The Grass
Claude Simon
Translated by Richard Howard
English translation copyright © 1960 by George Braziller, Inc.
Originally published in French under the title L'Herbe © 1958 by Les Editions de Minuit
No one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow.
BORIS PASTERNAK
The Grass
"But she has nothing, nobody, and no one will mourn for her (and what's death without tears?) except
maybe her brother, and he's an old man now, and probably no more than she would mourn herself, I
mean would allow herself to mourn herself, decide it was decent, was suitable to . . ."
"But she's not related to you, why do . . ."
"No," Louise said.
"She's not related . . ."
"No," she repeated submissively. But she continued looking at something in front of her which he
could not see.
"Well then . . ."
"Then nothing," she said (still staring through the trees, across the fields of that calm September
landscape, at whatever it was he could not see). "Nothing: she never married. Maybe it never occurred
to her that she could, that she had the right—with that brother fifteen years younger than she was and
whom they (she and the other sister, the one who's already dead) brought up, whom they managed (by
figuring out a way to wear a dress about three times longer than it was meant to be worn, down to the
last threads of the cloth it was originally made of) to make into a Professeur de Faculté, which, for two
schoolteachers whose father and mother barely knew how to read or perhaps not even that, must have
seemed worthwhile giving up everything to which a woman might normally claim to be entitled, and
when we were married, Georges and I, she gave me this ring, she made me come to her room (and that
was the first time I smelled that odor, that fragrance, like the smell of a dried rose or rather— since a
dried rose has no odor—the smell you imagine it should have, I mean, something musty and fresh at
the same time, and I looked at her table, her dressing-table, but there was nothing on it except four
pins and a bottle of cheap eau de Cologne, and still it smelled like a flower, like a young girl, the way
the room or rather the tomb, the sarcophagus of a young girl might smell if she had been preserved
intact though ready to fall into dust at the least breath), and then she rummaged around in a drawer
and took out not a jewel box, not even one of those steel boxes like the kind they sell in hardware
stores for farmers and stock-raisers who don't want to put their money in the bank, but a biscuit tin or
a cookie jar made out of tin and speckled all over with rust spots, and on the lid a young woman
wearing a long white dress, half reclining on the grass in a pose that was languorous and rigid too,
with just the toe of her foot, or rather her slipper, showing beneath the last pleat, modest and absurd,
and lying beside her (she was holding the same box in her hand, and the same image was repeated on
the cover) one of those small, curly, white dogs, the whole thing (the lady, the poodle, the meadow) in
a frame of flowers and periwinkle-blue ribbons and . . ."
"But…"
"No, listen: of course there wasn't any key and the only thing that kept the tin closed was a long
piece of string wrapped maybe twenty times around it, so that it took her a moment or two to get it off,
then pressing the tin against her body while those clumsy, stiff hands of hers struggled with the lid,
trying to open it—and I could still smell that odor of flowers, a young girl's fragrance, glancing
around for the glass bell, the bride's tiara, looking, but there wasn't anything. Nothing but that
intoxicating and probably imaginary fragrance of virginity, of freshness and of accumulated time. No,
not wasted: worsted, or rather surmounted, tamed: no longer that hereditary, omnipresent and
omnipotent enemy you watch, terrified, as it advances and flows past with such pitiless slowness, but
an old familiar travelling companion, perhaps hated and feared once, but so long ago that the
recollection of such fears is like the memory of those childhood panics which now merely make us
smile ...
Yes, I know, it doesn't go together: a young girl, the odor of jasmine, and that body of hers ready to
fall into dust, so familiar with time it seemed to be time itself, and those yellow, fleshless hands—
polished in places like old ivory—struggling against their own clumsiness and the rust of the tin (as if
rust and clumsiness were always merely one and the same thing: the years, time) until she finally
managed to get it open, then rummaged through its contents—not sticky gumdrops but odd buttons,
gold (or gold-plated) chains and old brass shoe buckles—and finally handed it to me: not in a velvetlined box, a case with a famous jeweller's name on it like the one Georges (or rather his mother) had
given me (and yet not really given to me, but given to themselves, making themselves an honorific
present, because I suppose that he—and she —would have considered it a sign of decline if I had worn
something worth less than five hundred thousand francs on my finger . . . And then, even if she
disapproved of his marrying me—although she's never said anything or even let me guess what she
thought—, giving him the necessary five hundred thousand francs or maybe, just to be sure, going to
pick it out herself and not giving it to him until the last minute, before he slipped it on my finger
himself). Not a case, then, just a simple wad of cotton.
Yes, that's the one. And I suppose no jeweller would give me even ten thousand francs for it, but I
wouldn't sell it for twice as much, three times as much, I wouldn't sell it for anything. When I go, I'll
give him (them: him and his mother) all their jewels back; I'll put them in a pile on my dressing-table
when I'm leaving, or maybe I'll throw them in his face, not because he deserves to have me throw
them in his face, but because that's the kind of gesture that helps in moments like that, but I'll say:
"I'm keeping this one." Because she's the one who gave it to me. You understand? She never asked me
for a thing and she gave me this ring, she loved me, just because I was Georges' wife, and I might have
been a whore, a duchess, or a shoplifter, she would have loved me the same way, and without asking
for a thing in return. Because she never asked people for anything, not even that they should love her,
not even permission to love them, any more than she allowed herself to tell them or show them except
in the only way she could imagine, that is, by giving what she could, and even what she couldn't,
managing it so that what she couldn't became what she could. That's why I've stayed, why I haven't
gone before. I would have left Georges long ago, even before I knew you, if it hadn't been for that. I'm
not even saying if it hadn't been for "her," I'm saying: if it hadn't been for "that." And now she's going
to die, and there'll be nothing left" (the voice stopping, suddenly breaking off, and Louise standing
there, panting a little, as if surprised, furious at having talked so much, still staring at whatever it was
that he couldn't see—that he knew he couldn't see, that he wouldn't see, even if he turned around,
staring in his turn over his shoulder in the direction where whatever it was seemed to be, and after a
moment a bird sang, quite near them, then, just as suddenly, the song—a brief series of double notes,
like an arabesque in calligraphy, rapidly doubling back on itself in the repetition of the same
complicated loop, then escaping, rising, stretching out into a long and peremptory paraph, broken off
—stopped and, again, they heard the distant and discordant racket of the sparrows gathering for the
night in the bamboo thicket).
They stayed there until it was completely dark, standing (once they drew nearer, made a gesture, and
she imagined their dark silhouettes mingling, then, a little later—as if it had taken this amount of time
to realize that he was touching her, to be aware of his hands upon her— she said: "No, let me alone,"
her voice hard and sad, yet vague too, and then the larger of the two shadows stepped back, and
between them the sky was once again like a plate of glass streaked every which way by the dark lines
of the branches while the voice rose again—and still that harshness, that vagueness—Louise pounding
her fist furiously into the open palm of her other hand, saying in the darkness, with a kind of
vehemence, an impotent despair: "He promised me we'd get away from here. He promised me we'd
move to Pau, that he ..." not finishing, merely continuing to pound her fist into her open palm,
obviously not expecting an answer, then no longer even pounding) until they could no longer see each
other's faces, their eyes hidden in the thick green darkness beneath the motionless branches, the car
hidden further away, behind the big trees just around the bend (but impossible to hide when they were
crossing the little raked garden, crunching over the gravel between the tables with their white oilcloth
covers, red and white parasols folded now, the two little girls lolling in the chairs, their bare elbows on
the chair arms that were too high for them, swinging their legs, watching them pass, their slippery
eyes following them, their mother not glancing up from her knitting, which was a worse way of
looking at them, still more embarrassing, and sometimes, when they came back down, five or six of
those big-bellied men with their faces red even before starting to eat the paté, the trout, the speciality
of this secluded hotel, patronized only by a few Parisians on vacation, and the fat men,
interchangeable and red-faced, of an indefinable social class, all between fifty and sixty, friendly,
attending conventions or business dinners, one or two near the washstand in the vestibule, washing or
drying their fat red hands, with a signet ring or a gold wedding-band, watching them come down the
stairs, immediately looking away, but not before they had seen, suddenly beginning to talk louder or
pretending to look at the prints, the old plates decorating the vestibule, the stairs, the walls, the rooms
inhabited by the invisible, innumerable, and unappeasable cohort of pale Bovaryesque ghosts), until
no more sounds came from the bamboo thicket that was black now—neither chirping, nor beating of
wings, nor murmurs, nor even rustling—, everything, around them, completely motionless or
concealed now, that is, the world (things, animals, people) not stopping, interrupting its life, but
pursuing its complicated, disturbing, and incomprehensible existence beneath this reassuring and
deceptive form of apparent motionlessness. Like the cat, shortly before: it did not make off, crouching
instead on top of the crumbling wall, staring at her, its legs drawn together, perfectly motionless
(merely a spot, a tiger-striped form among the brilliant jumble of the garden's conflicting shadows,
there where a second before there had been that reddish spring, the lightninglike materialization not of
a body, an animal, but of the very idea of movement, in the tearing across of the sun, then nothing
more), as if it could pass with no transition from movement to immobility or rather as if immobility
were somehow the prolongation of movement or, better still, movement eternalized: probably capable
of that (transforming speed into its motionless representation) at any moment: in the middle of a leap,
of a fall, in mid-air, resting on nothing but time somehow solidified, the solidified summer afternoon
in which the fierce, exuberant vegetation of briars and sunflowers bathed as in a kind of developing
fluid, and the cat too, fierce, cold, circumspect, frozen in that same attitude like a sudden condensation
of speed (just as a stick of dynamite contains a million times its volume of noise and destruction),
pertrified, staring at her, spying on her through those two narrow vertical slits, those lentil-shaped
pupils cats have, piercing and keen as if they were some sort of weapon, extra claws, razor-sharp and
probably capable of tearing and lacerating too, but which, for the moment, were content to spy on her,
the circumspect, cruel, vigilant, and craven stare not wavering, and Louise standing there motionless
in her pale dress, as if the two were confronting each other like two fugitives, two thieves coming face
to face, or rather a thief unexpectedly encountering his own image in a mirror: the sudden intrusion of
a consciousness (not of a priori hostility, not of sympathy either: merely expectancy, suspicion, fear
and aggression coexisting at the same moment) among the fierce unconscious sunflowers, their long
stems interlacing, strangling each other, separating in pale discs against the black background of the
briar patch humming with insects.
From here, at least, nothing more could be heard. Through the trees the car was still visible on the
top of the rise, and, to the left, the window with the closed shutters behind which the old woman was
dying, motionless in her solitary bed, the sheet which was drawn up to her chin rising and falling with
the regular rhythm of that continuous, calm and terrible rattle escaping from her lungs like the
monstrous respiration of a giant, some playful mythological creature which had chosen its residence
in the frail body of this woman in her death agony, so that these slow and interminable bellows could
be heard like the trumpets of the Last Judgment,—dying, diligently dying, concentrated, focussed
(solitary, arrogant and terrible) on the action of dying, in the dimness of the room where the summer's
powdery light penetrated only through the slit between the two closed shutters: a T whose crosspiece,
shaped like a thin triangle lying base upward, corresponded to the interval between the top of the
shutters and the window-frame, and which slowly shifted from right to left, somewhat distended
toward noon, then again diagonally lengthened again, all between morning and evening: like the initial
of the word Time, an impalpable and stubborn letter trailing in the moribund odor, the stale and
moribund fragrance hanging in the air: the smell of cheap eau de Cologne the nurse bathed her in, and
that ineffable, obsolete and ashen odor of faded bouquets which seems to float forever in the rooms of
old ladies, around mirrors reflecting their worn faces, like the discreet, fragile, slightly rancid
exhalation of faded days . . .
"But it's only an old woman dying," Louise said. "That's all . . " Still standing, the grass, the thin
tongues of the grass along her bare legs swaying gently—not the breeze but the warm air in its
indolent eddies—the high timothy, its supple spidery heads waving, licking her ankles, the
multifarious green tongues of the earth, and around her this soft vibration of heat gradually fading, the
outlines of things undulating like algae, the aspen leaves endlessly trembling, swaying, palpitating, the
seven o'clock train coming out from behind the rise, as abrupt as the cat had been, roaring across the
iron bridge, then disappearing behind the grove of trees on the other side of the river, the sound
disappearing too, swallowed up while the trembling of the thousands of leaves seemed to multiply the
silence, fluttering, stippling the mass of trees, the light dividing into an infinity of sparkling particles
alternately offering their silver and green faces, winking, then the sound coming back, very near this
time, while the train ran like a toy across the section of open ground, the series of its old greenish cars
so close you could hear the regular concussion of the wheels against the breaks in the rails, see against
the window-frames the busts of the passengers that looked as if they were cut out of paper and pasted
on the panes, and scarcely had the train disappeared than the brakes began to whine, a long, shrill
sound, rising higher and shriller, jamming, then nothing, the train at a standstill now in the station
behind the trees, the conductor's voice shouting out the station's name, all the compartment doors
hanging open in the fading light, the blinding, low sun, the passengers jumping down, most of them
carrying a briefcase or a small bag, commuters, habitués, the same ones who had boarded the train in
the opposite direction twelve hours before, their same heronlike shadows lengthening preposterously
over the platform but in the opposite direction, and at the end the caboose with the bank sacks, as on
every Thursday, and the two casual policemen, their futile machine-guns under their arms, talking to
the conductor while the sacks were being thrown into the wagon, the insects, luminous golden points
circling against the shadowy background of the briar patch, one of them projected into the light,
making a gray-mauve S with jagged edges, descending from the top of the wall just in front of the pile
of debris where the cat was still crouching, the insects still circling, mingling the unforeseeable
pattern of their flight, the unforeseeable skein with unforeseeable and sudden changes of direction, a
three-dimensional divagation, as if they were compelled to fly without a purpose, without respite,
around an invisible epicenter, continuing heedless in the descending sun, heedless and, even after it
had disappeared, silhouetted later, gray and impalpable, against the sky going from green to rust above
the blacker and blacker bushes, heedless of anything except circling in an increasingly vaguer cloud,
as if some torment were forcing them to circle where they were, but that wasn't it, she thought, any
more than any intention makes that hand move back and forth over the sheet, as if the limbs were
taking their revenge, their independence, now that they know she hasn't long to live, already can't
control them, the hand like a chicken foot, yellow and gnarled, the joints of the fingers like little balls
ceaselessly coming and going over the white sheet she was smoothing, pinching it almost
imperceptibly between her thumb and first finger as if to press out imaginary wrinkles, pursuing its
own life, ignorant of the death rattle, the shrivelled face gradually dessicating, assuming day after day
that majestic and timeless aspect of a thing refining, purifying, mummifying, progressively losing its
vulnerable quality of soft and fragile flesh to become like cardboard, an impassive cardboard mask
probably playing a double role, like the ones used in antiquity not only to carry the actors' voices to
the furthest rows, but to confer upon them that impersonality, that abstract inhumanity incarnating not
men and women at grips with passions, with fatality, but passions and fatality themselves, the
immutable rites of death, the immutable and irreversible progress toward death which constitutes the
very warp of all tragedy, of all life, whatever its glorious, burlesque or monotonous episodes,
annotated through the grandiose and ridiculous acts of heroes, kings, incestuous queens, by the
deformed, cyclopian voices, but from here, thank God, you couldn't hear it any more, only the silent,
refreshing and continuous rustling of the poplars, and now the sound of the doors slammed shut (the
conductor running alongside the cars, the two fat policemen with their absurd machine-guns behind
the last passengers, walking through the station gate, still talking, the woman who sold newspapers
and candy noisily pulling down the iron curtain of her stall), and still, over there, in the impenetrable
bamboo thicket, the chirping of the flock of sparrows gathering before nightfall, invisible, discordant,
cheeping, quarreling, and still the heady fragrance of the fallen pears rotting by the thousands on the
ground, the fragrance rising from the useless acres of orchard mounting the hillside, sugary, insistent,
stagnant in the heavy air, like those sheds, those cribs where the September fruit on the newspapercovered shelves exhales that same heavy smell of ferment, sickening and aggressive (Georges had told
her that when they went to spend their vacations with her, or rather with them, the two sisters, since
they were still two then, both already terribly old, even when he was a little boy, so that he didn't
know, didn't remember anything about them except that: old age, both of them thin, wearing dark and
timeless clothes, the two similar faces flaccid and soft with their identical and discreet traces of
clumsily applied grayish powder, their identical yellow hands—then describing the huge, cold house,
as enormous and cold as barracks, where they lived, he said, as though inside a kind of exaggerated
and Pharaonic tomb with its succession of useless rooms, moving their thin and invincible carcasses
from one room to the next under the high ceilings (as if, in inverse proportion to the amount they
shrank and wizened, the cubic measurements of the building increased)—the whole house breathed a
subtle and penetrating smell of mould, of dried fruit and preserve which he had finally not been able
to separate from the sisters, as if they themselves were two fragile, old-fashioned wooden dolls,
growing flyspecked as they slowly dried in the permanent and autumnal odor of pears and apples piled
on the shelves, gradually becoming wrinkled, and exuding something like a trickle of death, of the
distant past, over the old newspapers that served as their beds, with their headlines relating events that
were dead too, out of date, superannuated and without any meaning now), as if the whole countryside
were impregnated with that same decomposing odor against which the drops of eau de Cologne the
nurse sprinkled on the sheets and the spread could make no headway in the shuttered room where the
horizontal bar of the T now stretched out as far as it would go, must be beginning to shorten on the
left, gradually shortened, clipped, devoured, the light impossible to retain, to capture, oblivious of
traps, nets, snares, the dazzling, intricate, and polygonal networks of silk where the great brown
spiders waited motionless, patient and indifferent to the furious and sporadic agonies of the gnats
struggling, exhausting themselves in desperate convulsions, motionless at last between the meshed
stems of the sunflowers, the wild brambles above the breach in the wall where, still watchful, craven
and fierce, the cat was crouching, striped rust and black, in its violent immobility, its overpowering
virtual speed, among the wild tangle of the brambles, above the speckled shade, the fierce
undergrowth, the seething, invading vegetation.
"Nothing but an old woman. An old maid. That's all. Just an old maid about to die of old age in her
bed. If she ever even lived, if all she ever knew about life was anything more than death, if she hadn't
already been dead for years and years. . . ." As if she had never been anything but that (since Georges
swore she had always been the same): a little old woman always wearing those perpetual dark,
interchangable, timeless, and indistinguishable dresses, not even symbols of mourning, of affliction,
but perhaps of intemporality, of inexistence (the black, the dark colors being—unlike white, which
comprises the entire spectrum—a kind of absence, a negation), not having been first a child, then an
adolescent, then a woman, but appearing here on earth one day, eighty-four years ago, just as she had
looked (that was already ten years ago) standing at the gate of the front yard, a delicate black
silhouette with her hat and black gloves, one hand holding a black suitcase frayed at the corners where
the leather was fuzzy and grayish, having walked, in the June sun, the two kilometers between the
station and the estate (and, much more: having just crossed over half of France, or at least its territory,
for the political entity, the nation, was at the time in the process of collapse, rapidly shrinking, like an
oyster under drops of lemon-juice, a peau de chagrin whose limits ebbed behind her, behind the
moving train, or rather trains (she had changed several times), made up of cattle cars, first-class
carriages and even bare platforms, coupled haphazardly by the harrassed, peevish, and terrified
trainmen who at the last minute generally stuffed their own family into the last car still filthy with the
entrails of the animals it had been emptied of (these same animals hanging belly-open and halfbutchered on the posts of the station platforms and what had been hacked away grilling over campfires
along the track, during unscheduled stops in the middle of the countryside), they themselves jumping
inside at the last whistle, leaving behind them the empty stations, the deserted tracks with the signals
jammed, the long perspectives of naked rails vanishing behind the platform in the countryside that
was abandoned too, empty (the fields, the woods, the silent valleys), indifferent, left to the conqueror's
greed, supine in its expectation of the victors, the soft, deep earth with its green, sparkling, calm rivers
unwinding their meanders with an occasional young corpse—as if their bushy banks, their high
poplars, their stone bridges speckled with black moss had been conceived and created for all eternity
only for this, as if to constitute the last vision printed on the retinas of the young men doomed to die,
staring at the slow, idle water, waiting in the green peace of an evening of defeat and the silence of
deserted fields, the flesh heaving in a sudden flash, the brief burning of their death), and she (the old
lady, the old maid, the crumpled little black doll), standing there then, at the front gate, on that June
afternoon, after seventy hours in the irregular trains, the stations, the crowds, the hunger and the thirst
—clean, fresh, without even a wisp of straw on her skirt or her hat, the only indication which might
raise the suspicion that she hadn't come directly from home, and that home wasn't the house next door
but over seven hundred kilometers away, being the faint film of dust graying her black shoes (and here
only in the wrinkles, the cracks of the leather, because she had probably once again, before reaching
the gate, wiped off on the roadside grass the dust gathered between the station and the gate—for of
course she had already taken a handful of straw and wiped off the dust from the trip itself as she
stepped down from the train or even before, standing there with that smile, that expression of asking
forgiveness, a little embarrassed, a little shamefaced, saying: "Wasn't I silly!", saying: "I got
frightened. They wouldn't have done me any harm, of course, but when I heard they were already at
Dole I got frightened," saying: "Can you imagine anyone being so silly? Can you believe it, an old
woman like me . . ." (the scene —it had been described to Louise later—having occurred like this:
some people, a group, calmly sitting under the big chestnut tree, as in one of those impressionist
paintings where men and women in summer clothes are sitting in a cluster of rattan chairs around a
table, and on the table a tray with refreshments, a still life, with a pitcher of lemonade and cups or
bluish-white plates in the deep blue shadow, and the people are silhouetted darkly against the
luminous, shifting and pointillist background of the rest of the garden, all turning their heads together
at the creaking of the gate, staring at her in a kind of stupor, without understanding (the maid no
longer rubbing her red eyes with her apron, the butler with the red face, his color high from
excitement, or emotion, or even, perhaps, from consoling libations—all painted, in the deep shade of
the chestnut tree, by little vermilion, mauve, and blue dabs—, about to say: "It came over the radio ... I
just heard . . . They've crossed the Loire, they . . .", breaking off, he too standing stock still, mouth
open), one of the two dogs lying at the foot of the table standing up, passing from the shadow out into
the light, his brown-spotted coat dark now against the dazzling grass, trotting toward the newcomer,
stopping a few feet away—but not barking—, and the other dog getting up too, joining the first with
that same flabby, lazy, muffled, relaxed trot coming closer, sniffing at her—all this occurring in a
very short interval, that of surprise, of stupor, until the old man (but he wasn't an old man yet then:
just beginning to turn, to be marked by the first signs of all that was gradually, in the course of the
next ten years, to transform itself into so many abusive stigmas (and more than abusive: cruel,
pitiless, murderous), but which for the moment he still held in check: his body merely cumbersome,
not yet distended, his short legs a little heavy too, his face still high-colored, fresh, despite its
wrinkles, the flesh just beginning to work loose, to slip, to cave in) until the old man, or rather the
man who in the next ten years was going to become an old man, stood up, began to run (for he could
run then, not often, his belly jogging over his clumsy legs, but he could do it if he absolutely had to, or
else, as on this occasion, under the effects of a powerful emotion, a shock) toward the slender black
silhouette, saying: "Good God, Marie, how did you . . . saying: "Put down that suitcase, Julien will . . .
," turning back, shouting: "Come on, Julien! What are you wai. . . watching the two servants run too,
emerging from the blue shadow, silhouetted, sculptured in relief now by the sunlight, and the woman
(not old yet either, at least not as near old age as he, dressed in bright colors—too bright —, her face
high-colored too, or rather painted, her hair blond—it was to become tawny, then, still later, red—
now scarcely yellow, a long necklace—too long—jogging over her breast while on her fingers the
rings—too numerous, too large—threw sudden harsh flashes, piercing and mineral, in the soft, vegetal
light of the garden), and then they were all around her: her brother, her brother's wife, and the two
servants, surrounding her, gently pushing her toward the table, the rattan chairs, the butler moving one
forward, and she tugging clumsily on her string gloves to take them off, opening her bag, taking out,
not as might be expected a filthy rag, grayish or even blackened by all the soot and dust and fatigue it
must have wiped away in three days, but an immaculate handkerchief, still folded, dabbing it, still
folded, at the perspiration on her smiling face, her eyes with their reddened lids, her hands shaken by a
continuous, almost imperceptible and discreet trembling, still repeating with that same embarrassed
expression: "To come like this without even letting you know! If that wasn't silly! But I got
frightened. I should have left when your letter came. But I thought: an old woman like you . . . After
all! Only, when I saw everyone leaving . . . Tired? Oh well . . . You know what it's like. The train. Of
course it's always a little tiring, don't you think? But how silly I was! Would you believe it? Now I ask
you: what would they have done to me! . . .): tiny, wizened and black, arriving or rather projected, set
down here, as if all this terrifying cataclysm had had no other purpose, no other raison d'être than to
tear a tiny old woman away from the peaceful valley she had practically never left and to catapult her,
to plant her here in the middle of a fine June afternoon, like a warning: "Because," as the old man said
later, "it probably had to happen this way: so that even a creature like that, even creatures like her, I
mean, situated by their sex and their age outside, or (in the case of children) not yet within what we
used to consider, what we had been taught to consider, what this world, which itself had taught us to
regard it as civilized, or at least as having reached a certain stage of evolution, or, if not evolution, at
least modesty, decency, and this because it was content to kill only a few thousand adolescents of the
masculine sex, and only from time to time, and so to speak discreetly, clandestinely, since the thing
happened, by the mutual agreement of governments, experts, and the geographical données, in places
perennially reserved for this purpose (just as every civilized household naturally has a place set aside
in it for a toilet: those plains, those two or three rivers which Europe has grown accustomed to use as
its lists, as natural drains, or rather as, what do you call those water conduits that make it possible to
wash down the blood-soaked, corpse-strewn arena at the same time, they say, that vaporizers or
improved incense burners purify the air of the stale, disagreeable—and indecorous—smell of blood . .
. yes, it had to happen this way, so that even creatures like her, supposedly situated by right and in fact
beyond what we had been taught—what we had resigned ourselves—to regard as somehow outside the
slaughterhouse of History, could be (without the heavens falling, without even a single cloud halting
on its idle passage: and not accidentally, by inadvertance, by some hitch in the schedule, but quite
naturally, and by thousands, by hundreds of thousands) hunted out of their houses and thrown pellmell, mingled without any special consideration with the resigned herd where the traditional heroes
are exhibited. Just for our edification. To remind us of what we should never have forgotten: that
History is not, as the school books would like to make us think, a discontinuous series of dates,
treaties, spectacular and clanking battles (something that would be, ultimately, assimilable to the
diseases, epidemics, floods, and other kinds of scourges whose sporadic manifestations occur at welldefined hours, places, and dates, like bullfights, for instance, or the sempiternal death of Oedipus), but
on the contrary limitless, and not only in time (not stopping, not slowing down, never interrupting,
permanent, like film showings—including the repetition of the same stupid plot), but also in its
effects, without distinctions between its participants, war itself being no longer merely waged—that
is, endured, that is, suffered (for even the soldier, even the hardened professional, the muchcaricatured sabre-straggler and the absurd statesman in striped trousers, top hat and frock coat, don't
wage war but endure it, and it's only our incommensurable and absurd pride which makes us believe
the contrary), endured by men at the prime of life but even and to the same degree by children and old
ladies like her, wearing hats and gloves, unafraid, capable of sitting very straight on their suitcases, as
if they were paying calls during seventy hours or more in a cattle car, stopping in the middle of the
country, bombardments, stations filled with crowds, and evidencing (the old ladies, and even the
children too) as much calm courage—or unconsciousness: it's the same thing—as the young, affected,
heroic, obsolete and ridiculous Saint-Cyr graduates in their plumes and white gloves . .. Good. So,
probably, that can be, should be considered a good thing, at least, what we mean by that expression. At
least we will have learned this much: that if to endure History (not to resign oneself to it: endure it), is
to make it, then the dim existence of an old lady is History itself, the very substance of History . . "On
condition that you understand ...," he repeated, not stopping, reverting to that old man's silence in
which, day after day, he seemed more and more immured, immuring himself, increasingly taciturn,
and when, by chance, he happened to talk (as when, a few years before, he managed to run: also under
the effects of a sudden emotion, a shock), pouring out his monologue in that tone of sullen
declamation, as if he were addressing only himself, speaking only to himself, not waiting for, not
expecting any answer, sitting—he gradually came to spend almost all his days sitting, when he grew
so fat that his legs, his aching feet, scarcely managed to carry him farther than from the front steps to
the summerhouse—, in summer, under the big chestnut tree where he stayed, overwhelmed by the
monstrous weight of his own flesh, his own flesh scheming, preparing his own destruction and this, so
to speak, by an excess of life, he, ponderous, misshapen, and Tolstoyan, his staring eyes abandoning
the pages scattered on his table, lost, childlike, blue and exhausted, staring beyond the calm branches
and the green hills, perhaps reliving that same kind of afternoon when she (the old maid, his sister—
and more than his sister: the woman (she was more than fifteen years older than he) who had brought
him up and nursed him and virtually held him in her arms until he could stand up by himself), when
she had appeared, carried by that same seven o'clock train, although then composed of an assortment
of irregular cars in which she had travelled—or rather lived—for three days and three nights, with this
difference, too, that it wasn't seven but around three in the afternoon, and that it was the train from the
day before arriving around twenty hours late, or today's train four hours ahead of time, or perhaps
even tomorrow's and even the day after's train with, in that case, a huge supply of hours ahead of time,
for after this one and for almost a week, no other train came through, no echo reverberated, no roar
from the iron bridge under the iron wheels troubled the profound stillness of the valley, returned,
restored to peace, to its original silence, enlivened only by those few sounds which still belong to
silence—as if they were the sound of silence itself: the slow murmur of the leaves, the slow resonance
of the cast-bronze clapper of the church bell, the slow duodecimal numeration of time, the bronze
chime falling suspended, imponderable, vibrating a long time before fading away in the vaporous air.
And that was her last trip. For she never went back again. Not only when the trains were running
again (not freights: real trains, with classes again, carriages specially designed: uncomfortable for the
use of poor and overstuffed for the use of rich behinds, and with ticket-takers to check whether each,
poor and rich alike, were in the proper place), but even when peace had come again and they could run
from one end of the country to the other. Later they sold the huge old house, the pieces of land which
the old man and she still owned, although for a long time the old man had no longer touched his share
of the income which she persisted, which she had all her life persisted in sending him regularly, at the
same time as at each year's end she sent him the household accounts—taxes, fees, repairs, rentals: net
income . . .— the whole thing totalling some thousands of francs, which, divided in two, made no
more than half of some thousands of francs: and fifty years ago, when he had begun to receive
accounts and money, a third—the older sister was still alive—of some hundreds of francs which the
first time he had immediately sent back, to receive two days later— the time it took for word to travel
there and back, not even for any thought, just time enough on the doorstep to send back the postman—
their refusal with, accompanying it, these simple words: "It's your share. Kisses. Eugénie" (the older
sister's name), and he knowing them well enough (his two sisters, the two women, of whom the
youngest was fifteen years his elder, and who had virtually brought him up, had payed for his studies,
his books and his outfit at the Ecole Normale sou by sou, and not only by their work but even—he
suspected, had good reason to suspect—by a spontaneous, tacit, and inflexible renunciation of what
every woman aspires to (a man of her own, a home, children of her own, out of her own body), and
now refusing not only to let themselves be reimbursed—at least what could be reimbursed: the money,
the struggles, the privation, for the rest was something no restitution could compensate for—but even
to touch what they regarded as his share of the common inheritance), knowing them well enough, then,
to know that it was futile to continue volleying the same check back and forth, since each time it
would come up against the same inflexible, obstinate, and calm refusal, accepting it then, using his
amount—and even a little more—to purchase two similar fur stoles which he sent them, receiving in
reply the following lines: . . nice to your old sisters. The stoles gave us great pleasure and keep us
good and warm, particularly during the cold weather we've been having this year (much later, he was
to find the two stoles intact, carefully camphorized, folded in the same furrier's box they had come in).
But you shouldn't waste your money like that. Your present situation (he had just been appointed
professor in a lycée and was preparing his doctorate) obliges you to fulfill your status in society
suitably, and we know how much that costs" and a few years later (this time, it was two dressinggowns) receiving again in reply, in Eugenie's same schoolgirl handwriting, regular and impersonal:
which was like a refusal—not a renunciation: a refusal—it, too, arrogant, discreet, and inflexible—of
all personality) the other letter: "... how many times have I already told you that two old maids like us
have no need of such things. Besides, you know that in our family no one has ever been in the habit of
spending such amounts, and now that you are married you should think of your wife first. Don't forget
that she is not of our circle, and is certainly used to being coddled. That is why you would do better to
use this money on something she might like. A young woman of her sort, living in a big city, always
has a lot of temptations, and she must not feel she has married someone beneath her who hasn't the
means to satisfy her. We chose this coat, which we think she will find becoming, from a catalog. We
have ordered it and she should receive it in a few days. Don't tell her we sent it: she must think it's
from you, so that.. and then he gave up (the coat was worth about twice as much as the two dressing
gowns he had given them), and from that time on he was content to place the sums which they—then
Marie alone—continued to send him regularly every year in a special account which he added to
himself, giving special instructions to the bank, and saying no more about it.
So the house and the land were sold. The few acres with the meager yields their father had wrung
from them, the orchards, the little woods, the vines on the slope which he had watered with enough
profitable sweat to manage, this man who didn't even know how to read, not only to have his children
taught to read, but even to be able— the two girls, Eugénie and Marie—to teach other children how to
read, and with what they made by teaching other children how to read (with their two meager
schoolteachers' salaries, splitting their own wood in winter, sewing their own dresses—or rather
endlessly turning, readjusting the same dresses, making a new one out of two old ones, themselves
produced, derived from preceding dresses, so that a single dress represented (collars, sleeves, blouse,
waist, skirt) an ingenious combination of at least four others, like those arms, those heraldic blazons
whose worth is calculated by the number of quarterings, or again like the dresses of those dancers who
received, two or three hundred years ago, the privilege of entering the Cathedral of Seville during
Holy Week as long as the costumes they were wearing should last and who have never changed clothes
since, handing down the precious rags from generation to generation, patched as the cloth frayed, so
that finally nothing is left of the original dress but an irregular collection of scraps, themselves
replaced as the time came: not even clothes, the brilliant billowing costumes, but the immaterial
permanence of a myth persisting through putrefying time—, still finding time and strength to go, after
their father died, to spade and weed, once classes were over, in the fields nearest town, and only
reluctantly resigning themselves to rent out the others), with what they earned, then, the two sisters
managing to bring up their brother, not only in the usual sense of the term, but in its exact
connotation, raising him, literally lifting him from the state of an illiterate peasant to that of not only
a reader but a master (for that was what he specialized in, that was what he taught, later on, at the
Faculté) of that language, of those words his father had never managed to read, still less to write, just
barely to stammer, he having not only conquered them, assimilated them, but, as all conquerors deal
with their conquests, pulled them apart, stripped them, emptied them of that mystery, that terrifying
power that every unknown thing or person possesses when it is without antecedents or past, apparent
fruits of some mysterious, spontaneous, virtually supernatural generation: committing himself, then,
to discover in them an ancestry, a genealogy and, from that, to predict, to assign them an ineluctable
degeneration, a senility, a death, as if, by doing this, and as a sort of pious filial vengeance, he
affirmed the invincible preeminence of the old illiterate (of generations of illiterates with callused
hands, slow legs, slow words, backs endlessly bent since the beginning of time toward the nourishing
earth, endlessly repeating the same age-old, taciturn, secret gestures) over the subtle, treacherous, and
ephemeral instruments of all thought, as subtle, treacherous, and ephemeral as they.
And despite this (despite the insignificance of their school-teachers' salaries, the insignificance of
the revenue from their land, the expenses of bringing up this brother and of their decent and austere
dresses, whose nobility included four, eight, or sixteen quarterings), not content with keeping up the
enormous house—half in ruins when it had been acquired—which the family owned in the town, but,
with antlike persistence and patience, reconstructing it, so to speak, almost entirely, year after year, in
infinitesimal parts (capable of living a whole year in a room whose naked walls revealed the bricks
and rubble, plastered the year after, and painted only the year after that, and Georges told how he had
watched the finishing touches in his childhood, the final stages, still remembering walls without
wallpaper, sections of rotten flooring roped off and which he found, during the next vacations,
repaired, the new wood still smelling of the forest) raising then (for it would probably not have cost
them much more to knock the whole thing down and have a new house built on the same spot)
practically stone by stone this sort of ambitious—and, as Georges called it: Pharaonic—residence, like
a temple, this structure of outsize proportions destined to consecrate the raising, the establishment of a
family or rather a dynasty, with its huge staircase, its enormous rooms where, by a bitter irony of fate,
they were to be the only human beings to cast their fragile shadows, this brother for whom, for whose
dynasty and descendants the house with its innumerable rooms had been acquired, kept up and
reconstructed stone by stone, and the wife of this brother (Sabine) and the children of this brother
(Christine and Irène, the two girls, Georges, the son) appearing only for brief visits—just time enough
to let the intolerable Midi summers pass—leaving again the first days of September, leaving them
alone, more and more wizened, wrinkled, smiling, grieving and impenetrable, gently waving their
hands in a gesture of farewell while the car pulled away, diminishing, framed by the rear window,
standing on the doorstep with, behind them, the accumulation, the series, the mass of empty rooms
with disproportionately high ceilings, the whole vast house invaded by the insidious and stubborn
exhalation of fruit slowly dying on the newspaper-covered shelves.
But she never went back there. It was Georges who made the trip, going directly to the notary's
where, while the latter, his back turned, pretended to look out the window, a stockbreeder counted out
(announcing, with each bundle of hundred thousand franc notes that he took out, tied up in a roll, from
the pockets of a filthy duffle-coat: "A steer!") the balance of the sum for which had been sold—ceded,
abandoned—what could have neither price nor commercial value, could not be exchanged for the
equivalent in banknotes of a herd of cattle: not a house and some land but something like the tomb
itself, the funeral and vain mausoleum of every hope and every ambition, she (Mademoiselle, as the
servants now called her) not even wanting, stubbornly refusing to move back, not that she was, like
her brother—the old man fifteen years younger than she and who, from day to day, spent more and
more hours without getting out of his armchair—, incapable of moving: on the contrary, leaving every
day after lunch (and this whether it was raining, snowing, or the sun shining), invariably wearing, it
seemed, the same dark dress and the same coat that she sometimes carried on her arm, leaving it
behind only on the hottest summer days, leaning on the same black umbrella which, on sunny days,
served as a parasol, walking alone, stoop-shouldered, down the muddy, icy or dusty roads: the same
route, the same bare or thick hedges that saw her pass, stepping over puddles, carefully crossing the
patches of ice or lingering along the ditches, the bushes where she picked and furtively swallowed
blackberries, as if she had been caught doing something wrong, wiping the juice from her lips with the
same mended, patched, darned handkerchief, but always as immaculate, always still folded—and how
many did she have, how did she manage to keep them always so white, so crisp—that was doubtless
one of her secrets: something mysterious, illogical, and paradoxical, like her few accessories—not her
toilet articles (not coquetry, not vanity, yet something like coquetry—although with no connection
with what inspired, compelled the other old woman, her brother's wife who could easily have been her
daughter—to dye her hair orange, her nails blood-red, and to paint her face with all the colors of the
rainbow, but the tools of her personal hygiene: carefully arranged, lined up on the embroidered doily,
too white, immaculate, in front of the mirror with the pressed chartreuse plush frame, slightly tilted
back on a triangle of cardboard covered with the same chartreuse plush and hinged onto the back of
the mirror: several of those objects whose presence there, though natural, had something illogical,
something paradoxical about them: the comb, the two brushes, the tweezers, and one of those round
boxes of cheap powder, made out of cardboard printed with an overall pattern of little flowers, and on
the white label the name of the perfumer —one of those century-old names that you see now, still in
its old calligraphy, on mannequin or diamond-shaped flasks but which, probably for the exclusive use
of old ladies, continues to appear on the same powder box, decorated with the same old-fashioned
pattern of little flowers —and a pair of nail-scissors too, and, unexpectedly, an enormous straight
razor with a tortoise-shell handle, and a half-empty package of those metal hairpins with black, wavy
prongs, still in their envelope of blue paper with its medallion showing the bust of a young, rather
plump woman, half Venetian, half 1900's in style, combing her long, wavy hair.
So she didn't leave, categorically refused to leave, even if someone went with her, persisting,
protecting herself with a kind of calm astonishment, an inflexible sweetness, saying: "What would I
do there?": and they sat there, in the blue shade of the chestnut tree, the two sisters-in-law —the one
with the orange-dyed hair and the one wearing a black dress—and perhaps it was the end of the
afternoon and she (Mademoiselle) not exactly sitting but, just as on the day when she stepped off that
train, merely perched on the edge of the armchair, although she had just come back from her daily
walk, the hat still on her head, and on the rattan table where the same tray was set with the blue teapot
and the refreshments, a bouquet of those field flowers which she habitually picked along the roadside,
clumsily pulling them toward her, pressing the stems between her misshapen fingers, the flowers
scattered, thirsty, withering already, and Sabine—her brother's wife—leaning back in the other chair,
fanning herself, the hand with its ring-covered fingers casting the same cold, mineral, variegated
reflections each time, and from behind the fan, giving her sister-in-law—that creature of the same sex
as she and yet somehow desexed (she probably thought, with a kind of pitying commiseration, scorn,
and—who knows—envy)—quick, perplexed, pensive, baffled glances, saying: "But that house which
... where . . ."
And she: "Oh, well! . . ."
And Sabine: "But don't you want to see it again? To go back there at least once more, one last time
before . . ."
And she: "What for? It's better this way, really ..."
And Sabine: "But your whole life . . ."
And she: "Oh well. Of course. But what can I do about that? You know, at home, in our family, we've
never set much store by such things. We don't talk about them. And then, since Eugénie died, I was all
alone back there. No, it's better this way."
And Sabine: "But. . ."
And she: "It's better this way."
And Sabine: "But just to go and come back, just to see it again . . ."
And she: "No. What's the use? And besides, it rains too much back there. I'm tired of seeing the rain
all the time. It makes everything so dirty."
And Sabine: "Listen, Marie, I want to talk to you, I need to talk to you about . . ."
And she: "Look at my poor flowers: they're all withered already, they . . ."
And Sabine: "They should be put in water, I'll tell Anna to . .. But aren't you thirsty, wouldn't you
like a little tea?"
And she: "Tea? No. But I'd love a glass of water if it . . ."
And Sabine: "What about some pineapple juice, or some orangeade? . . ."
And she: "No. Just a glass of water. I'll go . . ."
And Sabine: "Don't move. Anna!"
And she: "Don't bother her, I can . . ."
And Sabine: "Don't move. Annaaaa!"
And she: "No, don't bother her, you don't need to call Anna for . . ."
And Sabine: "Oh Anna, finally! Where have you been? Do I have to scream my lungs out for an hour
until you hear me? Bring some icewater and a glass for Mademoiselle, and put these flowers in
something."
And she: "I'll put them in water myself, I . . ."
And Sabine: "Don't bother, Anna will take care of it. Listen, Marie, I want to talk to you. It's about
Georges. I don't want him to go back there for all that money alone . . ."
And she: "Really, I . . ."
And Sabine: "No, I know what I'm saying, I know what I'm talking about . . ." Then her voice dying,
and her eyes shifting, the hand covered with rings still moving the fan back and forth, still casting its
rainbow-colored reflections, the fan moving but the eyes not seeing any thing now, not even the heavy
branches, not even the hills, the trembling, bluish air, and after a moment, without moving her head,
her eyes still fixed on nothing, the lips moving, saying as if to herself: "I think we had him too late,
they say that if you have children after a certain age . . . But Pierre wanted a boy so much, and now . .
."
And she: "He's a nice boy, really . . ."
And Sabine (still not looking at her, nor at the hills, nor at the sky, although her eyes were wide
open, nor even at the two white butterflies fluttering in the sunshine over the lawn, chasing each other,
becoming entangled, their jerky flight gradually rising, sinking, almost touching the earth, rising
again: no longer two insects but two iridescent fragments of light, dancing exactly like those
diaphanous silk papers Japanese jugglers keep in the air above their fans) saying: "He worries me, if
you knew how he worries me . . ."
And she: "Really I . . ."
And Sabine: "No. He's my son. I see him as he is. I can't say no to him, but I see him. I don't want
him to go back there for all that money alone."
And she: "Oh, well ... Do you think . . ."
And Sabine: "If only he had wanted to work at something. If only he had made the slightest effort.
Pierre . . .
And now all he thinks about is that orchard, he's taken it into his head to . . ."
And she: "He's just like his grandfather. Our father had only one notion . . ."
And Sabine: "Now it's those pear trees. He claims . . . But I've talked to the farmers. They all say you
can't hope for a yield from that kind of pear tree in soil like this. It's too humid here. But he says
they're idiots, that all they know how to do is plant the same thing over and over and that's why . . ."
And she: "My father used to say . . ."
And Sabine: ". . . the soil gives such a poor yield here, he won't pay any attention and I've already
given him so much money" (and lowering her voice or rather her voice failing her, her eyes still
vague, the fan moving back and forth, and always the regular reflection of the rings in the blue shade
of the chestnut tree, and finally saying, managing to say): "Listen, Marie, you're the only one I can
talk to. I've already given him more than . . . more than . . . I mean, I had no right to. If Christine and
Irène knew all I . . . And now it's these pear trees, you understand? And he'll have all that money with
him . . ."
And she: "What would I do with it? After all, just think. What could I do with it? I've got my
pension. What does an old woman like me need with . . ."
And Sabine: (and now from the still motionless, staring eyes, seeing nothing, two silvery lines
slowly falling, without her moving or making an effort to wipe them away, two shiny streaks one on
each side of the nose down the face that was like a soft, pink paste, falling over the soft cheeks,
diluting the too-pink—or rather mauve—powder, sliding down the wrinkles to the corners of the
painted lips, and at the ends, two shining, crystalline, iridescent points, like the reflections of the
rings, quivering on each side of her chin, and Sabine still not seeming to bother about them, to feel
them, to think of wiping them away, and suddenly old, terribly old despite her many-colored paints,
her many-colored veils, her flaming hair, older than the old woman in black sitting or rather perched
upright on the edge of the armchair opposite her, ageless or beyond age, so that it was no longer two
old women talking under the tree among the bright and luminous vegetation, but a painted old woman
and an old lady, the old woman in the gaudy dress, with the gaudy face saying): "If his father ever
found out, and his sisters . . ."
And she: "But the land is yours. One day it'll be theirs, and if he's planting these trees, he must know
what he's doing, he . . ."
And Sabine: "I'd like to believe it, but I'm afraid it's just another . . ."
And she: "Now, now, don't think of such things. It's because he takes after his grandfather. Pierre
doesn't try to understand him, but he's a nice boy."
And Sabine: "If you knew how miserable I am! . . ."
And she (and in her voice something like scandal, something shocked or rather embarrassed, for she
was probably incapable of, would have been angry with herself for expressing, for betraying, for
feeling anything like reprobation, she whose voice had never wavered, had never permitted itself to
waver or even to say things that might have made it waver): "Now, now, you don't . . ."
And Sabine: "Sometimes I wonder if a woman wouldn't straighten all this out, I wonder if that
wouldn't arrange matters. He's unstable, you see, he . . . He's never talked to you?"
And she: "Talked about what?"
And Sabine: "That girl, I know they see each other, they say she's his mistress, they've been seen
together in a car several times. He's never talked to you about her?"
And she: "Why no, he .. ."
And Sabine: "He hasn't asked you for money recently? He's asked me, but I refused him, I couldn't
any more, I haven't any right, I told him: once you do something besides live like a farmer, a peasant,
running around all the time with those brutes fishing and hunting, getting drunk with them at those
village dances . . . Has he asked you for money?"
And she: "Why, you know ..."
And Sabine: "And you gave it to him?"
And she: "I mean, you know . . ."
And Sabine: "I know. I even know her name is Louise. It's a vulgar name. People know everything
here, it's not hard, between the servants and the shopkeepers . . . Of course she isn't the kind of girl I'd
have chosen for him, but there are times when I wonder if that matters so much . . . That's not what
matters: what matters is that he settles down, so I'm beginning to hope he'll marry her, they say she's
very pretty, she'll do as well as anyone else, after all, once she . . . But he'll deceive her. The way
Pierre deceives me. You know that Pierre deceives me, don't you?"
And she: "Really, I.. ."
And Sabine: "Listen, do you know what he told me yesterday?"
And she: "Really, it's all he can do to get out to the summerhouse, and . . ."
And Sabine: "He told me we should sleep in separate beds, he wants us to sleep in separate beds
now, do you know what that means, do you think when a man says a thing like that to his wife there's
no reason for it? Of course, he's your brother, but I know what I'm saying. He's always deceived me,
always, and now he wants us to sleep in separate beds" (and now Sabine's eyes were staring at her
sister-in-law, pleading, filled with tears beneath the heavy, shiny, painted eyelids and the mouth, the
painted lips, saying:) "Am I so old, do I look so old, tell me!"
And she: "Now, now, don't get yourself in such a state . . ."
And Sabine: "I'm not getting myself in any state, I'm not the one whose doing it, he's the one . . ."
And she: "Now, really, he can't even go farther than the summerhouse . . ."
And Sabine: "Of course, I understand. He's your brother, you'll defend him, I understand that, all I'm
asking you is to try to understand me too . . ."
And she: "Yes, but it's all so silly, you mustn't . . ."
And Sabine: "It's all right with me, believe me, I couldn't ask for anything better, it's all right with
me, but what should I do?" (taking out a handkerchief, this one made of lace and wadded up, and
finally deciding to wipe her eyes at the same time that the violent fragrance of the expensive perfume
was spreading, aggressive, chemical, obscene, struggling a moment with the warm smell of the grass,
of the mown hay, hanging in the air around them, and the painted old woman sniffing, blowing her
nose, the folded fan on her knees, groping for her handbag, and, at the same time as she applied fresh
powder, talking now in a neutral, somber voice that while not calmer was at least without any
vehemence, as if she had given up trying to convince anyone, as if all she asked her sister-in-law was
not to blame or share her suffering, her bitterness, but only to believe it, as she believed it herself, or
rather experienced it, for probably she didn't even need to believe it, to know, to have proofs:
experiencing this infidelity (real or imaginary) as a physical reality, a fact given once and for all,
admitted (or rather not admitted, because there are things impossible to admit, even if the mind
admits, the body refuses), a fact given once and for all, then (that he deceived her, had deceived her,
would continue to deceive her, even as an old, misshapen man almost unable to move from place to
place, even despite every likelihood and possibility), the first time, the first infidelity having
contained, having engendered, ceaselessly continuing to engender all the following ones, to the point
where she probably knew it was futile (that is, that it would make no difference to her suffering) to
check, to determine the veracity of the facts, saying:) "But what's the use, you can't understand!"
(shutting the compact with a dry click, staring again with the same incredulous, baffled, pensive and
somehow envious expression at the other old woman, her wrinkled, affable face that had something
childish about it, thinking of the ignorant, intact white body, as intact, as ignorant as at its birth: not a
body, not the flesh, she thought, but the negation of the flesh, as if under the dark, loose-fitting dress
there was nothing, and imagining this nothing, the white, untouched skin on the frail limbs, with those
folds, those fine wrinkles, like the crumpled bodies of new-born babies, as if, she thought again, she
was under there as she was on the day she was born, as if everything that sticks out, the face, the
hands, the legs, had grown old and yellow, but that underneath she was as she was on that first day,
thinking: "A little old woman with that oversize head that makes her even more like new-born babies
during those first hours, when they still have their bald and wrinkled heads like little old men, like
little bawling gnomes who come into the world with the same face they'll have the day of their death,
bawling, terrified, as if they were feeling, knowing, already prophetically suffering all that was
waiting for them, the vale of tears, the anguish, emerging from His Bosom with the same face they'll
have when they return to it, so that you'd think His Bosom was inhabited by interchangeable wrinkled
heads simply recalled and put on all over again each time, just as they are, on a new body, without
even bothering, since they know what's waiting for them, to erase the stigmata of past sufferings,
besides don't they say the life of the foetus is an agony before being expelled into the light and air,
among the flowers, the birds, and all God's creatures on earth . . ." and saying aloud:) "But you don't
believe in God, do you?"
And she: "My goodness …"
And Sabine (still continuing to stare at her with that distressed curiosity, that perplexity): "I mean . .
. have you never believed, or was it because of your work . . . I mean ... I know that in teaching, among
the lay teachers, there are ... I know, Pierre told me that even your parents . . . Which is strange,
because usually peasants . . . but didn't anyone ever talk to you about God when you were little . . . the
other little girls ... it seems so extraordinary . . . and you yourself, didn't you ever feel the desire, the
need . . ."
And she: "My goodness, no . . ."
And Sabine: "Why are you smiling, does that seem so ridiculous to you ... ?"
And she: "Oh no, I was only looking at those two butterflies. They're so pretty, it's as if . . ."
And Sabine: "The bu . . . what ... oh yes . . . Listen, you know I once made a resolution never to talk
to you about such things . . . When I married Pierre I took him the way he was, with all that he came
from, and I even knew everything you had done for him, you and Eugénie, sacrificing your lives . . ."
And she: "Oh well . . ."
And Sabine: "Yes I did, oh these flies are terrible, look where it stung me, nasty things, I'm sure
there's going to be a storm and they haven't finished bringing in the hay, it's like that each time, but to
come back . . ." (she hesitated, her voice lingered, drawled, tried to postpone the moment, but she
couldn't help herself, she knew she couldn't help herself, any more than she could silence, impose
silence upon, her suspicion, her jealousy, and she knew too that she should keep still, but it was
impossible for her to keep still, so she said:) "All the same, I find it almost inconceivable . . . Don't
you ever wonder sometimes, hasn't the idea of something else ever . . . the idea of God . . ."
And she: "Now, you know, it's all so silly," blushing, her childish, wrinkled, chapped face turning
red as if she had uttered an obscenity, as if the mere fact of exchanging this kind of remark, of having
this conversation, was in itself an obscenity, distressed that they were having it, that the other old
woman had forced it upon her, wretched at having let herself be forced, at having been compelled,
cornered into saying it, at having said it, drumming her misshapen fingers that were like sticks of dry
wood with their knots of knuckles and the wrinkled bark of their skin on the arm of the rattan chair,
with not only on her face but even in the attitude of her whole body something gently inflexible,
invincible, fragile and hard, and at the same time, while the other woman continued to stare at her,
silent now, baffled, the two old women sitting there, the one stiff, all in black, perched on the edge of
her chair, and the other in her gaudy multicolored veils leaning back, exhausted, fanning herself again,
but just for show now, for it was no longer so hot, the shadows were beginning to grow longer across
the lawn, like those of the hedges across the fields on the other side of the river, and a hay wagon,
appearing around the end of a hedge, began to come down the meadow diagonally, the knock-kneed
oxen leaning against each other, shoulder to shoulder, holding back the weight, advancing slowly, with
their sleepy, calm, and jolting gait, and on top of the load of hay probably a woman sitting, too far
away for them to make her out, but only the blue spot of her dress, or rather her smock, one of those
blue blouses with white stitching sold in country stores and specially designed apparently to
harmonize with the gray-green of the new-mown hay,—the agile wrist, the hand with the blood-red
nails nervously coming and going, while perhaps one of those tremendous and mute dialogues
continued to pass back and forth between the two women (unless it wasn't between them, unless it was
only behind, sheltered by the fan, behind the gaudy face, behind the painted cheeks, the painted
forehead, the painted eyelids: for only one of the two women, questions and replies following fast,
asked and answered by the same person, for her exclusive use): . . . forty years, almost forty years ago
we saw each other for the first time and I don't understand you the sister of the man I married forty
years ago and I don't know you
"Really I
"Who are you
"You know you've just said it yourself the sister of the man you married Marie-Arthémise-Léonie
Thomas
"And you're
"Eighty-one
Twenty years old four times over four times the age of love but loveless
"No not loveless "And soon you're going to die
"I know
"If not this year then the next in two years three anyway it can't be far off in the spring perhaps they
say the spring is difficult for old people to survive
"Yes that's what they say
"And don't you believe in anything
No answer
"And you're not afraid
"Afraid of what
"And you don't regret anything
"Regret what
"I don't know regret what might have been what hasn't been what you haven't had what you haven't
done
"Why
"You regret nothing
"No
"And you
"No
"And
"No
Then probably noticing, realizing that she was about to speak again, but aloud this time, and
doubtless already had been speaking for a while (and as if, still conducting the other dialogue, without
recalling the fact that she had taken the initiative) because it was in the middle of a sentence her own
lips were speaking that she became aware of it, hearing herself say: ". . . and I'm the one who hates the
country, all because of that war, what a terrible thing that war was, now he's got used to living here
and he doesn't want to leave anymore, we were supposed to, he promises me all the time we're going
back to Pau, but. . ." And probably she had been speaking for longer than she thought, it was the kind
of conversation that begins a long way back, since the other old woman opposite her had followed it
and answered then: "It's comfortable here . . and she: "Yes, for you maybe, you've been brought up,
accustomed to it, oh if only there hadn't been that war, we'd never have left Pau, we'd only have come
here like we used to, in September, and Georges would have gone on with his studies, I'm sure he
would have gone back to them, I'm sure he would have . . ."
So the huge old house was sold, and Georges made the trip there and back, armed with a power of
attorney, signed the papers, and in the following spring the whole plain between the foot of the hill
and the river was planted with young pear trees which, contrary to the predictions of the farmers and
the local people, grew nicely, developed from year to year, and soon, in summer, from the top of the
hill down, the earth disappeared entirely beneath their foliage, and it was only the first year they
produced fruit that they discovered the pears fell off, lay on the ground before they had ripened, and
began to rot slowly, filling the warm September air with that heady and insistent odor of ferment, of
cupboards and putrefaction.
And meanwhile Georges had married, and Pierre and Sabine had continued to grow old, he more and
more enormous, misshapen, moving with greater and greater difficulty, she more and more painted, it
seemed, her hair more and more orange, wearing dresses of more and more garish brilliance, her
fingers heavier and heavier with rings—but perhaps make-up, dye, dresses, and jewels seemed so
garish, gaudy, extravagant because they were an attempt to conceal, to embellish a face, a head of hair,
a body more and more eroded by time (time whose passage or at least whose effects were not regular
as the pendulum of the hall clock tended to imply: its bronze disc at the center of a gilded sun
ceaselessly oscillating between two little marble columns decorated with two symmetrical and
inscrutable sphinxes with parallel breasts, and these gilded too, the clockface topped with a doubtless
symbolic marble urn which two chubby bronze cherubs or putti seemed to be clasping tightly with the
help of garlands of bronze flowers, the works (reflected in the mirror set behind the clock and
revealing the mysterious complication of the tiny serrated wheels apparently motionless though the
mind knew they were involved in a movement of rotation all the more terrifying because it was
invisible) sounding, every quarter hour, a shrill chime, absurd and impudent, the whole thing—putti,
sphynxes, garlands, urn, marble, and bronze—having something funereal and futile about it, product
of a century both funereal and futile that amused itself by ingeniously elaborating this kind of
structure, in the style of elegant tombs, around a clock movement, as if, by a kind of premonition, that
elegant century (along with its elegant, licentious duchesses, and its cynical, libertine, encyclopedic
and desperate marquises with their powdered wigs knew that their heads were going to be cut off),
time, then, accelerating, so that another year wasn't measured in the furrows of wrinkles or the
collapse of cheeks, by a depth, a sagging equal to those made during the course of the twelve
preceding months, but instead (things happening as in those landslides slowly and secretly determined
by sudden jolts) the flesh disintegrating, so to speak, forming gullies, slipping unevenly, so that it was
not the result of an imperceptible transformation, modifying their external appearance by
infinitesimal retouches, that the old couple had now become what they were, but by a series of sudden
mutations, like movie actors whom a succession of rapid shots shows, with no transition, in various
consecutive stages of make-up: brutal, violent, and furious alterations starting from models initially
virgin of any withering and even (as they figured, he and she, in that photograph, that wedding group
taken forty years ago, on their wedding day) insipid, with that somewhat stupid, even irritating
expression which evidently results from posing in front of the camera, from the emotion, from the
photographic style of the period, or from the intolerable good conscience virginity confers, that is, not
so much the physical integrity to which the term generally refers, as a certain moral or psychic
attitude: a privilege and, like all privileges, immoral, abusive, marking whoever is its beneficiary with
that expression of stupidity which is both solemn and timorous, as if virginity were not so much a
matter of the sexes, of flesh lacerated, violated, as a disposition, or rather a preservation of the mind,
or rather an exemption, not from pleasure but from suffering, and certainly, looking at this group
posing among turn-of-the-century palms and pots, it was apparent that in this sense (and had the
photograph been taken the next day, after the ceremony and the nocturnal initiation, it would have
been the same thing, and perhaps more obviously) the young couple (the young groom svelte, almost
thin, almost skinny, his face decorated with a goatee and pince-nez, who was, who was destined to be,
to become, forty years later, the shapeless mountain of flesh almost incapable of moving, and she: an
unreal, tiny, precious porcelain face with almond-shaped eyes, overwhelmed, disappearing—delicate,
fragile, and pale—beneath the enormous mass of her hair), the young bride and groom incarnating that
kind of virginity which ultimately resembles the opposite of purity (consisting of pride, the stupid
vanity of not enduring, conquering, but being protected, exempted, preserved), and not the two women
who also figured in the photograph, among the other members of the wedding, all younger than they:
maids of honor, ushers, cousins or friends of the Dresden china doll whose marriage was being
celebrated, the men with their obsolete way of wearing their hair parted down the middle, their
moustaches, their obsolete suits, their theatrical, studied, and obsolete poses that made them look,
now, like waiters or guests at a shopkeeper's wedding (for it appears with a little perspective that the
poor and the rich have exactly the same tastes, the same behavior, the same way of dressing in
common, but with several years interval, so that what separates the poor from the rich is neither (as
the poor think) the fact of having more or less money nor (as the rich believe) some innate superiority
or intellectual refinement, but only time, that is, their respective position in time, which is why, in old
photographs, the rich always look as if they belonged to a rather vulgar social category: because the
last time we saw that way of dressing, of standing, was among people of an inferior class who were
only imitating, behind the times, what they had seen the rich do), which would make them look, now,
like shopkeepers, had they not had in common that same instinctive and condescending selfconfidence which was betrayed by a kind of carelessness, a negligence in their posture, in their way of
holding their cigars, of smiling, of wearing their suits or their uniforms—there was a young lieutenant
in the dragoons among them—which conferred upon them all (but perhaps it was also, for the ones
who, years later, looked at the photograph, the fact of knowing that almost all the others were dead,
the fact that these same bodies with their nonchalant, affected, and absurd poses were all destined—
that of the young lieutenant in the dragoons like those of the carefree revellers in suits, with cigars and
hair parted down the middle—to rot soon, often without burial, or hurriedly covered over with a few
shovelsful of earth, or thrown pell-mell in a trench with thousands, with hundreds of thousands of
other bodies like them, moustachioed, absurd and pathetic, as they can still be seen in the old, spotted
newsreel films of that war, parading jerkily, still stubbornly moustachioed, muddy, raising an arm,
waving a hand—in the same spastic, mechanical and hurried way, due to the still imperfect frequency
of the images, which raised the film sequences of the period, the official receptions or the troops
marching, to a kind of transcendental level—at the moment of passing in front of the cameraman,
before disappearing forever, to the left of the screen, into nothingness and oblivion), that negligence,
then, in their posture which, added to what those who were looking at the old photograph knew about
their future, granted them something like another virginity. And alone among the virginal members of
the wedding, the two old maids sitting there with their serious, already worn, sharp faces, stiff in their
stiff dresses (at that period when the women looked not as if they were wearing dresses but being worn
by them or rather emerging (head, hands, feet—not even ankles) from a kind of hard pasteboard
carapace within which their bodies, their women's bodies, existed, remained, probably, like the turtle's
body); dresses which themselves had a history, that is, which had been for the two sisters—like those
objects for which the search, the quest, is the pretext of whole epics—the source of an adventure, not
only because of their price— although, apparently, this question was in itself an adventure, having
with a common impulse determined them, not, of course, out of coquetry but so as not to cast any
reflections (they thought) on their brother—their son) to appear at this wedding in dresses ordered
from Paris, spending on the single purchase of those two dresses probably as much if not more than
they had spent to dress themselves during their entire lives—not only, then, their purchase, but, for the
fittings, crossing (it was 1910) half of flooded France, as if, each time they (for Eugénie, the elder
sister, it was the only time) left their town, the valley where their life was lived, it was to cross a
country ravaged by a catacylsm through which—flood, military defeat—they were apparently able to
pass intact, emerging from it on each occasion as if they were returning from a visit with the same
embarrassed smiles, the same words ("Would you believe it! . . .") of indulgent surprise, as if they
were asking someone's pardon, the events themselves being pardoned in advance; sitting there, then,
on those two fragile gilt chairs probably rented by the day from the caterer who had provided the
banquet, in their austere, stiff, and sumptuous dresses which must have represented the cost of two or
three years of their lives, she (Marie) staring straight at the camera with that face already looking a
little as it was going to be later, not so wrinkled, of course, but recognizable, already "set," so to
speak, having reached that stage where the subsequent transformations would be no more than simple
surcharges (whereas nothing in the polished Dresden doll or the lanky professor with his goatee and
pince-nez permitted even a careful eye to discern the man-mountain and the woman with the manycolored dresses and gaudy make-up which the forty following years were to create by profound
changes in their very structure), among the group of young people with their obsolete revellers' faces
typical of the town's jeunesse dorée among whom, probably, the wedding must have provoked a kind
of scandal, especially when they (the two old maids) appeared caparisoned in their magnificent and
ceremonious prune-colored or puce dresses, with their high collars, their leg-of-mutton sleeves out of
which appeared hands that were not so much schoolteachers' hands as peasants' hands and which it
didn't take much looking at to discover that they had wielded flails, hoes, or spades, done the washing
and housecleaning just as obviously as those of the young bride (she was just eighteen) or of the
ushers in suits or dragoon uniforms had never encountered rougher contact than that of the stems of
flowers arranged in a vase, the handles of foils or the reins of horses.
Not that the family, the relatives, the friends, the jeunesse dorée hadn't been warned, notified, had
been ignorant of the groom's origins. Perhaps it was their age: the fact that they—his sisters—should
both look capable, or virtually capable, of being his mother, and therefore seem strangers (appearing
somehow as intruders) not only to the youthful party consisting of the doomed carefree revellers and
the insipid girls resembling those insipid sylphides themselves resembling the pale iris like those you
see in old perfume advertisements; posing; obliged to pose—that could be felt, could be guessed: they
were there, posing there, only in self-defence, they must have tried to get out of it, had only resigned
themselves docilely to sitting on the fragile gilt chairs after yielding to someone's insistences, after
one of those polite and absurd scenes that occur on such occasions—posing, then, in front of the
camera, staring at it (Marie) with those blue eyes even paler than her brother's, as if they were faded,
with that affable, childish, and at the same time intractable expression. Perhaps there was something
else besides that—besides their age, their chapped, callused hands, their uncouth, calm faces—whose
presence among the group had in itself something unforeseen, disturbing about it, that discreet, selfeffacing and terrible presence which Sabine had felt, which she was to feel each time she was
subsequently to find herself confronting them during the years to come, and which, forty years later,
she was still not able to get accustomed to, producing in her eyes, each time she looked at them—or at
her, today, forty years later, when the two sisters-in-law were sitting under the deep shade of the
chestnut-tree, talking in the languid calm of a summer evening—that same troubled, abashed, baffled,
and pensive expression.
And now, for the last five days, Marie had been lying in the suffocating half-darkness of the room
where the sun's T was imperceptibly advancing: in the process of dying, or rather of dessicating, of
turning into a living mummy, so to speak, the face that could already be recognized in the old
photograph now tipped back, motionless, on the pillow, assuming hour by hour a kind of majesty,
distilling, purifying itself, solemn and terrible, while throughout the house sounded regularly
(reaching even through the walls, the closed shutters) that noise which had nothing human about it any
longer, that terrible death rattle, like a bellows, monotonous, obsessive, and measured. And this hadn't
happened, as Sabine had supposed, in the spring, the season hard for old people to survive. It was
already almost fall, the last days of summer, and the thing had also not happened in the usual,
expected way (that is, gradually, the first discomforts, then the complaints, then bed, then the pain's
aggravation, then the final agony) but (as if to the very end, or at least as long as she was in possession
of her faculties, she had maintained—voluntarily or not—the same reserve, as if in retirement, behind
that sort of smiling and granitic impenetrability), but in the following way: Julien, the butler,
returning in the car from marketing in town, catching sight of her sitting under the chestnut tree in that
same rattan armchair which, in ten years, had become her chair and where, when it was good weather,
she liked to sit when she came back from her walks; and later Julien, coming out again to wash the car
and seeing her still sitting there in the same place and at the time somewhat surprised, looking harder,
noticing something strange in her posture, something unaccustomed, beyond the fact that she had not
moved from the same spot for two hours, then coming closer, and as he approached walking faster,
then beginning to run, and, about a yard away from her, stopping abruptly, staring at her where she
was sitting awry for the first time in her life, and more than awry, as if she were broken, he said later,
a little broken black doll, her head hanging on one side, although the hat was still straight upon it, and
no disorder except on the ground, at the foot of the chair, under the gnarled old yellow hand hanging
over the arm, a few fragile field flowers scattered.
"As if it could go on indefinitely!" the doctor said. "What did you expect? It has to stop sometime or
other, it . . ."
"But," Louise said, "isn't there something, shots or something that . . ."