrating briefly on one thing or another, she found herself afterward in a state of profound stupefaction. The reasons for her flight seemed childish to her. She hadn’t been duped, but she liked to imagine that she had been. A hope took hold in her, and she would easily have laughed or cried out if she hadn’t been so alone. Generally she didn’t read for very long, having a hard time following the thread of the story; the effort quickly discouraged her, despite her typically determined will.

For more than two weeks, no one had come to ask about her. When George went to town, the farmers didn’t show any curiosity toward him. A knowing silence surrounded them. He had learned from them, however, that Uderan had been put up for sale and that several buyers were interested. But they were careful not to say anything about Maud.

He left her alone during the day and came back from Semoic only at dinnertime, staggering from tiredness and sometimes a little drunk. The dinner took place without him speaking a word to her, acting indifferent to her presence, and barely looking at her when she spoke to him.

One evening when he returned, George found Maud in the room downstairs. Crouched on the sofa, she was looking for a book on the shelf and was embarrassed to be found there by him; she normally didn’t come down until he called for her at mealtime.

They had been unhappy since her return and avoided each other. Maud found as much instability in George’s life as in her own. In the beginning, she hadn’t tried to discover the secret behind his behavior toward her. In fact, she couldn’t imagine any other way of doing things: if he showed pleasure from having her with him, he would lose her. Thus, he observed total discretion, and even if he suffered, that only proved that the experience wasn’t completely in vain and bore at least some bitter fruit.

But that evening, Maud would have liked to speak freely to George, without holding back. The time had come for them to talk, and to put an end, one way or another, to the uncertainty of their lives. Boredom and solitude did not blind her, even though they made her suffer, and she knew that only time would bring a conclusion to their adventure.

But she was disconcerted by George, because he didn’t seem to expect anything from the days that went by. He didn’t talk about staying or leaving and fell more and more into silence. Even during the night, when he came to her, he stayed the same—harsh and inconsistent; as a result, she, too, came to share in his extravagant behavior, with a pleasure that always astonished her flesh and whose dark memories seemed barely perceptible when daylight came.

When he surprised her in the downstairs room that evening, she saw that he was tired and perhaps happy to find her. He brushed his hand across her face, slowly threw his hat on the couch, and then asked her, “What time is it? Do you know? These evenings never seem to end…” He collapsed on a chair near the table, obviously not expecting a response to his question.

“You came in earlier than usual,” replied Maud. “You see, Amelia hasn’t set the table yet. I came looking for a book on your bookshelf because…” She despaired again as she saw him distance himself from her, as little concerned with her presence as if he lived in a dream in which she had no part. However, he loved her. The proof of this was the desperate determination he put into having her each night, without taking the easy pleasure men usually so willingly allow themselves. But whatever she did, nothing counted in his eyes except that certainty that she did not feel strong enough to give him.

Nevertheless, she felt it was up to her to approach him, because he would never make any effort to understand her. Things weighed on him without his trying to react to them. Thus, at Barque’s, she had already noticed, shouldn’t he have gotten rid of John Pecresse for her? By the same token, during a very long month, he had fled her because Jacques had announced to him the engagement of his sister to John. Shouldn’t he have disregarded that and come to see her? Even if he was like Jacques in some ways, he didn’t have Jacques’s stubbornness, and Maud didn’t know quite what to think of him.

“Because?” he asked her, partially standing. “Because you want to read? Why would you want to? You must have a reason…”

“Because I’m bored,” she countered. “Oh, I’m terribly bored, you know! You leave me alone…”

He reflected, and replied in a soft voice, “If I didn’t leave you, our situation would be even worse. All you can do is be patient.” She didn’t fully understand the meaning of his words but guessed he was trying to speak kindly.

“So, what do you like to read? If you like, I can bring you some books from Semoic.” She grabbed the cover of the old hardback book and read aloud, “The Valley of the Moon. It’s by Jack London.”

“You haven’t read that?” he said. “You should read, Maud; you have nothing else to do here…”

“I don’t have much fun reading. Or else I have sudden urges to do it…,” she confessed.

George shook his head like someone digesting upsetting news. “I saw your brother Jacques at Semoic. He’s incredibly bored. I think that’s why he was so solicitous. He doesn’t care about scandal and has no self-esteem. He’s a despicable person. It makes me sick to let you go; you can’t imagine what it’s like… all the more so because he’s probably angry at you. You should have gone back to Paris a lot sooner; you’re the one holding them back…”

Once again, without seeming to do so, he was asking her the question in theory. She stopped him with a small, dramatic gesture. “I’m sure that if they aren’t leaving, it’s in order to sell Uderan. They wouldn’t put themselves out for me. Don’t give me that…”

He got up. She hadn’t responded, not yet. It was likely she wouldn’t stay. He made a weary motion and added with a calm and resolute voice, “I’m going down to the river, Maud, while I wait for dinner.”

She tried to hold him back and ran after him. “Just a minute, George, just a minute.” He looked at her for a moment, in the muted and sulfurous light of the setting sun: her summer dress, faded and too short, revealed her smooth bare legs in her black city shoes; her long, lifeless hair hung in disorder. Her eyes were truly an indescribable gray, which in the bright light showed off her slightly mauve pallor; that precious skin, more than living, was delicately active, only letting the most discreet nuances of her blood filter through the blues and the mauves… For the first time, he saw in her a deceitful look, in a pleading face with a forced smile.

“If you’d like, George, I could go with you. It’s going to be night soon; no one will see us…” He came back to her, caressed her hand and kissed it. “I haven’t gone out for two weeks,” she pleaded. “You don’t seem to understand. We could walk together until dinner, as we did in the past…”

He shook his head, remaining intransigent, and was a bit surprised that she insisted so much. He suddenly saw in her such beauty that it was, in itself, enough of a promise. This beauty was still unknown to her, moreover, and to most of the people who knew her, but the greatest of beauties needs to know herself in order to assert herself.

He refused to let her accompany him. “In a little while you won’t remember anything, whereas for me… You suspect as much, don’t you? Please forgive me for the nights… When I come home from Semoic, I have to admit, it’s impossible for me not to go up and find you—as long as you’re here, between these four walls…”

She lowered her eyes and didn’t insist anymore. In moving away from her, he thought that, even if she was still innocent in many respects, she was neither sugary nor sentimental like most girls her age. He was amazed at her slightly disdainful candor and her refusal to lie to him.

When he reached the road, at the end of the cypress tree lane, he turned around. She was still there. He remembered he had something serious to tell her and came back.

“I don’t know why I would hide from you a matter that concerns you. Uderan has been bought by the Pecresses… bought, in a manner of speaking. They’re crazy. They’re rich, of course, but all the same!… They must have put everything they had and even what they didn’t have into it. The conditions of the sale are outrageous…”

“I’ve been ready for anything, and I admit that I suspected something,” responded Maud.

“They say your mother is quite short on money; she’ll still be keeping the house in her name, as well as all the land except the vineyards, which she handed over. The Pecresses agreed to take over running everything and to pay her a usage fee, which the Deddes never paid. They also consented to an advance of almost fifty thousand francs on the purchase of the vineyards.”

Maud thought of the Deddes. What would become of them? “The Deddes left last week,” continued George. “I saw the daughter the night before last, at Barque’s; your mother gave them something to compensate them.”

When she was alone again, Maud mechanically picked up the book she had chosen. As she was going upstairs, the servant was entering the dining room to set the table.

Why did George find his revelations crazy? Certainly, the terms seemed advantageous for her family. But wasn’t her mother skillful in business affairs? It certainly didn’t surprise Maud. With the Deddes gone and the property divided up, everything would go downhill from there.

She thought of the radiant sunset, and of her missed walk along the river that was so green in the evenings and reflected the old elms of the Dior meadows. She could walk for hours in the valley, on the damp riverbanks, without getting tired of the strong odor of land and water and of the marsh where the waste of the summer was already rotting…

With her face in her pillow, she sobbed for a long time, her visage half-turned toward the window open to the western sky, already being deserted by the sun.

CHAPTER 18

ONE DAY SHE DECIDED TO VENTURE ALONG THE ROAD TO THE Pardal. June was coming to an end. The harvests were waiting for the reapers. Only the vines, spread out on the sides of the hills, were still turning green under the brilliant light, preferring the more tender and dreamy light of autumn to ripen.

The men were waiting in their cool houses to emerge once again in the full light of day, once summer had drawn to a close. Nothing troubled the torpor of their surroundings and of the countryside except, from time to time, the flowing shadow of a cloud passing by, very low and at an unusual speed, as if fleeing the disturbing calm of the sky.

Lovely rows of poplars alternated with small dark hedges of wild rosebushes, dividing the region into checkered patterns of gradated green, varying according to the direction the hills faced. Below, in the shadow of elms and alders that cast the noble hue of their pale foliage over the anonymous luxuriance of other trees, all uniformly dark, the Dior flowed quickly by…

Once outside, Maud didn’t know what to do. She sat on an embankment and waited. Little by little she was seized by the same despair as in her room; she waited in vain for the end of the afternoon. Nobody passed by on the road, and evening came.

In the sky, a few clouds accumulated like fluffy sheep. There was no wind. Occasionally the lowing of a cow came from afar and gave Maud a start; filled with grass, tired of grazing, producing long, muffled ruminations, the animal was asking for its stable. Alone in the sky, the crows traced the irregular lines of their flight. Flying high, they broke the silence with their hoarse calls, vaguely announcing that angry times were coming, although it wasn’t clear whose anger or against whom it was directed. Certainly, no people passed by.

The clay road was beige. Almost the whole expanse of the sky was also beige, a light beige hanging over Maud’s head, thicker near the horizons close to the mud. Soon the birds also went to sleep; from time to time, one of them, uneasy with its location, would fly, worried, toward a neighboring bush.

A contrite dog headed home, slowly and wearily, like a human. As he passed by, he encountered Maud with his lifeless eyes, which made him look like a thing among other inert things.

The young woman set out again. Now the light that the sky poured onto the countryside no longer hurt her. Walking down the road, she looked back from time to time to take in all the scenery around her. Suddenly she found herself face-to-face with George Durieux.

She muffled a cry, because she hadn’t expected him, while George, for his part, looked at her with great uncertainty. In the gentle, subdued light, he took on an appearance that she didn’t recognize. He had the bearing of a farmer and the stance of an animal ready for a fight. He wasn’t doing anything, as usual, and his huge, useless strength got in the way of his breathing and his gestures.

“You were coming home? It’s crazy, but you frightened me…” Composing herself, Maud smiled and put her hand flat against his chest. With this unexpected gesture she protected herself from the strange presence that broke into her solitude.

He was caught up at first in his emotions but then spoke roughly to her. “You were making off again, weren’t you? Admit it…” She couldn’t believe she had run into him; she thought he was at Semoic. What was he doing hanging around the house instead of coming in? And those knocks on the door? Had she been dreaming?

“No, I just came outside,” she muttered. He looked disconcerted. She turned away somewhat so as not to look at him. “Come with me for a moment.” He followed her, knowing, nevertheless, that he had been fooled and that she would soon be emboldened by her desertion.

They went in. While she closed the shutters, she heard him murmuring, “I love you, Maud. I’ve been so unlucky with you…” The servant had gone. Maud went to the kitchen to prepare drinks.

What did she want? He thought about the night below the shed, when she had set about looking for the iron bar with the same determination that now hardened her looks, chiseling a deep wrinkle into her forehead, so unusual on her face. He would never have come to her if he hadn’t first met her on the path and been invited in. Now, however, because he had met her… Maybe she would stay, after all, for she never spoke about leaving; he never pushed her to decide one way or the other—in fact, it was just the opposite. Maybe, even though she wasn’t happy, she had decided to stay. That was what he wanted—for her to decide on her own.

“Maud!” He called as loudly as if she had been very far from him. She guessed that he wanted her, and wanted her to come to him right away, feeling the return of his boldness and intoxicated with the dizziness his newfound confidence gave him…

She reappeared, carrying a tray full of drinks. He took it out of her hands, set it down randomly, and taking her by the shoulders, toppled her over onto a chair in front of him. She said nothing. A kind of curiosity made the gray of her eyes sparkle—a gray full of light, not like lifeless metal, but like mercury ready to flee, a gray that made gray the very color of passion. She let herself go with the natural, animal-like feebleness of the female who lends herself to male desire, even when she doesn’t feel it spontaneously herself.

Usually when he came into the bedroom, he would slide toward her in the darkness, and it was she who would facilitate his pleasure. He would moan with terrible rage, and in those moments, she felt she was the strongest…

When he pushed her over onto the chair, she thought he was going to talk to her, but all he could do was repeat her name with a panting voice whose varied intonations expressed the cruel alternation of his despair and his love. She stayed immobile, her shoulder slightly raised, her hands open on her knees, while her lips slowly parted and a fine, shiny white blade appeared.

Suddenly he burst out laughing; what he didn’t dare admit, he hid under this loud laugh: “When you leave, Maud, do you know what I’m going to do?” She didn’t flinch. “Do you know what I’m going to do?”

Why did he evade all their moments of pleasure? She wouldn’t understand until much later. Springing up, she grabbed his shoulder and gave him her mouth. But he broke away and exclaimed, “What do you want me to do? There won’t be anything left for me to do, just like now, I’ll be incapable of taking you back.”

He kissed her, but almost without desire. Maud kept herself from giving him, even for an instant, the mad hope he desired. Lying can become such a common occurrence that a lie can escape from one’s lips without one enduring any suffering as a consequence. But Maud was weak when it came to lying—even if she willed herself to do it, her words would have betrayed her.

Their joined lips were cold, but they preferred this contact to that of their eyes, which fled from each other… “Anyway, I don’t care,” mumbled George, “just as I don’t care about suffering. When someone despises themselves as much as I do, it’s perhaps the only thing that gives you a little dignity in your own eyes…”

She sank into his arms, and between his legs, sliding her head against his shoulder. His veins pounded heavily against her ear. She was sad, sadder than him, and felt only contempt for herself. Her took her, mechanically, for the last time.

He didn’t even show up anymore for meals, which were served to Maud in her bedroom, and he inflicted on her from that point on the torment of absolute solitude. She felt dreadfully weary. Her tiredness grew from day to day; soon she could not eat the meals that the servant brought up to her and had to lie down for several hours at a time. George inquired as to what she wanted to eat; he thought she was bored and was showing her discouragement this way.

The old servant found her lying on her bed with a terrible paleness. “If you want, I’ll tell monsieur you’re not feeling well…,” she offered. Then, stopping herself, she became fearful—fearful that Maud would hang on to this master whom she adored. The servant lied, in a soft voice. “I think it’s this heat,” and then: “It’s no kind of life staying shut up all day long…”

However, it was by virtue of the old woman’s embarrassed look, of someone wanting to flee, that Maud understood she was pregnant.

CHAPTER 19

GEORGE SLEPT ON THE DINING ROOM COUCH AND LEFT FIRST thing every morning.

Maud hesitated. Should she tell him? Even if she no longer loved him the way she once had, he still had all her esteem. He would have married her if she had consented to it. The whole problem was with her, with her lack of will. Wasn’t it unworthy of her to agree now to what she had refused?

Moreover, she still intended to leave. The idea that her family might have left frightened her. Her child was not yet detached enough from her life for it to count more than she did.

She was served her meals quite early, so that George wouldn’t be home yet. The servant hid from her master that the dishes came back almost intact, so he stopped worrying. Maud’s boredom finally reached such depths that the thought of her child no longer occupied her mind. As her doubt disappeared, she thought of it even less.

She stopped reading. The things she thought about had no relationship to her present life. She became absorbed in memories that suddenly distinguished themselves from others, for no apparent reason, and took on the strange proportion of nightmares.

Very early one morning, she was awakened by repeated knocking on the door. George opened it; he said something she didn’t understand. She jumped out of bed and got dressed in haste, not being able to hurry as much as she would have liked because her hands were cold and she was trembling. For three weeks she had been waiting, hidden away in this narrow room. And now it had happened: someone, abruptly, remembered her.

George called her with a strangled voice, and she noisily pushed open the bolt on the door, to show that she was up. As soon as she was dressed, she opened the shutters. The day was just beginning to break, turning the horizon green. Since the beginning of her exile she had lived off the vision of this landscape, but because she had never seen it at the crack of dawn, she didn’t recognize it right away. She stopped a moment to look at it and then resolved to go downstairs.

In the dining room the awakening day entered by the open door, so indistinct one couldn’t predict what kind of day it would be, while dark shadows still reigned in the far corners of the room. George had dressed hastily in an old pair of pants and a shirt pulled across his chest with a shiver. His messy brown hair gave him a rough-and-tumble look. Standing near the couch, he remained silent.

In front of him, Mrs. Taneran was seated. As usual, she wore a long black dress. A hat with a brim that was too large hid her face and somewhat crushed her silhouette. Beside her, on the ground, was a traveling bag. Without lifting her head, she said calmly, “So, are you coming down?”

On hearing her mother’s forced voice, Maud imagined that her brothers were waiting behind the door, on the lookout for her appearance. The creaking of the stairs beneath her feet soon exasperated her. Her throat was as dry as if it had been made of stone.

Instinctively, she mustered her strength. The effort prevented her from seeing George, who was looking at her, and caused her to forget him.

Partially concealed by her big hat, Mrs. Taneran’s features did not stand out the way they usually did. Her eyelids were swollen with sleep, and to avoid lifting her eyes to look at Maud and George, she focused on the ground. But her emotions could be guessed by the redness of her neck and the quiver of her pursed lips. She tried to control herself, but she was too old to hide an emotion inscribed on her bruised flesh that made her look even more pitiful.

Maud considered her mother a moment, then drew so close that Mrs. Taneran could not hold back a nervous gesture. Standing up, Maud’s mother declared, “No, you’ve hurt me too much.” Then, turning toward George, more embarrassed than she would have liked to appear, she continued. “You’re going back to Bordeaux soon? I hope you will not prolong your holidays any longer…”

George gave a polite bow. “Don’t worry, I’m leaving…” He might possibly have liked to say something to Maud, but he felt hindered by the presence of this older woman.

He accompanied them both to the doorway, and when they were barely out, the door closed curtly. Maud perceived the noise of the latch. She thought she would come back someday, at a time that would have nothing in common with what was happening now, a time of peace and sadness.

The night had not totally vanished; the countryside was without shadows and gently lit by a light arising in the east, from a gash in the sky and clouds. Mrs. Taneran announced, “It’s four thirty. If we walk quickly, we’ll get to the train for Bordeaux by six o’clock.” To Maud’s surprise, no one was waiting for them.

On each side of the lane, which was white with dryness, the tops of the cypress trees, of a faded green, moaned gently in the breeze that lapped at them with little swigs. Maud walked behind her mother. As on the day she ran away, she was wearing nothing but a summer dress. She was cold. Mrs. Taneran didn’t notice, absorbed as she was in her thoughts. “Your brothers are on the road, by the Pecresse house,” she said shortly. “They’re coming with us to Bordeaux. I have some errands to run there…”

Her tone was almost familiar, although she still feigned a refusal to look at her daughter. She walked quickly and Maud had to step up her pace. Then, automatically, she took her mother’s traveling bag. At first, she felt a resistance, but her mother’s fingers suddenly let go; their eyes met for a second; they still had nothing to say to each other, but by mutual agreement, they sped up a little. Behind them, clusters of dust rose and swirled for an instant. Leaving The Pardal on the right, they turned off onto the hollow road and passed alongside the Uderan grounds.

At that point Mrs. Taneran declared, “I’ve sold the proper ty to the Pecresses, who will take it over as tenant farmers; it’s a very good deal. I keep the majority of my rights. It would have been hard for me to let go of my precious house at my age… Fifty thousand francs,” she exclaimed. “They gave me fifty thousand francs in cash. That’s excellent, you know…”

Maud continued to walk with her head down, without responding. Her mother’s indulgence astonished her. Without directly referring to their quarrel, her words erased it: “It doesn’t seem to surprise you that I came looking for you…”

Maud murmured, “It was time that you came…”

Mrs. Taneran could barely hold back a sign of satisfaction. “That worked out well! I suspected you had had enough. Personally, I thought he was too old for you. I wanted to tell you—here people don’t know you were staying with Durieux… You didn’t go out, you were careful, that’s good… The Pecresses know and have kept quiet. You will come to know them; they’re good people… So, I was saying that… We’ve left to get you, you are coming from Auch, from your aunt’s, Taneran’s sister, do you hear? At whose place you have just spent a couple of weeks… Afterward, well afterward, you will have to accept what we tell you, because you have seriously compromised yourself…”

Mrs. Taneran blushed. “John Pecresse adores you; he’ll overlook everything…”

It was extraordinary: Maud hadn’t thought about that yet. Without waiting any longer, she opened up with what was tormenting her. “It’s impossible, don’t even think about it; I’m expecting a child.”

Mrs. Taneran stopped, her eyes bloodshot, and looked at her daughter without seeing her; she pulled her hat off her head and threw it down; then, covering her eyes with her hands like someone seized by vertigo, she gropingly sought the embankment and collapsed. A minute went by, then two minutes, and Maud became fearful. The state of dejection she had lived in for weeks now brusquely stopped. She thought she saw frightening signs on her mother’s face. Maud took her in her arms and began to kiss her dress and her arms, as if this explosion of love could pull her mother from an ending she suddenly found so appealing. But it was purely Maud’s imagination, for Mrs. Taneran, having passed through a series of emotions in a few seconds, including terror, despair, and the desire to give up living, quickly recovered. She came back to reality, gently, strangely, the way sick people recover their health. She took Maud in her arms and then held her away from her and considered her with unspoken tenderness. And she forgot the role that she was supposed to play.

“Don’t cry. I’ve just been suffering from dizzy spells lately. The blood rushes to my head and makes me suffocate… So, you’re expecting a child? This marriage with John Pecresse, you can be sure it’s not my idea… It’s Jacques’s. I know he did it for the good of all of us, but still it’s been hard for me to accept… What could I have done? I knew you were at Durieux’s place, but he never wanted me to go there for fear I would raise suspicions…”

She took a small breath before adding, “He’s more cautious than I am, of course. Now what will become of us? I’ve already received and considerably dipped into the fifty thousand francs. Yes, I had to repay the furniture! And then Jacques had debts…”

She didn’t stop caressing Maud, who wept like a fool; she stroked her shoulders, her arms, her hair… “We’re going back to Paris, don’t worry! Durieux will come and get you. I’ll come back here alone. For the moment, that’s all there is to do.” They set out again.

At the bend leading to the national highway, two silhouettes of the same height suddenly appeared. Maud recognized her brothers. They were losing patience. “You think it’s funny to make us wait in these conditions…,” started Jacques.

His mother cut him off. She explained to her sons that they were going back to Paris. They accepted without trying to understand, happy to leave, exhausted from having gotten up so early in the morning. “We just have enough time,” said Mrs. Taneran.

Maud began to walk on the left embankment, a little apart from the others. On the road, their footsteps rang out with a strange sound in the surrounding silence. Soon a crossroad appeared. There was a white cross and a sign: La Rayvre. Beyond it, the road sped down a steep slope.