Composition No 1

<h1>COM POSI TION NO. 1</h1> \ <h2>A NOVEL BY MARC SAPORTA</h2>\ [[Click here to begin|Intro]]

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{(if: $p1 is not "true")[(set: $p1 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The blouse is cool, crisp, spotless. But Helga's breasts throb as they resist the fingers in search of the weak point under the material. The girl surrenders. Her lips part and return the kiss violently. But as quickly as the blaze was lit, it is extinguished. Helga tears her mouth away and abruptly turns her head. Her fingers try to free her breast. She seem astonished to have succeeded, and for a moment her surprise leaves her defenseless again. This time she really struggles, in fierce silence, against the arms that try to surround her. Like a little goat, she butts against her captor to free herself, but without success. Pinioned around the waist, she draws back her shoulders as her hard little breasts strive against the chest that seeks to crush them. Her back arches against the arm around her waist. Absurdly, she stops fighting for an instant in order to pull down her skirt, which has ridden up, revealing her knees and thighs. She has lost a precious moment, for now her mouth is taken by assault again. Helga seems genuinely angry. She is stimulated by opposition. No sensuality now in this desperate little animal determined to win. The blouse rips. One, then two buttons yield, while a seam gives under her arm, revealing the flesh and the brassière. The arm that slides under her knees finally tips the girl over. Lifted for a moment above the couch by her waist and legs, Helga falls back. A kiss muffles her cry.

{(if: $p2 is not "true")[(set: $p2 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar's eyes have green reflections beneath the pale lashes. They form an abyss in the middle of her face. Close up, they look like certain whirlpools in the Rhine, at the base of the Lorelei's rock. Deep inside lies the ring of the Nibelungs. It would be best to dive into the girl as into a spring. But Dagmar closes her eyes in a rapid blink, and white birds brush the surface of the current with their wing tips. The dawn rises in the green pupils while long iridescent scarves trail between the lashes. Dagmar says, "When you stare at me I go blind." And the pupils widen tremendously, as in darkness. But the day breaks now, and the glance grows animated. Deep inside Dagmar appears an image which rises to the surface. A tiny, unrecognizable man's head, at which Dagmar smiles gently. Under the high, tilted forehead, the closed eyes form a delicate field, ravaged by quivers. A tiny tear dissolves at the comer of the lids. Dagmar says, I’m happy." And this is only a subterfuge. A vain excuse for a tear which no doubt has an entirely different meaning. But Dagmar says, I’m happy." So as not to have to give an explanation. Through her lowered lashes, like a portcullis in front of a drawbridge, Dagmar stares for a moment at the moat that separates her from the assailant. She says, "I wish I could surrender."

{(if: $p3 is not "true")[(set: $p3 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar is stretched out on her back on the couch, completely dressed. She has merely taken off her shoes, revealing her feet arched in their fine stockings. Above the ankle rises the shapely leg, with the long curves of a young, swift thoroughbred animal. The thighs and hips are molded in the narrow skirt. Over her sweater Dagmar wears a modest cardigan, buttoned up to the chin, swollen by the throbbing breast. Around the throat, three rows of large pearls form a nacreous collar under the willful chin. On either side, curls frame the red smiling mouth. The vanishing lines of the face run toward the temples, leaving behind the two great green pools of the eyes. It seems that for once Dagmar has abolished the distance that separates her from the world, and that her body casts a bridge between her self and the reality which she brushes with the tip of her toe, the ends of her hair. Stretched out this way, she is space, and trajectory in space, the arrow winging toward its target. She says, "Yes, but like Zeno's arrow that never reaches the dove. Because the idea stops it in mid-air." She adds, "Besides, the arrow is the dove too." And wings flutter in her graceful curls.

{(if: $p4 is not "true")[(set: $p4 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The president of the club has been categorical. If the debt is not paid within forty-eight hours, expulsion will result. And until then, of course, it is not even permitted to sit down at a table and try to recoup. Since the end of the month is already difficult, it's practically impossible to get such a sum together so soon. Of course, there's always the races and a few other ways to cash in quickly, but it's probably money down the drain. Most friends having been squeezed dry by now, there's no use trying to get a loan. At home, Marianne complains every night about the attitude of the shopkeepers, who behave worse and worse with her and now refuse any credit at all. She doesn't understand, of course, how anyone can mislay his wallet so often. And suddenly the miracle—a tierce. For this time, honor is saved. Serious consideration must be given to not setting foot in that club again. No doubt about it, it's the croupiers who win every time. They're the only ones. Unless you succeed in working out a system. The president, looking embarrassed, explains that since gambling is merely tolerated and difficulties are always possible, certain players whose financial problems are becoming chronic will no longer be admitted to the tables.

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{(if: $emptied is not "true")[ (set: $emptied to "true")]} You reach for another page, but the box is empty. The story you have read has exhausted the entire composition. All there is left to do is sift through the pages strewn across the floor or, alternatively, shuffle them back into the box to begin anew.

{(if: $p5 is not "true")[(set: $p5 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga gives a start and her lips pout with vexation. She must think she is entitled to regard her room as an inviolable retreat that no one can enter without first knocking and being asked to come in. She even makes a gesture of protest when the door closes again, but she remains silent. Only her gaze, moving from bottom to top, is questioning. She is still holding a pen in her hand. In front of her, on the table, a half-written letter. She betrays a certain anxiety very becoming to her eighteen years. She is wearing a plain sleeveless blouse open at the throat. The row of buttons down the front further accentuates the girl's fragile look. It is only a flimsy obstacle between desire and the young breasts. Helga stands up gracefully to offer her unexpected visitor a light. Her gait is flexible, slightly undulating. Like all girls her age, she can't help practicing her feminine wiles. If she has any reason to be anxious about the intrusion, she makes no less of an effort to be attractive. She succeeds, quite dangerously for her. She is still waiting for an explanation, although it may be to postpone it that she slows her movements while she lights her cigarette. She recover all her vivacity, only to draw back suddenly with an abrupt movement which, without her noticing it, brings her closer to the couch.

{(if: $p6 is not "true")[(set: $p6 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga has let her cigarette go out. She curls up at the head of the studio couch. Her back to the wall, she tries to straighten her shoulders with a certain arrogance, to show that she isn't afraid and that this strange intrusion into her room seems quite natural to her. Yet she leans forward to light her cigarette again, straightens up and clumsily expels the smoke with a haste that betrays her uneasiness. Her hands tremble slightly. She tries to convince herself that she has no reason for anxiety. And yet she is gradually losing her composure. The gesture she makes to knock off the ash is a little more energetic than it need be, but not broad enough to permit her to shift position. Didn't she herself choose this position, with her back to the wall, cutting off all hope of retreat? She pretends to focus her attention on the cigarette and not to notice the hand gently caressing her legs. As long as this cigarette is in her hand, she knows she has a weapon and can stall for time. But the cigarette is burning down, and the hand grows bolder, rounding the knee revealed by her short skirt. Helga is torn between wanting to raise the cigarette to her mouth and wanting to make it last as long as possible—as is revealed, more than once, by a suddenly checked gesture. Now she has nothing but a butt between her fingers, and it is already burning her nails. Before stubbing it out in the ashtray, she already makes a gesture she cannot resist: in spite of herself, she purses her lips.

{(if: $p7 is not "true")[(set: $p7 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar suffers from her own racial prejudice, which drives her to save her kindest remarks, her sweetest smiles, for Jews and Negroes. "They're so marvelously far out," she says. She is dancing with a young student the color of darkness, and as the black hands gently clasp her waist and her shoulder she seems to float off the coast of some exotic continent, a prisoner of the currents that keep her both from drifting out to sea and from approaching the shore. Her deliberate schoonerlike grace allows her to maneuver as if she were alone among the crowd surrounding her on all sides on the tiny dance floor of this night club she has been taken to. She pays no more attention to the ebb and flow of the dancers than if they were the impalpable foam of waves washing against her hull. The young Negro clasps her in his arms, without interrupting his motionless drift, at the center of a group that slows down to admire this couple. With her blank gaze, Dagmar seems to be exploring a promised land beyond her partner's shoulder, apparently above the horizon. When she sits down again, accompanied by her partner, who bows affectedly: "Land," she says.

{(if: $p8 is not "true")[(set: $p8 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The villa's inside staircase rises toward the skylight, illuminated by the daylight falling through the glass as in an artist's studio; the stairs stream upward, in the opposite direction from that of the light. Helga dances from one step to the next, mounting toward the brightness. She wears summer slippers, mostly openwork, whose white heels leap from tread to tread. With a dancer's light movement, she brushes her bare ankles against each other, making a quick entrechat at each step. The delicate tanned calves bound upward. Perhaps she feels a slight awkwardness at the notion of being followed as she ascends—her legs being at the eye level of an observer behind her. At each step the short skirt reveals the hollow of her knees. Helga turns around on the landing, slightly out of breath, and tosses back her short braids before continuing toward her room on the floor above. Through the second-floor window the trees in the garden cast a greenish glow softer than the white glare of the skylight above the stair well. The blond hair gleams, though the face remains in shadow. Then Helga continues on her way, disappearing at the turn of the stairs. Her braids constitute an irresistible "Follow me, young man." By contrast, the hall leading to the rooms on the second floor seems plunged in darkness. Yet the invitation of those two teasing braids must be resisted.

{(if: $p9 is not "true")[(set: $p9 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The hallway is dark. The carpet muffles the sound of footsteps. All the doors are closed. The house is empty today. Only Helga has stayed in her room to work. At least that's what she claims. To what degree is the youngster aware of her charm and of the desires she provokes? Doubtless she likes to play with fire, it's only natural at her age. If not, it would be easy enough for her to lock her door. From the third-floor landing it is only five or six yards to the girl's room, but no noise comes through the closed door. The door feels hard and smooth against the skin. A rustle of paper, the faint noise of a chair being pushed back from the table, seem to vibrate in the wood itself, but perhaps it is only the sound of the sea that a shell makes when pressed over the ear. Like a tide, the sound of Helga's life flowing in the room swells against the wood of the door. It is time to determine the girl's intentions once and for all. The brass knob turns silently in the hand grown insensitive to all contact, like a leper's hand. Perhaps Helga has noticed the slight displacing of the doorknob. But nothing suggests a new movement in the room. The door opens inward onto an explosion of white light as it turns on its hinges. It was not locked.

{(if: $p10 is not "true")[(set: $p10 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The house is empty. The maid has left to do the marketing, and there is a tall black man waiting at the other end of the apartment. Yet the dark hall is the only way to get to the box of lead soldiers in the closet. In the dining room, all the lights are on. All the crystals of the chandelier gleam. It would be nice to stay here until the maid comes back. But the box of lead soldiers acts like a lodestone. Not because it's really fun to play war, but because this box wants to be taken into the dining room. It sends orders from one end of the apartment to the other. Outside the window the street lamps go on; a few windows glow in the house opposite, above the neon signs. The open dining-room door looms up like a dreadful black stripe. That thin column may be the man waiting in the shadows. It would be easy to open the door wide, slip in a careful hand and grope for the switch, just inside the door. But the box wants to be taken to the dining room down the dark hall, without the light's help. Suddenly all this darkness rushes forward, the closet door moves under his hand, opens, knocks against the wall, the box leaps out of its own accord. Now it's the dining-room light that rushes toward him. All the soldiers fall in a heap on the table. The flag breaks.

(set: $showFooter to "false") A novel by Marc Saporta Translated from the French by Richard Howard Simon and Schuster, New York, 1963 Original French language edition entitled Composition No. 1 Copyright 1962 by Editions Du Seuil Published by Simon and Schuster, Inc. Rockefeller Center, 630 Fifth Avenue, New York 20, N.Y. First Printing Digitisation by Michael Iantorno 2025 <a href="https://michaeliantorno.com/" target="_blank">//Download and Commentary//</a> //Note: one page is currently missing due to its absence from the scanned original.// Made in Twine <div align="center">- (link: "Back")[ (set: $showFooter to "true") (goto: (history:)'s last) ] -<div>

{(if: $showFooter is not "true")[(set: $showFooter to "true")]}\ ''THE READER IS REQUESTED'' to shuffle these pages like a deck of cards; to cut, if he likes, with his left hand, as at a fortune teller's. The order the pages then assume will orient X's fate. For time and the order of events control a man's life more than the nature of such events. Certainly there is a framework which history imposes: the presence of a man in the resistance, his transfer to the Army of Occupation in Germany, relate to a specific period. Similarly, the events that marked his childhood cannot be presented in the same way as those which he experienced as an adult. Nor is it a matter of indifference to know if he met his mistress Dagmar before or after his marriage; if he took advantage of young Helga at the time of her adolescence or her maturity; if the theft he has committed occurred under cover of the resistance or in less troubled times; if the automobile accident in which he has been hurt is unrelated to the theft-or the rape-or if it occurred during his getaway. Whether the story ends well or badly depends on the concatenation of circumstances. A life is composed of many elements. But the number of possible compositions is infinite. BUISSON //says//: We'll take care of you after school. COHEN //says//: You're a good guy, but it isn't worth it. HELGA //says//: Get out. MARIANNE //says//: That's how you treat your wife! DAGMAR //says//: I could never forgive a lie. GISÈLE //says//: It doesn't matter. You confess. And start over. LISE //says//: I really care for Robert. THE CHAPLAIN //says//: He died in a state of grace. LUCAS //says//: The envelope is in the middle drawer, with the confessions of all the tortured resistance fighters. THE ANESTHETIST //says//: Count aloud. A VOICE //says//: Get an ambulance! THE CROUPIER //says//: Trois, rouge, impair et manque. THE NURSE //says//: You must keep still. MAMAN //says//: This child is too nervous. THE SCHOOLCHILDREN //say over and over//: You're a liar. FRANCINE //says//: I'd like you to meet Marianne. THE DRIVER //insists//: I had the right of way, he was driving much too fast!

{(if: $p11 is not "true")[(set: $p11 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The stretcher floats silently down the white corridors. The ceiling is lit by long fluorescent tubes whose bluish reflections cast a lunar glow above the slow movement of the current. The orderly has a perfectly round head that would look the same from any angle. From below, at a ninety-degree angle, it has a friendly look, a Sunday joviality. The nurse sails on under her veil, propelled by the breeze. The sail swells over the raft that floats slowly through the hospital. The sluice gates open at each doorway on identical landscapes. The same corridors, the same whiteness. The elevator is merely a lock that is more dangerous to get through, but the raft emerges at the higher water level, where the operating room is. The smell of the anesthetics suggests some hope of relief from pain: sudden sleep. Without a raft this time, the sliding movement continues under the friendly gaze of the surgeons. The nurses, veiled like Moslem women, offer their beautiful eyes filled with departures, adventures. There is a long flight through alternating black and white layers, like a sky at sunrise, under the anesthetist's gentle hands.

{(if: $p13 is not "true")[(set: $p13 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The boss decides to be understanding once again, and he agrees to a new advance on the year's-end pay. However, he warns that this is the last time and that the December bonus is certainly overdrawn. Yet August is just beginning. The country house is already mortgaged. All the resources are exhausted. "I don't understand why you don't get a divorce," says the boss, whose connections with the family qualify him to give suitable advice, especially since he has just advanced quite a large sum of money. Impossible to explain that no one could abandon a woman in a state like Marianne's. It would be only too easy for him to answer that in that case it would be better for the young woman's health if her husband spent all his time with her or insisted that she be hospitalized. Of course the boss is unmarried. The envelope, deep in his pocket, makes a rustling noise. It would be a good idea to gamble the whole amount. With a little luck, all the debts would be paid at once and everything would start from scratch. But the cards are terribly unkind. At each deal the rustle of banknotes diminishes, and soon only the sides of the envelope rub against each other. There's nothing to do but go home to Marianne. And tell how the boss refused the advance she's been expecting so impatiently. She has just had a second-hand dealer take away everything in the kitchen, which she regarded as contaminated, for an absurd price.

{(if: $p15 is not "true")[(set: $p15 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne slams the door. The apartment remains strangely silent. The children have not been awakened. The bolt slides easily. The door makes no sound. Marianne certainly heard nothing, for she continues walking downstairs. Seen from above, she is nothing more than a head of brown hair with long, smooth curls on each side of a part, and the shoulders of a fur coat. She seems about to raise her head, but continues on her way down. Each time she reaches a landing, she disappears for a second or so, then reappears on the floor below, on the section of the stairs visible from above. Finally she disappears for the last time on the ground floor. A pause. The apartment house door slams heavily. The apartment is strangely empty. Leaning over the balcony railing, beside the potted rosebush, it is still possible to see the hair and the fur coat. Marianne gets into the car. Yet she doesn't know how to drive. There is nothing to do but go down, leaving the door open, hurrying just in case. Again the apartment house door slams. Marianne is waiting in the car for the inevitable reconciliation. One more time.

{(if: $p14 is not "true")[(set: $p14 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The skin of Helga's naked legs becomes imperceptibly grainy under the caress. They stiffen, and a slight hollow forms in the calf muscle, like a sword blade. The girl moves away and crosses her knees with a kind of aggressiveness. One of her legs forms a right angle with the floor. The foot set firmly on the rug suggests both firmness and arrogance. Helga presses her legs together as much as her position permits. She is now sitting on the pillow, her back against the wall. She can no longer move away. But her face further reflects the indecision of her body. Her wide, vague eyes avoid any recognition. They constantly escape, return, flee again. They gleam now and then, but this is perhaps only the reflection of the daylight through the window. Her fingers seem to press harder against the wall, but she doesn't refuse the kiss. Nor does she accept it. And her indecision passes into her lips, which sustain the pressure without opening. Her shoulder is smooth and round to the touch, but does not yield. Her teeth are clenched hard. Perhaps that is why she does not cry out—to avoid opening her mouth. For a false move would subject her to the kiss, and she is not yet sure whether she wants to yield to that. Her hands tremble slightly when she finally tries to defend herself.

{(if: $p12 is not "true")[(set: $p12 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The dark, varnished door with ornamental moldings indicates that the office has been set up in what was once a middle-class apartment, now converted to commercial use that is more profitable to the owner. The installation expenses have been kept down to a minimum, despite the high profits of the firm; the boss thus betrays an avarice which is almost legendary among his employees. In a period of functional offices and of public relations, the grim aspect of the premises offers a permanent refutation of the thesis of progressive employers; for, despite this dreadful atmosphere, business is booming. Yet it is not the morale of the personnel that favors productivity. So we must assume, on this point too, that the experts are mistaken; work is accomplished joylessly but with the desired effectiveness, and that, according to the management, is what matters most. The open door reveals a threadbare carpet on which stands, like a wreck saved from the Flea Market, a walnut-stained chest of drawers which serves as a desk. The leather armchair and the other chairs seem to have belonged to some dining-room set. They must have been part of the original furnishings. Perhaps the experts on "human relations in business" are not altogether wrong, even so. The gaping safe is all the more tempting to the personnel because every employee detests his employer and sees in the bundles of banknotes the best way of quitting a demoralizing job, in a setup that favors the kind of thoughts that are most inimical to the established order.

{(if: $p16 is not "true")[(set: $p16 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar walks on with her supple, thoroughbred's stride. Her blond hair falls to her shoulders. Her Greek profile disappears as she turns her head to ask, seriously, "You don't like Germans, do you?" She doesn't expect an answer. As she doesn't expect the cobblestones to exclaim at her beauty. She is harmony. And silence. Silent harmony. She is. Her arm presses the hand that clasps her elbow against the side of the coat. The barrier of the tongue. The barrier of the cloth coat. She walks alone despite this presence at her side. She reflects. Turns her head again. She adds as if several minutes hadn't passed, ''I'd like to explain to everyone I meet that it isn't my fault and that I can't do a thing about it." Beneath the blond impassivity of her vigorous body seethes an ardor indicated by the curves of the greedy mouth and a certain luster of the eyes, their lashes darkened with mascara, under the coal-black lines of the brows. Her hips are firm, her breasts tender. She strides down the hostile street with a convincing show of assurance. When she turns her head to speak, her unsmiling expression has something pathetic about it. She knows that the words reach her interlocutor's ear only after having crossed an infinite distance which makes any attempt to communicate almost futile and which cannot be measured in conventional units. Twelve, fifteen inches? Those separating a woman's mouth from the ear of a man walking beside her.

{(if: $p17 is not "true")[(set: $p17 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The hospital room is only a heap of chaotic memories. On the white ceiling the shifting scenes are inscribed in palimpsest, as on a film used several times by an absent-minded photographer. Between the bed and the doors, many layers of images form a transparent wall which the nurse penetrates. The air is unbreathable, heavy with colors and characters. At each breath, moving beings stream toward the lungs and make their way down through the body. Under closed eyelids the scenes are composed. By quick touches flowers bloom into long rockets, leaving on the surface of the black canvas a constellation of meteors, trails of falling stars. Eyes float through the room, widening until they fill all the space between the white walls. Passing through these eyes is like diving through the water in a pool. But the eyes vanish, either because their lids have been lowered or because tears have dissolved them in the air. The dive has left only concentric circles, whose waves close over the void. Dagmar comes in, dressed all in white, and makes way for a bride, her face tense, pale under her veils but controlling her nervousness before the altar. The nurse leans over. Her hand is cool. She says, "You must keep still." But it is only the images that cry out. As the nurse leaves, they dissolve like cigarette smoke.

{(if: $p18 is not "true")[(set: $p18 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar has done her hair into two little braids that stick out like rattails behind her slender ears. Without any make-up, her naked face reveals its sensual modeling. She is not even pretty. She is only upsettingly sincere. Frankness made flesh. She wears a beach coat whose loose folds conceal her figure. From the material emerge only her long, firm legs, stretched out on the rim of the pool. Dagmar holds out her face as though for a kiss, in an effort to hear better, to make sure of the words she is hearing. To be convinced that love exists. She radiates confidence and tenderness. She holds out her face to diminish the distance. Not only the distance that separates two young people on the rim of a swimming pool where they must maintain a decent attitude, but the distance that separates the falsehood of words and the reality of sentiments. The distance, too, that keeps two lovers from dissolving into each other, even in possession, above all in possession. Dagmar says, "I wish you could dive into me the way you dive into this pool. I feel like water, with you." And her accent is one more distance.

{(if: $p19 is not "true")[(set: $p19 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar gets into the car, as she does everything, with a clear awareness of all her movements. Her knees bend as she sits down on the front seat, one hand holding on to the door handle. For a second her legs gleam, revealed as far as the knees by the short skirt. The shoes, pressed close together, rise above the pavement. The long, shapely calves turn on an invisible axis and vanish under the dashboard. The door slams. Dagmar smiles through the window. With her broad, calm smile, full of confidence in life, in love, in herself. A smile that is a kind of certainty. Once in the car, she continues her rotating movement. As if she were on the couch in her room, she half folds her legs beneath her. Her bright-red mouth and her green eyes are contradictory signals which compete, at the intersections, with the orders of the stoplights, at the risk of provoking accidents. But if the bright lips pronounce words which are so many warnings, admonitions to use caution, the glow of the green eyes seems to suggest that the road is clear. Despite the stop signals that the girl keeps offering, apparently without conviction. Dagmar says, with a broad, slightly forced smile, "If you sideswipe, there's a danger of damaging your fins."

{(if: $p20 is not "true")[(set: $p20 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The blue stairs descend blithely toward the blue water of the pool, to the slapping rhythm of naked heels. Through the railing appear the prone bodies a floor below. Tanned girls glance between their lashes at boys who sweep them with an insistent stare as they pass. The wet steps are slippery. The iron railing is painted blue like the steps, and beyond it can be seen Dagmar's red-and-white-checked beach coat, where she is sitting at the edge of the water. A dripping boy and girl run up the steps four at a time, chasing a friend or each other. The vigor of their bodies causes a splatter of laughter. The girl stops a second to wring out her sopping hair, then starts off again. Everyone watches everyone. This descent is like an ascension toward an aquatic heaven full of promises of happiness. Dagmar waves to indicate her presence, but how to answer without risking a slip on these boards that are more treacherous than a skating rink? The bodies rise toward the steps, grow larger, hide each other, and Dagmar is no more than delicate, muscular legs, an arm waving over heads, and a strip of red-and-white-checked material between the bathers. Finally she reappears, all of her, in a clearing of faces and bodies, stands up and walks forward. She says, ''You have to watch yourself to keep from falling, on that ladder."

{(if: $p21 is not "true")[(set: $p21 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar left behind only this tireless termite that gnaws away at the heart. The image of the lost young woman returns like a long fatigue that makes the back arch, the shoulders straighten. In vain. The muscular diversion functions only for a fraction of a second. The memory of the missing Dagmar is no longer a sentiment but a physical sensation. Intolerable sense of discomfort in the body, near the heart. Slow tension of the secret fibers which never make their presence felt any other way. Dagmar advances behind her smile as though along a stream. But the illusion vanishes; the street again becomes familiar, empty, with its peevish pedestrians, the hostile crowd that is no longer illuminated by the blond hair worn high, like a lighthouse beam, by the familiar silhouette. Dagmar's absence works deeper into the pit of the stomach. A silent moan runs through the entire body with the blood which nourishes with grief each bit of flesh, down to the finger tips accustomed to caressing the young woman's velvety cheeks. Furiously, the feet must prowl these empty streets to the point of exhaustion, until the darkness that keeps the cascade of blond curls from being seen. Until the fatigue that will numb the pain. So that the image of Dagmar, stubbornly present behind the eyes, blurs and vanishes. At least until awakening.

{(if: $p22 is not "true")[(set: $p22 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne locks herself in the bathroom. She announces through the door that she is too miserable and that she is going to slash her wrists. She adds that she is tired of being a housemaid and that she was not brought up for such a life. There is no use reminding her that she stubbornly refuses to hire even a cleaning woman to help her take care of the house; or that, besides, the meals she puts together are limited to ready—cooked dishes she buys at a shop, and household tasks concern her not at all. She refuses to answer this argument that has been hashed over so often. And she refuses to open the door. The minutes pass and the sobs that come from the bathroom increase to the point of hysteria. It is quite possible that in such a state she really will try to slash her wrists. The hammer attacks the door, whose jamb splinters. The neighbors downstairs, suddenly awakened, pound on their ceiling to show their bad humor. Now the hammer is attacking the panel of the door itself, while the walls of the courtyard echo with the indignation of the other tenants. Finally Marianne opens the door. She is very pale. From a tiny cut on her wrist a thread of blood flows down her hand. The wound must be disinfected and bandaged, and Marianne made to promise she won't do it again.

{(if: $p23 is not "true")[(set: $p23 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar is standing in front of her drafting table. Under the broad, slightly tilted top, a jointed framework makes it possible to alter both the height and the angle. Ball-and-socket joints fit into each other in a complex series of shafts and adjusting screws. One foot on the brake pedal, Dagmar turns a screw and the whole armature disjoints in an exact movement, the way the limbs of an athletic girl function when she exercises her muscles. The pale wood seems to be a part of her firm blond body. The play of the smooth leg and the round arms stops the movement once the table has reached the right height and angle. Dagmar leans over the white sheet and draws lines, while the lamplight plays over her delicate hands, displacing masses of darkness above the flat surface. Leaning this way, Dagmar turns toward the observer only the side of her body that is in shadow. On the other side, half of her face, still hidden, exposes its golden skin to the bulb. The long red nails move with precision, manipulate the ruler and the T square, finally set pencil to paper. Precise lines have produced an angular stage set, with admirably balanced masses. The sketch has the calm of columns. Dagmar straightens, examines the drawing carefully. Then she slowly tears the sheet away from the tacks that fasten it down. She crumples the paper in both hands and tosses it into a basket. When she turns back, she is somehow absent from her own face. Then she smiles, slowly.

{(if: $p24 is not "true")[(set: $p24 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ "//Trois, rouge, impair et manque//." The croupier rakes in the chips on the table with a greedy dexterity belying his lordly expression. He can afford such offhandedness; he wins every time. The ball is going to roll around to zero. Sheer force of will seems to be guiding it there. Zero. The pile, which has dwindled until it consists of nothing but this counterfeit five-hundred franc piece which a shopkeeper refused earlier, is restored. Should this coin not be played again? It has worked as a good-luck charm. But maybe it's a good idea to get rid of it now. "//Trente-six, noir, pair, passe//." The pile begins to shrink. Is or isn't it dangerous to bet the counterfeit coin? In any case, the accumulated debts can't be settled by the winnings of one night during which luck seems niggardly and the stakes are low. The whole pile is stacked on the red; it returns doubled in volume. Then begins to dwindle again. Despair sets in. The night is a bad one. Once again, the ball travels around toward zero. Zero. Better not tempt the Devil again. The man behind the cigarette counter tests the coin with a peevish expression and hands it back with a cold, suspicious smile. The fetish might be turning into an evil omen. From the top of the bridge, the flash of silver falls and vanishes into the river.

{(if: $p25 is not "true")[(set: $p25 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The collision is black and shiny, like the hood of the car. The noise combines the groan of crumpled steel with the impact of a giant fist. The fist is still stuck to the skin and continues to weigh upon the flesh. The street cries swell and rise to a shriller key. Death is not pain but a desperate struggle against the darkness suddenly prevailing in the car, just after the dazzle of the sun and the black luster of the car moving at top speed, to the right, coming closer in a split second until it overflows the street, hides the houses and fills all the space under the sky. The screech of brakes continues in the darkness which has suddenly fallen. A screech which is both a long skid on the street and a strange floating sensation, released from all weight. As if a strange orchestra had begun, the sounds melt, yet remain distinct. The ear recognizes all the instruments in the sudden blare that echoes indefinitely: the clatter of cars, the cries of the vendors on the sidewalk, the tires skidding, all dissolved in a sonorous, stifling mass where what is left of the car is drowned in the depths of a deafening ocean. The sound remains suspended in air like water suddenly frozen—coagulated, like blood. And then the uproar of the accident is followed by the noises of the rescue. Doors slam, voices come closer. "Get him out of there." "Don't touch anything." "Call an ambulance." Strange that the pedestrians are so interested in an accident that took place at least a hundred years ago.

{(if: $p26 is not "true")[(set: $p26 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga opens her eyes wide. Her cheeks are very red, whereas Dagmar's are pale. But perhaps this is only on account of the two slaps she has received, one after the other, which have half stunned her. Her mussed blond hair is divided into two funny little braids. One of them lies on the pillow, and a shadow forms in the hollow of each braided link. The ribbon around the end of the braid is undone. It is still looped around the hair, but its ends are lying fl.at on the couch. The other braid is curved back on Helga's shoulder. The bow is still intact. From the braid escape countless loose light hairs, which form a kind of halo. The two little ribbons are bright blue and becoming to the blond hair. The girl's neck is thrown back. It forms a white column that looks broken. In Greece there are such fragments lying in the grass around the ruins of ancient temples. The angle between the neck and the chin is very wide. Something throbs like a heart, very strongly, in the side of the marble column. The braids are undone. The neck is open. And the lips, through which passes the young girl's heavy breathing. Under the ear, a defenseless hollow, fragile and exposed. Helga opens wide her brimming, suppliant eyes, and between her lips appear her moist white teeth. Parted.

{(if: $p27 is not "true")[(set: $p27 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga is recovering her spirits. Her body, like that of a tiny exhausted creature, rests its full weight on the sheet, where two broad strips of red confetti, abandoned after the celebration, confirm the imprudence of her existence. She stretches her stiff muscles; each movement is a kind of rebirth. She sits up on the bed and clasps her legs, her face resting on her knees; gradually she regains the self-possession that was lost for what seems like infinity. In the window, the daylight still hasn't faded. It was not an hour ago that the door was opened, obliging the girl to interrupt the letter she had begun. On the carpet, the scattered garments indicate the violence of the struggle. For a moment Helga seems about to cry, but she sniffs back her tears. Her face hardens by degrees. She turns her head toward the mirrored wardrobe and looks at herself in it, as though searching for traces of what has happened. Finally she sets one foot on the floor, cautiously, toes first; she lights a cigarette and sits musing for a moment, avoids the caresses and without a word picks up her clothes. She straightens up and stands in front of the mirror above the sink. Her disheveled hair resists the hand trying to smooth it. Helga picks up the comb, turns around. "Get out," she says.

{(if: $p28 is not "true")[(set: $p28 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga is sitting naked on the edge of the couch. Her legs are crossed at the ankles instead of forming a right angle with the floor the way they do when, usually, the girl arranges them so as to set off their curves; in fact, they are lying almost flat, the tips of the toes on the floorboards. The calf muscles are relaxed, which imperceptibly alters their purity of line, like the almost invisible first blemish on a petal. The body is a trifle pudgy. One hand is lying palm up at the head of the couch, at right angles to the arm. Her shoulders seem more supple, almost sloping. The back is rounded with a certain weariness. She forgets to draw on the cigarette in the other hand, abandoned on her knees. Her face still shows traces of tension, the features drawn, as though with the effort she is making. The loose, disheveled hair hangs down her neck. She says nothing, and her expressionless eyes contemplate the floor without seeing it. She stands up, swaying a bit, and heads toward the sink. She looks at herself a moment in the mirror, picks up a brush, makes as if to smooth her hair. But she turns around before continuing. "Get out," she says.

{(if: $p29 is not "true")[(set: $p29 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga is sitting in the children's room. She has assumed the attitude of Andersen's little mermaid, her legs folded beneath her, her back straight, her shoulders sloping slightly, her head tilted. The children listen, fascinated, to the story of the little mermaid which Helga tells with a slightly affected accent. Then the girl acts out the tale. Arms outstretched, wrists flexed like a skater, she suggests a slide, or a flight, or a dance. Her eyes sparkle with excitement; the story moves her as well as the children. Her face grows sad, her eyes fill with tears. The story has a sad ending. Suddenly Helga is standing up. She starts straightening up the messy room. Each time she bends down, the back of her short skirt rises and reveals the top of her calves, the beginning of her thighs. She has a dimple in the hollow of each knee. She straightens up abruptly, arches her back, her breasts silhouetted for a second against the light. She tosses her short braids behind her shoulders and disappears through the open door. When she returns, her feet dancing, a gust of fresh air enters with her, as if someone has just opened the window. She picks up her French book and her dictionary, which she had forgotten, and leaves for good. The light has turned completely gray.

{(if: $p30 is not "true")[(set: $p30 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ "A little pink dog with a pig's head, an elephant's trunk and a corkscrew tail." "He's the one who told us, Mademoiselle." Mademoiselle seems very annoyed. "Why do you tell your schoolmates such nonsense? I'm sure you don't even have a dog." Mademoiselle writes a note in her classbook for Maman. It's about this constant and pointless lying. Lies for no reason. And yet the little pink dog could perfectly well exist. It's funny grownups never believe stories. Why couldn't a little dog like that live somewhere in the house? It didn't occur to the other children to question the story. They were simply crazy about it. Maman is annoyed, too. There's really no reason. If she looked hard, she could find a little dog with an elephant's trunk in the store and bring him home, and there wouldn't be any more lie. The dog-pig-elephant could even come and wait outside school, right in front of the other students and the teacher; that way everything would be all right. "This child has too much imagination," Maman says. Meanwhile, he has to listen to his schoolmates saying over and over, "You're a liar."

{(if: $p31 is not "true")[(set: $p31 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar walks on in her fawn-color fur coat, striding through the cold. The wind is her escort. In front of her, whirlwinds of dead leaves open the way, like motorcycles before the cortege of a princess. They unroll a russet carpet under her feet. Her pale face is icy. With a cascading laugh, her teeth sparkling, Dagmar takes possession of the winter. In the clinging green dress that attractively reveals her body, Dagmar walks down the path with all of spring. Her arms spring from her body like a freshet from the sleeveless dress. Her breasts swell the blouse. When she stops in front of the statue, her ballet slippers instinctively assume the third position of dancers, right leg back, carrying her body's weight, left leg slightly forward, the knee flexed. For a second, it looks as if she is about to go on point, to rise with the breeze. But all her woman's weight holds her on the ground. Dagmar and desire. Her body smells of summer and its fruits. She seems to have fallen at the foot of the Alhambra, where the ripe pomegranates explode their hard rind, in the gardens of the Generalife. And her pink mouth has the cool taste of seeds pilfered in the shade of the Andalusian pomegranate trees. She says, "What's the use of being a woman?"

{(if: $p32 is not "true")[(set: $p32 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The stairs are made of solidified night. Each landing is a carpet of night. The steps are black rocks which support, like the bottom of the sea, a fluid and opaque element rising to the waterline of a perhaps inaccessible raft. The climb or the progression to the surface is endless, along the Ariadne's thread of the invisible bannister. The steps thrust up their vertical panels, which produce a muffled thud whenever they are kicked. The skeleton key is warm at the bottom of the pocket. The door moldings guide the fingers toward the keyhole. To the left, at the same height as the keyhole, is a large cold button which the cigarette-lighter flame reveals to be made of copper. The tip of the oilcan enters the keyhole easily. Well oiled, the mechanism will function noiselessly. The key turns slowly, once, twice. The door yields without difficulty. Now to follow the wall by finger tip and find the door of the office without alerting the night watchman, who must be sleeping in front of the main door. And it is a good idea to count the number of steps, just to check the information on the plan and turn at the right place during this journey in the dark. The office door is at the right place in the hallway.

{(if: $p33 is not "true")[(set: $p33 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The hallway is pitch dark. Blindness. It seems impossible that a light could ever come on, or, if it should, such a light would not be exclusively reserved for others. And it's too unfair that others should be seeing clearly at this same moment somewhere in the city, everywhere in the city, except in this hallway. The hallway holds its breath to listen for the sound of footsteps, like an open mouth whose tongue lies glued to the bottom, tip just licking the teeth, every muscle tense in an effort to hold the breath one moment more. Contact with the floorboards is a slow torture, as is the slight brushing of material against the walls. The finger tips make no sound, but they advance apprehensively toward the unpredictable contact—a wound, a hole, or the face of the night watchman unexpectedly met within the tunnel of darkness. Fluid monsters dissolve into the dark, but must be passed through despite their unhealthy presence. The hallway is a wood, a path in a bewitched forest, where one false step can plunge the victim into traps or pits, hollow logs hidden under the moss to snatch the unwary, to imprison him in walls of bark. A molding indicates the door. The polished wood is pleasant to the touch after the contact of the rough and slightly damp wall. The handle is in the usual place, as if this door were like all others. The office opens.

{(if: $p34 is not "true")[(set: $p34 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne's scream saws through the night, the pieces of which fall as if they were two blocks of wood falling on either side of the blade. Her nails lacerate the arm, each leaving a burning line. Marianne's hand, where the loose wedding ring slides along her finger, clutches the sheet, twisting it in a convulsion of fear. I'm dead!" Marianne says. "I know I'm dead!" Blinded by her obsession, she cares nothing for reason, or for the children sleeping in the next room. From the depths of the tomb where she is trapped she shrieks out her agony. "But I tell you I'm dead," Marianne repeats. The body straining under the sheets is hard as metal. The voice is unrecognizable. With clenched fists, Marianne repulses any gesture of tenderness, covers her ears in order not to hear the comforting words. She has to be forced to relax. She collapses, lying on her back; in the darkness, her breathing gradually grows calmer. Two little ghosts of terrified children make their way into the room. Marianne awakes. For each she has a tender phrase. Apparently she remembers nothing. Or else, like the other times, she's faking this ignorance, which is belied by her sly smile, and her sudden burst of affection is an attempt to make everyone forget this new fit of nerves. The night is very long, once Marianne has fallen back to sleep.

{(if: $p35 is not "true")[(set: $p35 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne is deep in a huge medical dictionary. She looks up and says, "I have cancer. Now I'm sure of it." She's sure of it about three times a week, and each time for diverse but concordant reasons. "No, now that I know, I'm not going to see any doctor," Marianne answers once again. She hesitates a second before confessing, "Besides, even if it's only tuberculosis, I don't want to be treated just so I can suffer longer." There's no use reminding her that all the symptoms she's complaining about are the result of the deliberate starvation she has been inflicting on herself ever since she decided that she was deathly ill. "In my condition, you can't eat," Marianne insists. Her pretty mouth is already ravaged by too many sweets, with which she is obliged to compensate her lack of all other nourishment. Her teeth are filled with cavities, but Marianne no doubt considers that this slow destruction of her beauty is appropriate to the disease she insists she has. Just as she manages to keep herself at the limit of emaciation, beyond which she could not even stand up. Her clothes hang on her body, held together by safety pins that make sagging pleats in the material. She poses in front of the mirror and observes with unconcealed satisfaction, "I think I've grown a little thinner."

{(if: $p36 is not "true")[(set: $p36 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ "If I don't go, it will bring me bad luck," Laurent grumbles. He grabs his cap and joins the group. The chaplain has set up his portable altar in the barn. In front of the door, a few village women watch at a distance. They would like to take advantage of the occasion to attend the Mass without having to speak to the enemy soldiers; perhaps they want to thank heaven for having spared their families or their homes, or to pray for a new offensive by their own side. Most of the men yield to a kind of superstitious fear, and even those who have come only to pass the time maintain a respectful attitude, which gradually turns to a sincere piety. The responses grow louder and the signs of the cross more numerous. Laurent is conspicuous by the haste with which he walks forward to take Communion. He is still kneeling when the bombing begins. The men's commentary drowns out the priest's voice and there is a stampede from the barn. The old German women have already vanished. Have their prayers been answered? The chaplain runs back and kneels beside Laurent's body, saying in an unanswerable tone, "He died in a state of grace." What were the prayers addressed to heaven by the village women? Perhaps they asked for Germany's enemies to be punished. One of them is the mother of a young woman with whom the detachment had a little fun.

{(if: $p37 is not "true")[(set: $p37 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne utters a shriek: "I don't want it!" On the chair lies a wonderful scarf which represents a battle scene. Around the central medallion, soldiers in Empire uniforms are being called to arms or shouldering bayonets under tall guardsman caps. The drawing is delicate, the colors harmonize with Marianne's fur coat, with her complexion, with her eyes. "You did it on purpose, I don't want it." On the table, the birthday cake with its candles, the two champagne glasses, the bottle still uncorked. Marianne sobs loudly. The door slams. The key of the bedroom turns in the lock. The sound of sobbing penetrates the closed door. The door reverberates dully under the pounding fists. The wood is solid. More pounding comes in reply, from the neighbors on the floor above. Marianne comes out of her refuge. The mascara has run down her cheeks. Her long hair, wet with tears, clings to her cheeks, where the make-up has smeared. She looks like a child's caricature. She sobs, "You're a beast. I should never have married you." Finally the explanation: "How could I ever put a dead man on my head? You know how sensitive I am! But you never think of anything." Sure enough, in the center of the scarf a soldier is lying at the Emperor's feet.

{(if: $p38 is not "true")[(set: $p38 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne is huddled in the rickety armchair near Francine's bed. Since the hemorrhage, she hasn't left her friend's bedside. She has stopped eating since the doctors diagnosed the disease as cancer of the intestine. To the arguments of Dr. Brun, who wants her to get some rest and call in a nurse, she replies, in an expressionless, faraway tone of voice, "I have cancer, too." Francine is lying, still unconscious, on the bed, where despite Marianne's efforts the bloodstains are still evident, like dim but indelible memories. The bohemian apartment is still full of recollections of surprise parties organized by Francine, who is gradually dying, bloodless despite the transfusions. The doctor has refused to allow Marianne to give blood, considering her too exhausted already. Marianne insists on remaining in the studio where, for forty-eight hours now, she has been watching Francine's long agony without eating or drinking. "With a nervous condition like hers," Dr. Brun says, I’m afraid Marianne will carry the scars of this endless vigil of hers to the end of her days." Francine is as gray as her sheets that no one dreams of changing. Marianne is as ashen as the dying girl. "I have cancer, too, I know I do," Marianne says. Dr. Brun makes a gesture of despair. He murmurs, "Just as I said." But he knows that he will have to use force to get Marianne away.

{(if: $p39 is not "true")[(set: $p39 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The girl stands in the doorway, a little embarrassed but smiling. Her blond hair is covered by a cap or beret cocked over one ear. Her pert face exhales a dewy freshness. She can't be more than eighteen and may not even have reached her full growth. She has to tilt her head back, like a child, when she talks to grownups, but her lines are charming and her proportions perfect. She steps through the door like a gust of wind. Her walk has a little skip in it. She looks like a lamb ready to gambol on its delicate, muscular legs. Her wide eyes have just a touch of astonishment in them. But when she is asked to sit down, her nervousness is suddenly apparent in the way the tries—without success—to keep her legs covered. She sits down on a chair as if she were going to fly away at the first sign of danger. With an attempt at casualness, she unbuttons her coat. Her skirt is even shorter than the coat. Nervously, she tries to pull it down over her knees. She accepts a cigarette, probably to have something to do with her hands, but her fingers tremble and she has difficulty lighting it. She exhales the smoke without even tasting it, as if she were smoking for the first time. Then she repeats, to recover her assurance, I’m the girl who answered the advertisement." She speaks very softly. She adds, I’m from Cologne."

{(if: $p40 is not "true")[(set: $p40 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga's room is on the third floor, all the other rooms of which are used for storing old furniture, trunks full of unused or unusable linen, and all kinds of bric-a-brac. The room is meticulously clean. Along the wall at right angles to the door, a long table serves as a desk. The narrow window opposite the door lets in the daylight to the left of the table, where Helga is bent over a letter she has begun writing. To the left of the door, a studio couch makes a comfortable nook. Helga keeps her books and dictionaries on the corner bookshelf. In the opposite corner a huge mirrored wardrobe reflects the head of the couch. Hanging over the table, a framed reproduction of a tryptich from the Cologne museum, the work of some old master of the Rhenish school. In front of a virgin or a saint with huge eyes which look a good deal like Helga's, a knight is kneeling; he has a halo and a pair of wings. To the right and left of this central scene are a choir of angels and a legion of demons. At the bottom of the painting, tiny portraits of the donors, a couple steeped in piety. A special detail: the fragile saint is huddled in a huge bed; she seems to be waiting for the knight to join her there.

{(if: $p41 is not "true")[(set: $p41 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga is alone in her room. The little wooden table she is using as a desk stands against the wall, perpendicular to the door The girl is writing. She turns her head. Looking up this way, her face is tipped back a little. She seems to be offering a kiss. Her lips, slightly distended in their childish pout, stand out, red and shiny, above the rather square chin. Surprise gives her the look of a schoolgirl caught doing something wrong. Perhaps, after all, she is writing to one of her boy friends. That would explain her high color and the excitement in her eyes. Her bare, slightly dimpled arms are still lying on the table. She has not set down her pen. She continues to show a slightly fearful surprise, but she accepts a cigarette. With a graceful movement, she stands up to get a match. This is a tactical error on her part, but she doesn't know it yet. Yet she must foresee a danger, for her steps are somewhat hesitant. Helga lets the matches be taken from her, holds out her cigarette to receive the flame. Suddenly she steps back, without realizing that this move brings her closer to the couch. She still seems to be waiting for an explanation, wondering what the reasons are for this intrusion. Or perhaps she is refusing to believe the explanation that springs to her mind. She seems increasingly awkward. Yet she surrenders her hand and lets herself be led to the couch. No sooner is she sitting down than she frees her wrist with a gesture that is a little too brusque.

{(if: $p42 is not "true")[(set: $p42 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The first thing that must be deducted from the monthly pay check is the amount necessary to pay the largest debts Marianne has contracted during the month. Especially the price of a new table service, for Marianne has twice dropped the piles of dishes perilously balanced in her kitchen, waiting to be washed one day or another. Besides, she has mislaid a certain piece of an old chair which she broke in a moment of rage, and the cabinetmaker's bill is all the higher since he had to replace the two-hundred-year-old wood. The linen, not being mended in time, dissolves into rags at each washing. It too must be replaced without further delay. Once the various checks for these major expenses are sent out, Marianne has to be given her allowance, so the balance left in the bank for unexpected emergencies is dangerously low. Marianne complains bitterly over having married a salaried worker instead of a doctor or some other member of a lucrative liberal profession whose income, in her opinion, increases steadily. Besides, she must immediately enlarge her record collection, for she cannot live without music. As for the current expenses, she declares she'll "manage." Which means, among other things, that she'll do without eating most of the month, once again.

{(if: $p43 is not "true")[(set: $p43 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Gradually Helga begins moaning to herself, her face toward the wall, to the right; her contracted features express her desire to go all the way. "No," Helga says, and she turns her face, chin raised, toward some vision projected behind her closed eyelids. Her body yields like a bank of moist sand, hard, compact, flexible, yet crumbling in places; the girl's resistance comes to an end. Now and then her body takes the offensive. The hard little sex bud gives blow for blow, leaps up, rising higher. Like a fish out of water and capering on the grass, the belly arches, swells, relaxes, then begins again. The legs press together, but the ache returns and the girl opens them with a gasp that rises from breasts quickening under the hand. The panting becomes louder. The swollen breasts seek contact with the other breast. The pink nipples are erect and hard. Helga reaches down and pulls against her the loins that press upon her pleasure. Her legs, solicited, rise; she reacts to the slightest pressure like a pony to the bit. Her eyes open, become darker and darker, and close again. Another languid glance of overwhelming gratitude sparkles through the lashes. The round neck welcomes the garland of kisses, and the girl lights up like a string of Venetian lanterns reflected in a lagoon at night. It remains only to bring the carnival to a perfect conclusion.

{(if: $p44 is not "true")[(set: $p44 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The street is empty. A good opportunity. But first, one way or another, the hands must be made to stop trembling and the stairs climbed without a sound, which is difficult with shaking legs. The pack of cigarettes is crumpled at the bottom of the pocket. It now contains only one frayed Gauloise, from which the tobacco is seeping at both ends. The reassuring flame of the lighter burns the fine paper, whose outer edge flares up in a tiny conflagration. The block has only about a dozen housefronts, which is not enough. A short walk around the block is in order-to reassure the muscles and harden the will. To the right of the first intersection, the cross street looks a little longer. The rhythm of the footsteps grows firmer as the moment for climbing the stairs is postponed. To the right again. The point farthest from the action is soon reached. Then the distance separating the present moment from the door gradually diminishes. To the right for the third time. A couple passes, strolling casually. The boy and girl are gazing into each other's eyes and see nothing. Fourth and last corner. Twenty steps to the right. The moment has come to go into the house whatever happens and whatever the cost, as planned.

{(if: $p45 is not "true")[(set: $p45 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ From the side the flight of stairs is merely a series of tiny puppet stages, the steps forming so many platforms about to fit into each other. The girl approaches the landing as if she had prepared herself in the wings; she catches her breath by slowing her rhythm for a moment. Finally she begins the ascent of the third Hight. The show is about to begin. The scene is brief but intense; it even assumes a dramatic aspect, in the strictest sense of the word. For the passage across the boards exerts a force of attraction, demands attention, like a carefully handled suspense story. Face, bust and skirt suddenly appear; the girl runs on, drawn from above. But, for the moment, all this is only the setting for a scene. A momentary setting, in fact. Then the real protagonists appear, sprightly as in a comedy by Marivaux: the two delicate legs conduct a dialogue with extraordinary vivacity, tossing the initiative from one step to the next. The fascinating movement of the smooth calves alternately extends and relaxes them. The open curves compose a shifting scene, a scene consisting of lines and pure mass, for the spectacle is abstract and has no other significance than its own presence. The ankles are the last to vanish. The heels clatter on the landing above. The moment has come for the spectators to invade the empty stage.

{(if: $p46 is not "true")[(set: $p46 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne is fussing around with her pots and pans. She has long since fired the last cleaning woman who tried to help her keep the apartment more or less in order, for she cannot endure the presence of a stranger in the house. For months she has been looking after the household by herself. Her high heels clatter across the kitchen, stepping over piles of dirty dishes set on the floor. She walks over to the stove, where a saucepan from which the water has long since evaporated is smoking and giving off a smell of white-hot metal. Jets of grease spatter from a skillet left on the glowing electric ring. Marianne is wearing a lamé dress with the elegance and distinction that constitute a large part of her personality. The dress is covered with stains. She grasps the burnt saucepan in her bare hands and drops it with a moan of pain. But she is undaunted. She grits her teeth and merely sticks her finger in a lump of butter to soothe the effects of the bum. The skillet begins smoking. The smell of grease fills the whole apartment. Marianne turns around and screams, "A man's place is not in the kitchen." Then she closes the door. A moment later she opens it again to answer, "I have to wear a dress, even when I'm cooking."

{(if: $p47 is not "true")[(set: $p47 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne is at her desk. The scribbled papers accumulate around her, covering each other. The writing is almost a shriek. Illegible. No single letter is actually formed. No sentence seems finished. Some sheets show only a few words. Others are completely covered. Once the page is filled, Marianne has written in the margins, vertically. The text is full of crossings-out and rewritings. No sheet is numbered; she can't possibly find where she is in all this mess. Nervously she tears up one of the sheets; throws away the part already used after having crumpled it into a ball, and begins writing again on the scrap that is still blank. The crumpled ball joins some fifteen others under Marianne's feet on the floor. Her black hair falls down over her eyes, concealing what she is writing. Marianne hurriedly pushes back her hair and feverishly continues her work. Finally she picks up everything on the desk that shows the least trace of writing and arranges it all in a pile in which torn scraps are next to pages upside down. She folds the whole thing once and stuffs it into a drawer. She changes her mind, takes out a random sheet, writes a marketing list on the back and slips the sheet into her pocket. Finally she stands up. She says, ''I've begun to write a novel."

{(if: $p48 is not "true")[(set: $p48 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Sitting on the couch, her legs folded under her, Dagmar selects a chicken leg from the tray in front of her and delicately raises it to her mouth in her slender fingers. The tray is arranged as though for a party. The two carefully set places, the hand-painted plates and the colored paper napkins give the effect of a cheerful smile. Dagmar holds out the bottle first, then her glass, with a gaiety that seems genuine. Before drinking, she pretends to propose a grave toast, but the sparks dancing in her green eyes belie her seriousness. With a lover's deliberateness, she seems to be constantly seeking the source of a possible danger to her happiness. In the tenderness of her gestures there is a kind of tremulous anxiety. She controls herself, however, with an effort that is quite touching. Like a fragile nymph whom the faun's pipes disturb yet seduce, she remains alert, then yields to the pleasure of the moment—which is still only music—ready to flee at the least breath of air. One leg folded under her, the other in the air, at the edge of the couch, brushing the floor with the tip of her shoe, she is motionless dance, still flight. She says, "Happiness is wanting to be yourself and succeeding." And she adds, "I'm happy."

{(if: $p49 is not "true")[(set: $p49 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar is sitting to the right, her back against the car door, her legs folded under her. Her face forms a white pool that remains visible although the traffic makes it impossible to look at her. Unlike most young women when they ride in a car, Dagmar does not sit facing the way the car is traveling, but perpendicular to it. Her eyes are fixed on the driver. At least in this car. Couples pass, in other cars. The distance separating them is indicative of their feelings. Some are intertwined on the front seat, coiled dangerously around the steering wheel. Others drive side by side; one girl has her head resting on her companion's shoulder. At a red light, two hands, superimposed, can be seen clasping the gearshift. But in most cars the riders' gaze is in parallel lines, forward toward the horizon or the next turn, like incorporeal telegraph wires. Perched on the front seat, beside the driver, each woman's posture proclaims her emotional status. Dagmar is sitting far to the right, leaning against the door, which it is a good idea to lock so that the young woman doesn't fall out backward in case it opens unexpectedly. But her eyes are fixed on her companion, enveloping him, not leaving him for a second. She pays no attention to the road, at the risk of being thrown against the windshield if the car should stop suddenly.

{(if: $p50 is not "true")[(set: $p50 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Every week Dagmar spends Wednesday afternoon at the museum. Thus it would be possible to get at least a glimpse of her by standing near the door and waiting. Since she refuses to say a word on the telephone and there's no use writing her, perhaps the sight of the tall blond figure will fill for a few moments the void created by her absence, a void which sucks all thoughts into itself. Dagmar's absence is this strange pain in the chest. It is a quicksand, deep in a forbidden cavern, where the least false step would involve an endless descent into obsession and disappointment. Surely it is possible, by using a thousand tricks and stratagems, to arrange a business meeting some Wednesday afternoon in order to get away from the office. Of course, the meeting must be over early enough for the museum to be still open. Luckily Dagmar is in the habit of staying until closing time. But which of the huge building's many doors has the girl chosen? Of the two possible solutions, taking a chance on a particular exit or driving the car around the courtyard, the former is harder on the nerves, the second less effective. Five o'clock. The visitors disappear one after the other. The car motor idles. A jam slows up the traffic. Five after five. The moment has passed. The doors are closed. It would be useless to search the surrounding streets. The ache grows sharper. Maybe Dagmar has changed her habits. The lie, the business meeting—all this childish fabrication has been futile. The pain starts up again, worse than ever.

{(if: $p51 is not "true")[(set: $p51 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne agrees to let a girl board with them, to take care of the children during the summer vacation. But only on certain conditions. Since Marianne's nerves cannot endure the presence of a stranger in her home, the girl cannot use the kitchen or the living room. In fact, she must stay in her own room, the guest room on the second floor of the villa, and one other room, the children's room, where she is to watch them while they play. And she will be entitled to go there only at certain hours. Thus all the other parts of the villa can be kept locked. This is what Marianne calls protecting her privacy. The mere idea that an outsider can walk into her home is a torment to her. This way, the girl's comings and goings will be reduced to a minimum. Besides, the girl will generally take the children out during her few hours of service. That way, Marianne will see her as little as possible. It would be absurd to think that Marianne is ashamed to show anyone the neglected state that the house is in. In fact, she takes a certain pleasure in living in a chaotic and expensive bohemian atmosphere. But she is convinced that her equilibrium would be imperiled if anyone tried to alter the established disorder, even with the innocent intention of putting something away. The last housemaid was fired for trying to clean up the bathroom, Marianne's inviolable kingdom and the sanctuary of her "privacy."

{(if: $p52 is not "true")[(set: $p52 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar stands erect in the light from the lamp. She stares straight in front of her. Her face expresses a faint disturbance, but her voice is unchanged. She says, "There's only one thing I wouldn't have tolerated: lying." And she repeats, "If I had found out without your telling me, I couldn't have borne it." She is very calm. If she happens to be suffering, she hides it well. She hides it so well that it is impossible for her not to be suffering. Her calm is much harder to bear than a reproach. She seems to imagine that there is some other woman who is her rival. Her smile expresses a kind of playfulness which may not be forced. She says, "The worst of it is, I feel as if I were an accomplice." Very slowly she comes closer. One kiss and everything would be simple again. Yet everything isn't simple again. And she knows it. And it is a kind of suffering to kiss her after having confessed. At this moment, Dagmar is more beautiful than any other girl on earth could be. She possesses the assurance that understanding gives, or certainty, the assurance of understanding with certainty. She says, "And you'll have to forgive me your own faults, too."

{(if: $p54 is not "true")[(set: $p54 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The man runs alongside the road. He turns around and thrusts out his thumb to ask for a ride. He bends down toward the open window on the right side of the car, his face unshaven and with patches of coagulated blood over one eye and below the cheekbone. He asks, "Are you going as far as town?" Marianne makes a horrified gesture when the man gets in behind her. The door slams and the car starts up at top speed. Dark eyes appear in the rear-view mirror, at once arrogant and apprehensive. But gradually the man seems to relax. A scraping of shoes on the floor and the rustling of material indicate that he is changing position. He puts one hand in his pocket, takes out a handkerchief and wipes his face. Trees and telephone poles rush by at dizzying speed. Marianne sits in tense silence. The man is silent, too. The road is completely deserted. The speedometer needle keeps rising. Houses appear at the turn. "This is it," the man says. Even before the car has come to a complete stop, he gets out and slams the door, after mumbling something that sounds like "Thank you." Marianne explodes, claiming that her life has been in danger, that the situation is ridiculous. It is ridiculous, at that.

{(if: $p53 is not "true")[(set: $p53 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dr. Brun tries to reason with Marianne, who hasn't moved from her friend's bedside since the hemorrhage. But he knows the young woman cannot be deterred. Francine's agony is the kind of event for which Marianne has been waiting for years, to give free rein to her own anguish, and to justify it. "I have cancer, too," Marianne says. Under the doctor's eyes Marianne washes her friend's body and, in her clumsiness, leaves bloodstains on the sheets and blankets. "This is no place for you to be," the doctor says, "in your nervous condition." Marianne continues her somnambulistic work, a basin and a sponge in her hand. Francine hasn't regained consciousness. The dying woman's call, just before she blacked out, awakened a feeling of guilt in Marianne. Hasn't she systematically held Francine off ever since her marriage? She stumbles as she goes out to empty the basin. "No, I can't eat," Marianne says. "I have an intestinal cancer, too." Impossible to make her admit that it is not she but only Francine who is dying. ''I've just caught it," Marianne says. And Dr. Brun, on the verge of exasperation, tries once again to prove to her that the disease isn't contagious. Marianne seems to feel a certain relief in believing she is stricken like Francine.

{(if: $p55 is not "true")[(set: $p55 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The house is typically Franconian, the kind that should exist only on postcards. The pointed, gabled front has big outside crossbeams, with bricks in the spaces between. The roof is thatched. In front of the door an old woman is sunning herself. The granddaughter wears a peasant skirt held up by suspenders that are crossed over her white blouse. She capers like a lamb or a kid inside the house, braids fluttering around her little seventeen-year-old face. The old woman peers suspiciously at the billeting order. The idea of lodging enemy soldiers under her roof doesn't appeal to her. The kitchen is cool, tiled, shadowy. Meticulously clean. Rows of copper pans, caldrons and jugs gleam along the wall. A fire of vinestalks burns on the hearth. The girl continues vivaciously on her way into the house. She runs up the stairway that leads to the upper floors. The wooden staircase has an ancient-looking bannister, well polished but crackled. The rustic bedroom is on the fust floor, comfortable, almost too luxurious after the nights on bivouac. Over the bannister, on the floor above, appears the pink face of the girl, now staring curiously at the foreign soldiers.

{(if: $p56 is not "true")[(set: $p56 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The candles serve as footlights for a wonderful spectacle. If you stare at the flames too long, they seem to dissolve in a golden curtain above the line of white collection boxes aspiring like Gothic columns toward a celestial vault. The candles are so many slender saints in white cloaks—like tremendously attenuated lead soldiers. Soldiers of God, piously wasted by fasting. The flames turn in haloes around them, and their procession seems to advance into the choir. A sniveling child on the bench at the right surreptitiously exchanges kicks with his neighbor. The golden veil tears up the middle. All that's left is the ugly, bare neighborhood church, with its paraphernalia of plaster saints and shuffling old bigots circling the confessionals. The priest's robe, as he passes, smells of celibacy and stale incense, like bad breath. It is no longer possible to re-create the white procession, even by staring hard at the flames. Only the dark background of the church is lit, by multicolored fireworks; luminous dots create a swarm of incandescent flies that die out after a dizzying trajectory. A little girl slides along the row, stepping on everyone's feet, as at the movies before the end of the film. The verger walks around to all the collection boxes and gathers the money, which clinks as the canvas bag is filled.

{(if: $p57 is not "true")[(set: $p57 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Robert appears at Lise's door in a bathrobe, his face haggard with jealousy. At the risk of attracting the attention of the girls sleeping in the next room, or of waking the proctor, he shouts, ''I've caught you, you dirty dog!" Lise, half naked, flings herself in front of him, motioning for him to be still. She should have remembered to lock her door. Robert doubtless got in through the ground-floor window that Lise usually leaves open for her lover. Robert must have watched and used the same way. He seems determined to make a scandal, even if it means that all three of them will be thrown out and Lise's reputation ruined. On the table, the heap of dictionaries, the half-finished Latin translation and the open Tacitus could scarcely serve as an alibi. Robert can blackmail her as much as he likes. He doesn't give a damn about being expelled. The first blow lands like a hammer. A fight is imminent, one that will wake up the whole building, bring the other girls out of their rooms and attract the teacher's attention. Grin and bear it. But suddenly Lise explains quite calmly that she was only waiting for this incident to let Robert know that he is the man she really cares for. There remains the possibility of using the same blackmail against them. But maybe it would be better to step aside; there are some weapons not everyone wants to use. Leaving, it's hard to keep from wondering whether fastidiousness, under certain circumstances, isn't a kind of cowardice. This question has no answer. It will keep corning up for a long time. Very long. Eventually it may even determine the orientation of a whole life.

{(if: $p58 is not "true")[(set: $p58 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Plunging into black night. The car has sunk under the water and will have to be brought up to the surface. The ignition key has vanished. All the car parts dance a saraband. The roof is underneath, the steering wheel in front, behind, everywhere. The inside is full of steering wheels. Someone shouts, "Open the door and get him out of there." The rescuers' arms pull in opposite directions. There is no more car. The ground comes up at incredible speed; it hits the race like a tremendous slap "Pick him up." "Don't touch him before the ambulance comes." The ignition key has vanished. Yet the motor has to be turned off. The smell of gasoline is unbearable. The police are good. The boots of the policemen make a fence. The police ambulance is peaceful. The policemen are unruffled; their imperturbability contrasts with the yelling of the street and with those houses that cry out. The police ambulance floats between earth and sky above the clouds, where the loud pealing of bells echoes over a calm valley. The archway of the hospital thunders. The world exists again.

{(if: $p59 is not "true")[(set: $p59 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ ARTICLE 332. Anyone committing the crime of rape will be sentenced to criminal confinement for a period of ten to twenty years. If the crime has been committed upon the person of a child under the age of fifteen years, the culprit will be sentenced to the maximum term of criminal confinement. Anyone committing a breach of decency, whether consummated or attempted, with violence against individuals of either sex, will be sentenced to criminal confinement for a period of five to ten years. If the crime has been committed upon the person of a child under the age of fifteen years, the culprit will be sentenced to the maximum term of criminal confinement. ARTICLE 333. If the culprits are ascendant relatives of the person upon whom the crime has been committed, if they are among those who exercise authority over that person, if they are that person's teachers or paid servants, or the paid servants of the persons previously designated, if they are officials or ministers of a sect, or if the culprit has been assisted in his criminal enterprise by one or several persons, the sentence will be criminal confinement for a term of ten to twenty years... The professor of criminal law adds that the application of these articles will always be a delicate matter and susceptible of many abuses. Actually it is quite difficult to distinguish between the use of force pure and simple, which characterizes rape, and the recourse to what the Roman jurists called //vis grata puellis//, violence dear to young girls.

{(if: $p60 is not "true")[(set: $p60 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ ARTICLE 379. Anyone fraudulently removing a thing which does not belong to him is guilty of theft. ARTICLE 381. Those individuals guilty of theft committed under any four of the following five circumstances will be sentenced to perpetual criminal confinement: 1. If the theft has been committed at night; 2. If it has been committed by two or more persons; 3. If the guilty party or parties have committed the crime by means of housebreaking or false keys, in a house, apartment or lodging inhabited or serving as a habitation, or in their annexes, whether by assuming the title of a public official, or of a civil or military officer; or by assuming the uniform or apparel of such an official or officer; or by alleging a false order from such a civil or military authority; 4. If the theft has been committed with violence; 5. If the guilty party or parties have utilized a motor vehicle with the intention of facilitating their enterprise or making their escape. ARTICLE 384. Any individual guilty of theft committed by one of the means indicated in Paragraph 3 of Article 381, even if false keys were utilized in buildings, grounds or enclosures not serving for habitation and not connected with inhabited buildings, and even if housebreaking has occurred only within the building itself, will be sentenced to criminal confinement for a period of ten to twenty years.

{(if: $p61 is not "true")[(set: $p61 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The humus must be placed, still moist, in the bottom of the pots, neither too hard-packed nor too wet. The loose layer serves as a nest for tulip, crocus and narcissus bulbs, previously kept in a cool, dark place. Then the pots are carefully filled one by one, and the loose dirt is heaped around the bulbs up to about a quarter of an inch from the top. It is essential to press the earth down well with the thumbs in order to keep the bulbs from being exposed. The important thing is for the :flowers to be able to send down their roots before the first sprouts appear. The plants must be watered frequently but kept in a dark place. When the first sprouts appear, it is better to keep them under a hood until they take color, in order to insure the strength of the stem, which weakens upon premature exposure to light. The plants must be treated with exacting care which nonetheless allows for a certain margin of improvisation. Of course, only instinct can supplement rules and formulas that are often faulty. To obtain bloom, even under imperfect conditions, one must treat the plant like an adolescent girl who is still uncertain of her own blossoming. With an understanding sensuality which does not exclude the firm application of certain immutable rules. With perseverance, with obstinacy, with faith.

{(if: $p63 is not "true")[(set: $p63 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga buzzes like a golden insect in the sun. She repeats her lessons, her forehead pressed against her childish fists; her thin arms, springing out of the sleeveless dress, are bent in V's. She murmurs her vocabulary exercises. Seen through the doorway she looks studious, perched on a chair in front of the dining-room table while the radio pours a Beethoven slow movement into the room. Helga looks up and smiles. Then she answers, "No, I can't, I have work to do." Sparks dance in her green eyes. A flash of malice clings to the corner of one eyelid. The girl is silhouetted against the light, and her funny little braids look black She dives back into her books, elbows on the table, pretending to be absorbed by the difficulties of //chou, genou, caillou//. But the movement of her delicate legs under the table reveals that she is paying more attention to the eyes resting on her than to problems of grammar. She straightens her shoulders like a guardsman on parade and breathes deeply so that her blouse swells, and her green eyes sparkle between her fingers. Obviously she likes being admired. Finally she collects her books and prepares to leave the room. Hesitates a moment, seeing her retreat cut off, then, like a child playing tag, makes a sudden swerve, lowers her head, ducks under the arms stretched out toward her and turns around, delighted, once she is out of reach, to smile again ambiguously before disappearing.

{(if: $p62 is not "true")[(set: $p62 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Maman is sitting on a chair beside the bed. The nurse comes and goes in the room. Her white veil and her low-heeled white shoes give her walk the touch of a summer breeze. She brings a glass of water and a pill. The water is as cool as her white outfit, which suggests tennis courts. But the iron bars at the foot of the bed recall that the hospital is a prison from which no one can escape, racket in hand, toward the red courts surrounded by shady trees which constitute the club's charm and pride. Nor toward the young girls who are talking about smashes, backhands, net shots or kisses. The bed is a net that traps vacation time. The doctor has a warm, comforting voice. He seems sure of himself. Wearing a suit, without his surgical gown, he smells of the street. Maman listens closely to the meaningless words that melt into the sounds that come through the window: a cry, a motor humming, a sparrow chirping. Maman and the doctor have left. The room is plunged into half darkness. A pale nurse comes in, leaves, returns. The orange juice is cool. The pillow has fever. It burns without flame, like the log in the high brick fireplace of the mountain chalet. The night's brightness penetrates the slats of the Venetian blind and casts the prison bars on the ceiling, forbidding all flight upward. This room is an aviary where wings desperately bump against the walls, shedding a snowy cloud of scattered fevers. The pillow has fever.

{(if: $p64 is not "true")[(set: $p64 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ From the garden, every pane of Helga's third-floor window seems to be signaling. Depending on the angle, it looks like either a rectangular black hole or a sparkling white surface. Either way, it is impossible for the eye to penetrate the panes and find Helga in the room. Glances ricochet off the high façade without seeing anything. The black pool on the third floor rivets the attention. The garden grass is cool. A tiny ant, on the ground, tries to find its way through the soft earth, looking for food. The clover leaves look like playing cards. Something seems to move in the window, which the sky now fills with pale blue. Perhaps it is only a furtive cloud. Perhaps, too, Helga has glanced toward the garden, her movement betrayed by the halo of blond hair. At the base of the rock brought here by some pretentious landscape gardener, moss has grown on the north and east sides, its moisture lodging some rather monstrous-looking insects. From the top of the rock, it would be possible to get a better view of the window. But it's no use; Helga appears at the window, opens it wide and, discovering herself observed, smiles. Then she disappears. The window remains empty. The girl must be purposely—and not without coquetry—making a detour to keep from being seen as she comes and goes.

{(if: $p65 is not "true")[(set: $p65 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga's eyes show green reflections under the pale lashes. They form, in the middle of her face, a wave that is about to break into spray from one moment to the next. The sun sparkles on the crest of the wave in a thousand facets, like coins tossed from a boat to make children dive. Helga blinks quickly, and gulls utter their shrill cry before diving into the schools of fish that sparkle from every scale as they leap between the waves. Realizing she is being watched, Helga shakes her head, a habitual gesture whenever she feels embarrassed. The boats dance deep in her irises where the drowned city quivers, still alive. Her gaze dissolves somewhere near the window, returns, escapes again, turns back. Under the high, slightly bulging forehead the tide rises, the water turns blue in the depths, then clears for a few seconds over the pale sand. The pupils are full of murmurs. Deep down, a man's face, tiny, unrecognizable, becomes a swelling black dot. But Helga decides to smile, turns her head away and merely says, "Why?" in her Rhenish, rather singsong accent. It is merely an evasion; she knows she will hear the words she is waiting for. Her eyes gleam with excitement. Sometimes they flicker with anxiety, a cloudier wave that surges up from the depths and in passing tosses the seaweed, sand and shells torn from the underwater rocks.

{(if: $p67 is not "true")[(set: $p67 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Maman looks severe as she leafs through the notebook covered with heavy blue paper. She still has on the long coat with a fur collar which she wears only on Sundays or for visiting friends, but she has decided to put it on for her visit to the director of the //lycée//. She still says nothing, but her silence is more painful than a regular lecture. Obviously she is still wondering what attitude to take. The way she is holding that notebook is already suggestive. She knows. Besides, she leafs through the pages to the one where the forged grade is. The fraud isn't even a clever one, it's obvious that one of the figures of the second column has been scratched out and a new figure added in the first. Maman asks with more anxiety than anger, "But why bother cheating for a composition that doesn't count, that doesn't even get figured into the average?" Impossible to make a grownup understand that it was just because it didn't count and because the fraud is without importance. "It's even worse," Maman says, "because you did it for no reason, for the pleasure of lying." Lying isn't a pleasure. It's a torture, in fact. But a kind of necessary ordeal. "Was it out of conceit?" Maman asks again, with the stubborn incomprehension of people who don't know how to lie.

{(if: $p66 is not "true")[(set: $p66 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ "This child is too nervous," Maman says. "He should spend some time up in the mountains." "You'll go," Maman says again, "if we tell you to go." The first pane breaks like a pat of butter. With a kind of astonishment. It's scarcely possible to understand why the fingers are bleeding so much. The sound of the glass breaking on the balcony is not as crystalline as books say it is. The blood begins running down the hand. The second pane seems less surprised. No doubt it was expecting to join its brother. It makes a star of glass, with sharp, cruel points. The hand is all red, and big drops of blood fall on the carpet, redden the handkerchief. Maman utters terrible shrieks. The blood leaves red petals down the hall to the bathroom. The sink is red in a second. Maman scolds and sobs at the same time. The alcohol burns so strongly that it feels good. The druggist stops the blood in a second, just by dabbing the hand with some medicine. He takes off the tourniquet Maman has put around the wrist, and the numbness goes away. "This way," the druggist says, rewinding the bandage, "you'll look as if you've really been wounded. But how did the little fellow do it to himself?" Maman doesn't tell him what really happened.

{(if: $p68 is not "true")[(set: $p68 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne, face rigid, features drawn, works like a charwoman. Under the eyes of the doctors standing around Francine's bed in the sordid little studio, she is down on all fours, washing the bloodstains off the rug. The doctors are still undecided whether the hemorrhage resulted from an intestinal ulcer or from cancer. Francine looks very pale on the bed. She has probably not recovered consciousness since she fell beside the telephone, still holding the receiver, after calling Marianne with a last effort of will. Now Marianne is washing Francine's body, on the bed. She doesn't speak a word, but seems about to faint in her turn. It's impossible to make her leave her friend's bedside. She is covered with bloodstains. Unable to get rid of them, Marianne has left a number of dark spots on the carpet and the sheet. She seems at the same time exhausted and full of an implacable energy. Perhaps she feels some regret at having deliberately dropped Francine since her marriage. Perhaps, too, the sight of her friend in her death agony has crystallized the anxieties that make her own life an endless flight from fear. The doctors admire Marianne's devotion. Dr. Brun, a friend of the family, explains to his colleagues that Francine played a decisive role in Marianne's marriage. They don't know that Marianne is in the process of giving herself the last rites.

{(if: $p69 is not "true")[(set: $p69 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The police are playing puss-in-the-corner in the failing light. They have taken their positions around the intersection under the eye of a gold-braided sergeant who is acting as referee. At the corner of the boulevard, near the red fire-alarm box (Break the Glass), one of the men holds the submachine gun so that it points diagonally across his chest. A big child with a dangerous peppermint stick in his hands. He is quite young, clean-shaven and stupid-looking under his service cap—excited by the pedestrians' interest and his own identification with the symbols of force. Facing him is a policeman in a peaked cap, armed only with the revolver in his belt. He keeps a whistle in his mouth and peers into the passing cars. On the opposite sidewalk another policeman, also accompanied by a companion with a submachine gun. Thus the four corners of the intersection are solidly controlled by the sergeant, who hugs the walls, his gold braid gleaming in the evening light. Occasionally one of the men, as though to calm his nerves, blows his whistle, stops a car and walks over to exchange a few words with the driver. Then the vehicle drives on. A patrol car pulls up to the curb. The sergeant goes over to make his report. It is all like some tedious office routine, negating any thought that firearms trained on cars or pedestrians might constitute a peril to the city. No other intersection seems to be the scene of such an ambush.

{(if: $p71 is not "true")[(set: $p71 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The boss seems very annoyed. He has figured out his annual profits per employee. And he estimates that each employee should bring him in at least twice as much. Either he has to fire some of his staff or else he has to make more money. For him, an employee is a machine for making money. Unfortunately, in an age when everyone is unionized and when the government has passed such ridiculous social laws, personnel expenses cannot be reduced. But it's not an employer's responsibility to take the necessary steps, the boss thinks. It's the job of his deputy, the assistant manager. Especially since the latter, who came up from the ranks, must be perfectly aware of the psychology of his subordinates, who are his former colleagues. There's nothing to do but lie low and wait till the storm is over. The boss tries to be humiliating; he probably thinks that's the best way to stimulate the zeal of his help. Too bad he forgets the disproportion between what each employee should bring in and each man's salary. Especially too bad that the assistant manager knows how much the boss keeps in the middle drawer of his desk and locks up in the safe every night. The possession of such amounts would constitute the most effective remedy against a feeling of humiliation, whatever its source.

{(if: $p70 is not "true")[(set: $p70 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The office overlooks the street, but the buildings opposite, far too high, cast their gray shadows in through the window. The clatter of the typewriters transmits messages in a code the ear cannot decipher. In this noise, crystalline at moments, there is a suggestion of foreign cities, of sailings to far places, but also of girls with submissive legs who strike the typewriter keys the way they would if harnessed to a wheel, waiting until a master's pleasure flings them on a bed in some bachelor apartment or hotel room, in exchange for a promise of a raise after a few months. The secretary comes in without knocking, a letter in her hand whose figures have to be checked at once against the latest quotations. She has lusterless hair and tired-looking shoulders. The letter is about ore from a mine with an exotic name. But the coppery evocation does not succeed in brightening the gray air of the office, where the lampshade casts a greenish glow. The girl leaves, dragging her smile behind her; her heels are worn and one stocking has a run in it. As the door opens and closes again, the clatter of typewriters mounts in intensity, as if the house were going to take off, powered by some motor hidden in the storeroom. Only the open door of the heavy safe, in one corner, could make travel accessible. But it opens only on armored depths in which are piled sums of money that must be accounted for every evening.

{(if: $p73 is not "true")[(set: $p73 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The house is empty. Only the night watchman is sleeping somewhere behind these walls. The door opens. The staircase is like a black glue into which footsteps sink. At the landing, the service door hardly creaks at all. Three steps to the left, then six forward. The hall is carpeted. About eight steps more. Then another three, for there has been an error in the estimate. The office door opens without difficulty, too. It wasn't bolted. The moonlight reveals the desk. The middle drawer, whose lock controls the whole system, slides noiselessly along invisible grooves. The big envelope is lying in the middle of the drawer, on piles of disordered documents. The hall carpet muffles the footsteps. The descent down the dark stairs to the street is as easy as entering a pool after a dive from the high diving board. In the street, the darkness abruptly vanishes. The limpid stretches of the night lie ahead. The moon lights up the white sidewalk like the neon sign of a de luxe shop. A police car passes, making its rounds, the motor humming faintly. The car suddenly returns, alerted by some mysterious summons.

{(if: $p72 is not "true")[(set: $p72 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The safe is in a corner of the office. A mass of metal from which emanates an impression of wicked and almost animal power. The gaping mouth is empty. The heavy, bulging envelope is still in the middle drawer of the desk. The safe door closes with a muffled sound. The wheels turn, the combination is effaced. The boss is still working, alone in his office, under the lamp. No one else is left on the premises. The boss, hardly raising his head, gathers the keys to the safe in the hollow of his broad palm, where they gleam for a second before vanishing into his pocket. There is still time for a change in plans; still time, at the cost of a remonstrance, to admit that the envelope has been left in the drawer instead of being put away inside the armor of the safe. The boss murmurs a vague good evening and plunges back into his accounts. Of course it is plausible that thieves should attack the office during the night and take the envelope. Of course suspicion would fall heavily on the man in charge of the safe. But only negligence could be held against him. Yet the presence of thieves on this one night would be an almost incredible coincidence. After tomorrow, the envelope will resume its place without anyone's having been able to notice the venial fault of not putting in the safe the bundles of banknotes and bonds contained in the brown paper envelope.

{(if: $p74 is not "true")[(set: $p74 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The little girl is dressed like a boy. She has her hair cut short and is playing marbles with remarkable skill. She bends down to pick up all the marbles, which she has just won again. Her hand is full of them. "It's not true. I didn't cheat." She is red as a rooster from indignation; her little hand tightens over the marbles. "I am not a cheat. I won't give them to you." With her clenched fist she protects herself as best she can. Her fingers are closed tight around the marbles. She skillfully avoids being tripped, but she is handicapped by her concern not to open her fist. Gradually she yields, while trying to free herself by kicks. And suddenly she gives up, just when the marbles no longer have any importance. She opens her hand and the agates roll across the floor. The little girl lets herself go and falls down in the middle of the triangle drawn on the floor for the game. She rolls on the floor, as though for fun. She seems amazed to find herself released. She lies still an instant and then gets up in her tum. She seems to be waiting for something, shakes herself. She sits down on another chair. She pouts. No one has picked up the marbles, which lie there quite stupidly. The little girl's big sister finds her still sitting on her chair. "Why aren't you children playing any more?"

{(if: $p75 is not "true")[(set: $p75 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The unpaid bills remain stuck in the mirror frame. At the bottom, on the marble mantelpiece, a sheet of beige stationery with a commercial letterhead. Under the firm name, the address of the shop and its various branches. To the left, a drawing of household appliances. Under a horizontal line, the columns in which the stock numbers, the items and the prices have been typed. The paper is folded in half, so that the total doesn't appear. Above, a reminder, the kind business houses send. Still polite. The printed text in italics. Only the figure is written in by hand, in ink, in the space provided. The telephone and electricity bills, more recent, are stuck in the frame, one on top of the other, the second partially covering the first; both contain a number of perforations which give a mysterious character to the sum, written in cursive figures all too easily decipherable. Higher up are sheets folded in half or quarters, of whose contents there is no room for doubt. At the top is the bank notice indicating there are insufficient funds to cover a very recent check. Although the amount was paid at once, the document has been left here as a reminder, so that Marianne won't forget it.

{(if: $p77 is not "true")[(set: $p77 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The bulging envelope is on top of the other papers and folders in the middle drawer. It is a big brown envelope of heavy paper, the size of a folder. And the contents, intelligently handled, might be worth millions. A fortune. It is possible to sit down in the chair facing away from the window, through which the darkness penetrates, diluted by moonbeams. To sit down and think for a few seconds, despite the danger. Or perhaps to defy the danger. Or to review the various possibilities. Unless it is to stop the trembling of the hands that are holding the envelope and that seem to focus all the moon's brightness. It will be necessary to open the envelope and distribute its contents in the pockets of the jacket. Or better, snatch up a briefcase forgotten on a chair, slip the contents of the envelope into it and return the envelope to the drawer, among the other disordered papers. Then to walk noiselessly but with assurance toward the door, like a businessman, briefcase under one arm. Then to walk down the hall. Reach the kitchen and the service door. Walk back down the stairs.

{(if: $p76 is not "true")[(set: $p76 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The stairs leading to the office look like a service entrance. There is no elevator in the decrepit apartment building, whose dusty wooden steps make a setting fit for a drama of realism. The secretaries who are late bump into the messengers leaving for their first rounds. The latter offer a mocking greeting which the girls welcome with a burst of laughter or an impatient exclamation. The boss climbs the stairs with calculated slowness, so that he can comment sarcastically on his assistant manager's lack of punctuality as he passes. The boss stops for a long time on the first landing, where he pretends to be retying his shoelace, which permits him to keep watch a few seconds longer. Then he continues his ascent. Through the balustrade his wrinkled, well-polished shoes appear beside the slender legs of an apprentice clerk hired on trial who is terrified of losing her job. At least that is what her hoarse, anxious voice reveals as she respectfully explains that she had to wait a long time for her bus. The boss's voice answers curtly that the subway is never late. The door on the landing opens as a buzzer sounds. Another new day, exactly like all the rest. The summer vacation is still a long way off. Winter reigns in the corridors, even grayer than usual.

{(if: $p78 is not "true")[(set: $p78 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The office, the office, the office, the office, the office. In the drawers of this piece of furniture, the folders. In the folders, the columns of names and figures. In the middle drawer, the one whose key controls the whole system of locks, the most important documents. Corrected numbers. Rewriting. Erased figures. The telephone rings. A calm voice asks for the folder of the week's orders at once. The week is a long series of columns of figures. The days differ only by the total at the bottom of each column. Even though the total of minutes and seconds is always exactly the same. It would be futile to add up this sum which leads to nothing and which it suffices to set down once and for all. Except to begin over again from time to time, if an error might once have occurred. But the error changes nothing. A fault in calculation cannot change the number of seconds in the day. On the other hand, there are certain mistakes that can change the amount of money in the safe to a significant degree. Providing the figures are carefully scratched out and the bookkeeping has all the appearance of honesty. The head of the sales department sends the folder back with his secretary. He has noted no error in it. Another week to the good. But it would be unwise to take the amount of the difference out of the safe before any possibility of a further check is definitely out of the question.

{(if: $p79 is not "true")[(set: $p79 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The Bengalis cheep in their cage. The two delicate heads grow motionless. And suddenly there is a desperate fluttering from one perch to the other, like the panic of a girl who suddenly sees the man whom she has roused with her teasing now coming into her room to ask for his due. The Bengalis huddle at the bottom of the cage. Flattened against the floor, they wait in terror for what will happen to them. They try without conviction to hop out of reach. A hand closes over one of them, pinioning the wings that vainly try to spread. The tiny creature throbs in the closed hand. No use smoothing the down on the head and neck, fear is too strong. The bird prefers its prison to this caress. It takes a lot of time and patience to teach the creature that the hand wishes it no harm but only to free it, to teach it to fly around in the room and return to its cage. Like a girl whose body must slowly be taught to find its pleasure. Helga watches the experiment with curiosity. She is convinced that the birds will never learn. Her bright eyes tum from the cage to the hand, from the Bengali's eyes to the delicate caress that smooths the feathers over and over until at last the bird allows its nerves to relax. It cheeps gently. But no sooner is it back in the cage than it forgets everything, again flutters wildly at any approach. And everything has to be started over. It takes even more patience than with a young girl.

{(if: $p80 is not "true")[(set: $p80 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The little secretary sniffs. She is ugly, undersized, ailing. The crying has been going on for three days; she stops just long enough to explain that she's going to drown herself. Then she starts sobbing harder than ever. In the car, she's still clutching her handkerchief; but it's purely as a reflex that she goes through the motions of wiping her eyes, where the tears have dried. With the amazement of a child in front of a Christmas tree, she asks, "But why are you doing this for me?" She adds, "You're running a terrible risk if something happens." She doesn't think of the consequences of this "something" for herself. The doctor doesn't seem to believe a word of the whole business. "I don't care whether you're the father or not, so long as you're the one who pays." The wait is endless. Hurried footsteps in the corridor suggest that something has gone wrong. The doctor comes back, looking relaxed. "All right, it's over, you can go see her." The girl doesn't seem to believe yet that her nightmare is over. She repeats as though in a trance, "Why did you do it for me? You could have got into terrible trouble. You didn't even know who the father was."

{(if: $p81 is not "true")[(set: $p81 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar's room is on the fourth Hoar, tucked under the eaves, and has to be reached by the service stairs; a kind of studio has been knocked together in the area reserved for the servants in this former town house now divided into apartments. The door rises straight up from the top step, endangering anyone coming out who forgets the absence of a landing. The door opens onto a tiny vestibule—the former landing, probably, sacrificed to enlarge the studio by two square yards. On the wall, the reproduction of a German expressionist painting—Kirchner. A portrait of a man tormented and emaciated by a secular Passion. At the left is the studio, which also serves as living room and bedroom. The easel stands in front of the window. It is the only place in the room that is clearly lighted by the big skylight opening onto a prospect of roofs. On the wall, an abstract work, unframed and tacked above the drawing board. The canvas is signed by a young artist whose last show made a stir. Two large low armchairs and a table furnish a somewhat more livable corner opposite the door. The couch, along the wall, is covered with a Mexican serape. Dagmar is sitting there with her legs folded under her. Above her head, contrasting violently with her blond hair, the dark abstract painting with clots of color that seem to be on fire is still unfinished. It is called //Composition No. 1//.

{(if: $p82 is not "true")[(set: $p82 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar is the picture of serenity. Her huge green eyes open wide on the world. She says, I’m happy," as if she were remarking that it was a beautiful day. When she walks down the street, she occasionally tries to brush her breast against the arm through which she has slipped her own. And the efforts of this calm and haughty girl to keep her strategy from being noticed are touching. All the same, she behaves so naturally that the gesture hardly suggests a manifestation of sensuality. At the intersections, when she has to wait a few moments for the stream of traffic to stop, she leans on her companion's arm with all her weight, her body tilted so far that if this support were to fail she would fall. Like all girls who are too tall, too solidly built, she has a fantasy of being delicate, in danger, constantly teetering on the edge of an imaginary cliff. People turn around as she passes. A toothless old woman huddled on a bench wheezes out, "Nice to be in love." And Dagmar thanks her with a sunny smile. In the gray day she casts a light from her blond hair, her gleaming teeth, her red lips. "It's because I'm happy," Dagmar says.

{(if: $p84 is not "true")[(set: $p84 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The third-floor hall is empty. All the guest rooms are empty except for Helga's, and the girl has practically the run of the whole floor, which she regards as her kingdom. A song murmured in German by a fresh young voice emerges from the half-open door of her room and slips down the hallway. The carpet muffles the sound of footsteps. The walls are hung with colored prints of dubious authenticity which, with their dusty frames, add an irksome note. They are rural scenes in which romantic gentlemen pay motionless court to vaporous beauties. Yet one of them seems a little more suggestive. It shows the heroine draped on a sofa, hard pressed by her gallant, who, still half kneeling before her, his hands outstretched, is already prepared to take advantage of his imminent victory. It would be interesting to know the effect that this picture has on Helga when the girl goes up to her room in the evenings. Maybe she hasn't even noticed it. The picture could be interpreted in several ways. The snatch of song slides through the open door, breaks off, resumes, as if the girl is busy with a task which occasionally requires all her attention. The hallway is endless, and only the Ariadne's thread of the old lied makes it possible to advance toward the luminous ray which the door releases like a lighthouse beam intended perhaps to guide the hero of an improbable adventure.

{(if: $p83 is not "true")[(set: $p83 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The law school is divided. The royalists are the only ones who parade their opinions and pick fights. The others show their feelings only by the Colonial and Maritime League insignia or that of the Croix de Feu concealed beneath a reassuring anagram. De Thon sneers: "You and your Cohen. When did you decide to sell out to the Yids?" Sam Cohen tries to grab his arm, but the blow has already landed. De Thon puts up a fight, is knocked down. Cohen says, "Come on, let's get out of here, it isn't worth it." And suddenly there's a brawl. Two against ten, fifteen, twenty—hardly fair. From the left, Sam screams, "Watch out!" at the same time that he flings himself in the path of the club. The blood runs down his big nose; his brow is split. The royalists scatter. De Thon shouts a last taunt: "Next time we'll break both your necks!" At the drugstore Cohen repeats, "You're a good guy, but it isn't worth it." It is useless to explain that beating up de Thon has nothing to do with race prejudice, that it's meant only to prove a certain kind of courage once and for all. Sometimes a man has to choose sides without being sure why, provided he sticks to it afterward. And the afterward is bound to be hard. But maybe race prejudice does have something to do with it, after all.

{(if: $p85 is not "true")[(set: $p85 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga walks down the hall carrying a tray on which are a steaming bowl of soup, cutlery, a glass, and a pitcher of water. The hall is too narrow to allow another person to pass abreast. The girl, after a momentary hesitation, stands with her back to the wall, holding the tray close to her body. The pitcher slides, stops at the edge of the tray. The water dances a little, but there seems to be no danger of a mishap. Helga slips both arms under the tray, keeping it perfectly straight, and presses closer against the wall. The hall is dark, but the girl's eyes shine. Perhaps she feels somewhat exposed and defenseless, which would account for her apparent disturbance, though there is an amused expression on her face. She smiles with an awkwardness that gradually turns to impatience. But before she has been able to speak a word, her neck presses instinctively against the wall, her forearms try to free themselves of the tray, which oscillates dangerously, her hands tighten on its edge, her face shows more astonishment than indignation. Her lips are fresh, but pressed into a rebellious pout. She doesn't know if she should laugh or be angry. She decides to make her escape down the hall, shaking her head as if she had heard a rather daring joke. She is holding the tray quite straight, but she is almost running. The pitcher has reached its destination without an accident. On her way back, Helga is careful to turn on the light before walking down the hall.

{(if: $p86 is not "true")[(set: $p86 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga is sitting at the family table and pretending to be absorbed in helping one of the children, who is sitting beside her on two telephone books placed on the chair. She prattles gaily with her young interlocutor, as if she did not feel the knee that keeps pressing her leg under the table. Yet she grows troubled when she faces the other guests again, and drops her knife. Although she bends quickly, she cannot avoid the contact on her hand. Her fingers are agile as little eels that slip under the net and escape the fisherman's hand. When she straightens up, her cheeks are red—perhaps only from bending. The knee keeps trembling under the table, although Helga quickly begins telling a story, which she gets all mixed up. But she laughs loudly, though no one has been able to see the joke. The knee moves away while the girl turns back to the child, whom she fusses over ostentatiously. But she must find the shoes she has slipped off during the meal, as all girls do, and her leg returns to its place beside the knee it has avoided. During the time it takes to put on her sandal, she presses her thigh hard against what to her might seem to be the leg of the table. Then she hurriedly stands up and leaves, the child in her arms, without turning around.

{(if: $p88 is not "true")[(set: $p88 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Attacked, Helga recovers her spirits. Her anxious expression, like that of some tiny creature crouching in a nest as it sees the hunter's boots flatten the grass around it, vanishes. Anger turns the girl's face red, she strains her muscles, and with a sudden effort she tries to free herself. Her back stiffens. But she would have to be a serpent to slide with a single contortion out of the embrace that holds her on the couch. She frees one of her hands and, palm outward, tries to protect her face against the kisses. Her wrist falls back on the bed, solidly imprisoned. But the girl is still struggling, raising her knees and pushing with her legs, not realizing that by this very movement, which exposes her to her adversary, she is surrendering. She lies motionless for a second, to concentrate her forces, and then manages to free her left hand by a brutal gesture, a punch. For a fraction of a second she remains almost startled by what she has done, unaware that both her arms have suddenly been released. But before she has had time to express her astonishment two slaps ring out, one on each side of her face. Half stunned, she tries to protect her cheeks against more. The knee penetrating between her thighs meets no further resistance.

{(if: $p87 is not "true")[(set: $p87 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga protects her face with her elbow, still stunned by the slaps. She has lost, and knows it. The panties ride over her delicate hips, veil the golden fleece another second, slide down the sleek thighs, cling slightly to the knees. The athletic girl's fiat belly, between her delicate hips, pleads for kisses. Now the panties fetter the muscular calves, then the ankles, like those of a little slave girl. The slippers are caught in the material and fall with it to the floor, at the foot of the couch. Helga still hides her face in her arms. Grasped at the waist by hands that attempt to encircle her slender, firm body, the girl stiffens, arches her hips, and falls back on the couch. The breasts appear in the opening of the ripped blouse. The hipbone seems to have to give way under the weight of the hand, as a bird cracks under the tooth. But the joint moves, opens, and yields to the almost brutal caress that subjects it to pleasure. Contrasting with the hardness of the hip, the belly is soft and elastic. The clump of fleece, of a Titian red, is coarse on its rock. Helga lowers her arms to attempt one last defense with her weak fingers, which now share the kisses. Her waist is still marked by the elastic of the panties; it has printed a raised pattern on the surface of the flesh. The girl's fingers are calloused from contact with the tennis racket.

{(if: $p89 is not "true")[(set: $p89 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The barracks, after the free life of the Maquis, is a real prison. Luckily the experience is not one of long duration. The objective of the military authorities is not so much to teach the men to kill or to obey—they could have learned that in the Maquis. The real goal is to change their being. To dispossess them of themselves and, above all, of their dignity. Of their sense of being human. To inculcate something alien to a human being—the sense of their insignificance and of the abjection into which young men can fall when absolute authority is exerted over them and they must adhere to an absurd system of unreasoning obedience. Exercise. Arms drill. The sergeant, who will doubtless end his days in some concierge's lodge, is the master for the moment. Instruction in hand-to-hand combat. How to kill without attributing the slightest worth to the opponent, who must be reduced to the status of a simple object. Object, not even hatred: obstacle to progress or to the execution of an order. Barrack room. Learning to sleep like animals in a cave, this stinking ward, with comrades assembled by chance, not chosen or even accepted according to the same ideal. The dirt. The renunciation of pride. Of self-respect. The submission. Far from any woman who might inspire a man to protect himself.

{(if: $p90 is not "true")[(set: $p90 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne's eyes are black, hard and shiny, like those of little animals surprised and preparing to flee or defend themselves; in them appear white reflections. And suddenly the pupils widen as all her features express great discomfort. She says, I’m sick, terribly sick. I'm going to die." It does no good to try to console her, to comfort her. "I know what's wrong with me, but I won't tell." Marianne is in a state of weakness bordering on collapse. "I don't want to eat. What's the use? I know it's incurable." Her eyes fill with tears; Marianne's sympathy is awakened when she describes her own death. "I don't want to see a doctor. No one can do anything for me." It's impossible to know the degree of pretense—dangerous pretense—there is in this slow self-destruction. Her eyes turn back to their normal chestnut color. The seizure is almost over. In the long, almost slanted eyes the pupils form warm, tender caramel suns, of an affecting sweetness. Marianne never seems to blink; occasionally she closes her eyes as though to rest from living, then opens them on an incurable sadness. "It's incurable," Marianne repeats. And the most terrible thing is that she's telling the truth. At least from a certain point of view. But it's obvious that the case is not one for the doctors—as she herself often maintains. And her huge eyes reveal a distress without appeal.

{(if: $p91 is not "true")[(set: $p91 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne confronts the attendants who have come by order of Dr. Brun to tear her from Francine's bed. The dying girl's bohemian studio is still full of traces of the hemorrhage. Marianne has not managed to wash all the blood off, despite her zeal. Francine is dying slowly, drained by the cancer in her intestines as by an animal gnawing at her entrails. Marianne struggles as if she hadn't been watching over Francine for the last forty-eight hours without taking a thing to eat. The attendants abandon trying to pull her away by force. The doctor once again begins explaining to Marianne that her nervous state does not permit her to continue this already funereal vigil any longer. In her elegant dress soiled with clots of blood and filth, Marianne is more unmoving than a fashion model before the photographer's lens. Francine's breathing has been a death rattle for several hours. Marianne, fascinated, watches the progress of death. "If we took her to the hospital," the doctor says,. "at least we could keep the other woman from going mad." But Marianne is doubtless punishing herself for having abandoned and neglected her friend during the ascendant phase of the disease. The attendants finally take her by surprise and control her enough to drag her away. "I can't be moved," Marianne screams. In her own mind she has managed to assume, to transfer to herself, her friend's cancer. "They should never have let a woman as nervous as that come here in the first place," the doctor says. "But it's obviously too late to think about that."

{(if: $p92 is not "true")[(set: $p92 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne's features are tense under the white veil. Her face is nothing but a caricature. Her black hair further emphasizes the almost ashen pallor that contrasts with the crisp white of the bridal gown. Yet she wanted this ceremony, this formality. She wanted this wedding that now seems to fill her with terror. Nothing remains of her usual arrogant manner. She walks jerkily to the first row, in front of the altar, without seeing the guests already seated in the church. A malicious friend murmurs, "She's going to have a fit of hysterics during the ceremony." Marianne seems drugged. She advances mechanically toward her prie-dieu, stiff, blind, as though compelled by a power superior to her will. Friends of the family comment, "She's always been a nervous girl, but after she's been married a while..." Or else: "She may be marrying for love, but it certainly doesn't look it." The young bride glances scornfully around her, but it is clear that she has heard nothing. She would not behave differently even if she were suddenly to loathe the very idea of this marriage that she has pursued with such fierce obstinancy.

{(if: $p94 is not "true")[(set: $p94 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The farm is surrounded. Two trucks are parked in the barnyard. A hundred Germans, in uniform and in civilian clothes, come and go. Lucas says, "If we hadn't got lost coming across the fields, we'd be caught like the others by now." It's probable, in fact, that the whole commando unit was captured at the appointed meeting place. Lucas adds, "Keep down and find out what's going on. I'll try to give warning; we have to let our pals know that the plan miscarried." Lucas crawls away. It's very dark. German patrols take their position on the road and hide in the ditches to intercept possible stragglers. A scream fills the night. A man throws himself through the window down into the barnyard and continues to scream, lying motionless on the cobblestones. Three Germans come out of the house and pick up the body, which they drag inside. The man goes on screaming, either from pain or to warn the other members of the group who have not yet reached the meeting place and are wandering around the countryside. The voice belongs to "Plutarch," the group leader, but it is so distorted by suffering that it is almost unrecognizeable. A woman's piercing shriek splits the darkness and is suddenly cut short. They must be working on Jeannette. A tall German woman with queenly bearing nonchalantly crosses the barnyard. She would be beautiful without her uniform.

{(if: $p93 is not "true")[(set: $p93 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The café is empty. The dim light from a blue-painted bulb over the counter casts purple reflections on the walls. The leatherette banquettes look black, a combination of their regular color and the artificial lighting. The windows are heavily curtained. The door is covered with the same blue paper that schoolboys use to cover their textbooks. The door opens. The man who comes in glances questioningly at the bartender. With a gesture of his chin, the latter indicates the back of the room. The newcomer approaches, walking between the empty chairs, and gives the password. "Are you the one from Lucas?" He smiles. "If it's Mathieu who sent you, I can tell you I'm Lucas." He sits down and takes a floor plan out of his pocket. "You go in through the service door. Here's a duplicate key. You have to go through the kitchen that they use for an interrogation room now. In the hall you turn left, and it's the first door on your right. Usually the sentry is asleep in the foyer, in front of the main door of the apartment. Try not to wake him. In the room, there's a desk in front of the window. The envelope must be in one of the drawers. Jacques said they put his confession inside it. The other confessions must be there, too. Bring back the whole thing. We have to find out who's been caught." Outside, two German soldiers are walking past, noses high. The siren begins screaming once again.

{(if: $p95 is not "true")[(set: $p95 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Number three to win. The red silk slides past the watching eyes as though on a rail. Stiff, erect, at attention, thousands of men stand guard at the powder magazine of chance. Drawn up like soldiers in an army ready for combat, they stand a trifle straighter, stretch their necks, look up a little higher. Scouts gesture beyond the lines and spot the enemy. It's Grouchy—no, it's Blücher. The green silk wins on the turn. From the top of the grandstand, all that can be seen are specks of color flying along, like toys, like the cars of an electric train, on the other side of the race track. The grandstand gasps as the red ant catches up with the green dot. A muffled shout greets the exploit. Like beads on a thread, the silks form a loose necklace, which gives way and spills on the ground. At the last turn, the beads suddenly scatter and roll in all directions. The horses seem to advance head on, motionlessly enlarging, as in a camera lens retransmitting the spectacle. But the camera dissolves as men and animals assume the three-dimensionality that makes them leap from the screen. The shouts suddenly grow wilder. An orange jockey comes out of nowhere, advances, takes the lead, devours space, the track, the grandstand, tramples the cries that fling themselves under his horse's hoofs. The horse, belly to the ground, strains for the finish line. There is nothing left to do but tear up the tickets.

{(if: $p96 is not "true")[(set: $p96 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The desk stands, as expected, in the middle of the room, facing the window. It is impossible to use the cigarette lighter, whose flame might be visible from outside, even if only to the eyes of those responsible for air raid precautions. Yet the moon sends its beams into the center of the room. The bunch of skeleton keys clinks faintly, but it is unlikely that the German sentry can hear the noise through the door. The drawer opens. A bulky envelope appears on top of a pile of papers. The confessions are kept here. There is no time to look through the various interrogations of the resistance fighters. The sweat that soaks through the shirt collar is icy one minute and burning the next. Between the office and the kitchen door hangs a curtain of shadows which must be cautiously parted. Best to walk slowly, trailing the fingers of one hand along the wall. The curtain opens, then closes behind the progress down the hallway. The kitchen smells of blood. As though down a rope, the descent of the stairs, fingers on the bannister, is slow immersion in increasingly breathable air. And now again it is essential to avoid the street patrols that haunt the depths of the night, their heavy boots clattering like those of divers.

{(if: $p98 is not "true")[(set: $p98 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The prints that hang along the hallway describe in several episodes the courtship of a lovely lady by a tall, romantic young man in some manor house. A legend, the same on each picture, says that these are scenes of country life. The story is told from episode to episode, leading from the first song of the gallant to the beauty's surrender. However, the last scene is modestly suggested by the languor of the young woman stretched out on her couch, beside the man, who is eagerly offering her an easily imaginable assistance. The picture is still quite chaste, however, and both characters are dressed from head to foot. Perhaps the lover will be content to offer his Elvira the bottle of smelling salts. Now and then through the half-open door can be heard the lied sung by Helga, who is doing her tasks in her room, unaware of the danger threatening her. The carpet muffles the sound of the footsteps. In the strip of light that filters between the half-closed door and the jamb appears the mirrored wardrobe, with no other reflection, for the moment, than that of the studio couch. The light takes shape; startlingly white, Helga's figure appears between the mirror and the door. A curving back, naked to the waist above a light white garment that fits closely at the hips. The adolescent legs already sheathed in silk stockings add a tawny note to this study in white. But scarcely is she in front of the mirror than Helga sees she is being watched; she turns around rapidly without bothering to conceal her little breasts, leaps forward and slams the door. There will be another opportunity.

{(if: $p97 is not "true")[(set: $p97 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Sentries have been placed at the entrance of the village to avoid surprises. In any case, the Germans were cut to pieces some time ago. But of course the houses will have to be inspected, to make sure some haven't hidden in there with the women and children. Revolvers in their hands, the boys of the Third Brigade are already in the street, searching the houses. It's necessary to hurry before all the prettiest girls are taken. In the first house there are only two bearded old women, but it's a good idea to be sure no one has hidden in some corner or other. And here, in fact, is something. A young woman has hidden in the cellar with two little girls of about ten and twelve. The little girls are obviously too young, although the Moroccans wouldn't mind that, but this company consists of civilized men. The young woman throws up her arms and follows, weeping. The two old women hold on to the little girls, who burst into tears. In the street, most of the patrols have found some prey or other. The women are led into the requisitioned houses and taken at once, on the floor even. They off er no resistance. In any case, since they've had to go without men so long, it's bound to give them some pleasure.

{(if: $p99 is not "true")[(set: $p99 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne, a young bride, has invited her former professors; to them she is still the model student whose charm and elegance are enough to stimulate the master and who shows every sigh of having a lively and original mind. Marianne is radiant. Her little court of old pedagogues includes some of the most prominent men of the Sorbonne. A hoary philosopher tells how he was obliged to give her a grade of "very good" after an oral exam in which he had sown the questions with traps. The others deplore the fact that such a gifted girl should have decided not to stand for the degree, merely out of nonconformism. Only some of the faculty wives purse their lips. They haven't yet forgiven Marianne for having seduced their husbands so frivolously. Although all danger seems past, since Marianne herself has married, they continue to be suspicious of this impenitent little socialite who amuses herself by beating the thick-spectacled bluestockings of the Sorbonne on their own ground. In a beautifully cut dress, Marianne does the honors of the buffet. Her extraordinarily slender waist, her bony fashion model's shoulders, her slender legs, make the scholars' wives muse. One of them comments harshly: "I wonder why men like a girl that thin. She looks like a skinned cat." Marianne has heard. She winces almost imperceptibly, and her smile becomes taut. For a fraction of a second she looks like a caricature of herself. The fleeting grimace reappears on her face several more times, like a tic.

{(if: $p100 is not "true")[(set: $p100 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The street files past both sides of the car. The crowd is in brilliant colors. Or perhaps it is merely the speed that gives it this holiday look. The vendors have set up their stalls on the edge of the sidewalk, in the gutter, which makes it hard to see. The intersection comes in sight a few yards away. The nearest house, to the right, is silhouetted in shadow against the scene. The building opposite it, on the other side of the intersection, is in dazzling sunlight. The shoppers stroll in the street, among pushcarts where cabbages and cheeses are piled. Of the women vendors only enormous backs can be seen, with hands holding out packages wrapped in newspaper. A car horn sounds far away to the right, scarcely audible above the racket. "Here, lady, look at these greens!" "Cheap, cheap!" The car has risen up like a black monster, to the right. A frightening uproar, then a squeal of tires. The collision is black, endless. In the dark, objects are hurled forward. The roof collapses. The steering wheel is everywhere at once, right, left, on top, underneath, all directions. The ignition key is nowhere, and yet the motor has to be shut off. The smell of gas makes the sound of a voice growing louder. The pushcart women all shout together to sell some shoppers the accident, others the gas, others the victim.

{(if: $p102 is not "true")[(set: $p102 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne smokes nervously. The cigarette is covered with lipstick almost halfway from the end. Each time the young woman takes it from her lips to tap off the ashes, she gets lipstick on her tobacco-stained fingers; the nails show traces of chipped polish. She stands up, looks at herself in the mirror. Sits down again. Lights another cigarette while the first burns out in the ashtray. No sooner lit than the second joins it and Marianne exhales the smoke jerkily, not keeping it in her mouth an instant. She picks up a book, which her finger smears with lipstick, opens it without cutting the pages and reads a few lines. She tosses it onto the couch. The book slips, falls to the floor. The paper cover, bent in half under the volume, is tea-stained. Marianne turns on the radio, picks up the first of the two cigarettes, which has meanwhile gone out, drops it, takes the other, inhales a puff and leaves the room. The book must be picked up, the cover smoothed, the radio turned down, for it is playing at top volume, and the cigarette in the ashtray stubbed out. Marianne returns, lights a third cigarette, turns the knobs of the radio, picks out a new book from the shelf and stains it with lipstick. After which she stares at herself with interest in the mirror. She says, "Everyone says I'm still pretty, except you since we got married."

{(if: $p101 is not "true")[(set: $p101 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne turns over and over in the bed. The darkness releases a sound of choked sobs, like those of a little girl who is trying to be brave and whimpers quite low so that someone will notice after all that she is not giving way to despair. She answers, sniffing, "You know perfectly well what you've done." She adds a certain number of comments in a deliberately unintelligible tone. On the wall the slats of the Venetian blinds cast stripes that suddenly gallop, like a stampeding herd, when a car's headlights sweep across the housefront. Then the animals grow calm and resume their place, tranquilly grazing on the wall. The night grows weightless again, like the sound of the tears. Marianne insists, "And now it's done, once and for all; you can't help it now. Why did you do it?" She waits impatiently for the moment when she will finally have the chance or the desire to explain what she means by this. The stripes shift again. The whole wall pours down like a waterfall. The bed lamp erases the wilderness and restores the room to its usual look. It is three in the morning. It was midnight when Marianne began crying. "Why did you do it?" She has probably forgotten what its all about, but can hardly admit it. There's nothing to do but wait till she surrenders to sleep. This can go on until six, as it has on other occasions.

{(if: $p103 is not "true")[(set: $p103 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne announces her engagement to a small group of friends invited for the occasion. In the resplendent setting which shows her natural elegance to such advantage, she plays the proper young lady, serves tea, passes the plate of cakes. "I introduced them," Francine Duret says, as she invariably does every time she sees Marianne. But the young fiancée makes no comment. Her brief glance at Francine seems to be measuring the distance she will keep as soon as she can. And this glance is so explicit that a silence falls. In a dress of overpowering simplicity, the hostess looks like a princess dispensing charity to the poor. She knows she dominates her friends by her intelligence, her wealth, her social position. Her face is so startingly mobile that the others seem dull, expressionless. She knows that she intimidates them, and she takes advantage of it. Then, suddenly, she sits on the floor and asks the young people to do the same, and around her appears a pinwheel of pale legs revealed by the short skirts, to the delight of the men in the group. Marianne is playing her favorite game. Surrounded by her little court, she starts a conversation. There is nothing she likes better than breaking the ice after freezing the people around her. Francine Duret embraces her as she leaves. "You're wonderful, Marianne." Perhaps she knows she'll never be invited back to the lovely apartment.

{(if: $p104 is not "true")[(set: $p104 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ An assistant manager of a firm is almost a boss, without the profits. The two telephones on the desk are the attributes of his power. In a bold short cut, the receiver combines the orb, the scepter and the hand of the royal insignia, reinvented by a futurist designer and adjusted to a new conception of the world. But the symbol is fallacious, for by that token anyone who pays his telephone bills can imagine he is a king or a suzerain. The only people to whom it means anything are assistant managers who have taken a long time to climb the rungs of the ladder and for whom the presence of two phones on the desk is a sign and a consecration. Especially since the profits go to the boss. The room is dark. The big desk floats like a raft on a gray sea in the middle of the bedroom converted to an office. A wan light comes in through the window behind the assistant manager's chair. The firm is neither modern nor functional. It has been installed in an apartment house converted to office space. There is still a kitchen at the end of the hall, and the secretaries use it to heat up their lunches. None of which means a thing, for the sales figures are high and the annual profit is considerable. Thanks, of course, to the activity and competence of the assistant manager, who keeps an eye on everything. Besides, an Oriental proverb says that the left hand never pays as much money as the right hand receives.

{(if: $p106 is not "true")[(set: $p106 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ It is impossible to pay attention to Mass when Gisèle sticks her legs out of the row on the pretext that they're stiff from kneeling too long. The girl adopts a slightly more reverent posture, but her girlish calves above her first high heels, molded in her first silk stockings, silently drown out the priest's voice, the little bell. This is irrepressible sin. Gisèle flirts in front of the church while her mother gossips with her friends. It happens that the child is invited to a party that afternoon. She can take anyone she wants. She doesn't seem to be shocked by the avowal of the sin. She even enjoys it. She admits with a proud little laugh, 'When I began to Hirt and go out, I was like that. But it doesn't matter. You confess. And start over." It remains to be seen whether God allows thinking about kissing Gisèle during Mass. And kissing her on the way home after the party. Even if it's confessed after. In order to start over. The night of the sin is black. Sleep resists. Gisèle laughs in the darkness of the room, endlessly, until dawn, as though on the doorstep, "Don't you even know how to kiss?" And the shame of not knowing how to kiss is even stronger than the agony of having sinned. For no one can absolve that shame. Except Gisèle, and only on condition that the sinning start over.

{(if: $p105 is not "true")[(set: $p105 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The leaflets must be distributed at the university, despite or on account of the many arrests. Among the students, a certain number of young men affiliated with pro-Nazi movements still slip in, pretending to sign up for courses in order to keep an eye on what is happening in the Sorbonne's various colleges. Besides, there are German soldiers or officers who take advantage of their leaves in Paris to take courses at the Sorbonne, especially since some were registered there before the war. Most come in civilian clothes, and not all are easily indentifiable. Lucas was explicit. In order to create the proper psychological effect, the leaflets must be distributed in broad daylight, either by being dropped into the courtyard from a high window or by some other method. The hallway that leads to the school of history is deserted. All that's needed is to set the pile on the sill of a window carefully chosen and previously opened. The wind, blowing in brief gusts, will send the sheets down to the students passing below. A tall blond young man picks up the sheet which has just fallen in the hall. He gives the ghost of a smile and returns the leaflet. He says with a strong German accent, "Quick, go downstairs. I'll close the window—otherwise your sheets will all blow inside." In the telephone booth, another blond boy with a German accent is already alerting the //Kommandantur//. A young Frenchman is standing beside him.

{(if: $p107 is not "true")[(set: $p107 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ ”I'll kill you," Marianne says. ''I'll get you if it's the last thing I do, I'll stick a knife in you, I'll drill you with a bullet, I'll put arsenic in your coffee." She is frothing at the mouth. As in bad movies, her face comes closer and closer, until all that can be seen is a forehead lined with frenzy and two eyes reduced to black dots, like a bird's eyes. "You can go to bed, you won't wake up tomorrow," Marianne shrieks. The neighbors upstairs pound on their floor again to stop this racket. That is one of the advantages of living in an apartment: Marianne can't have one of her fits for long without the neighbors intervening. It isn't like this in the summer, in the country house, where the scenes reach the most violent paroxysm. The children, wakened in the middle of the night, run in and beg their mother to stop. They too glare at their father. Papa is the man who makes Maman cry. Marianne comforts the children, puts them back to bed. When she returns, she deigns to explain. "You put your filthy, germ-ridden hands all over the stove, and now no one will get anything to eat. I wouldn't touch that thing again for anything in the world." Swearing that no one has touched the stove is enough to calm her down. She often tells a lie to find out the truth.

{(if: $p108 is not "true")[(set: $p108 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne, a young bride tense under her veils, walks away from the altar between the double row of friends and relatives. She stumbles and leans her weight for a second on the arm supporting her. Then she straightens, her eyes fixed on the door she must reach, and walks forward stiffly, like a mechanical soldier on parade in some tragic tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Her gaze springs out of her black eyes like a line. The departure from the church is endless. She longed for this marriage, but the result doesn't seem to have satisfied the ferocity she employed to achieve her ends. Perhaps she is already thinking of the consequences of a union brought about by a threat accompanied by the blackmail of suicide. Or else, more likely, she is frightened by the ineluctable character of the act she has just performed, all of whose implications she has not anticipated, focused as she was on its realization. As she passes, the guests force themselves to smile, but the gaiety freezes on their faces and the comments cease at the sight of this young woman disfigured by tension. Nothing remains of the natural elegance or the supple carriage that constitute Marianne's habitual charm. The usher stands in front of the open double doors. The sun sparkles on the white porch and leaps into their faces. The flash bulbs explode. Marianne forces a grin that lowers her jaw as if she were going to have to fight over her prey. But she already knows, apparently, that the prey will escape her, that others will tear it from her.

{(if: $p110 is not "true")[(set: $p110 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne shrieks, "That's how you treat your wife!" She sobs, grinds her teeth. "That's how you treat your wife!" Her hair sweeps her face. She hasn't bothered to brush it for several days. Under the influence of her rage, her features grow tense, distorted, until they lose their usual appearance. In a sudden network of folds and wrinkles, time attacks. Marianne looks like the old lady she will be in perhaps thirty years. She crouches as if the weight of pain and shame kept her from standing straight. She shoves away the hand extended to help her up. "Don't touch me, you make me sick!" She stands up by herself. With a furious kick, she breaks her heel. She glances at the damaged shoe and pulls it off without interrupting her imprecations. "That's how you treat your wife!" And finally the explanation, between two sobs: "You never telephone me from the office during the day." The shrieks grow louder. The telephone rings. Marianne walks over to it. Picks up the receiver. In a perfectly calm voice she inquires after the health of her aunt, who hasn't called her since the slight grippe she was suffering from the week before. On the rug the shoe with the broken heel looks like a wrecked ship.

{(if: $p109 is not "true")[(set: $p109 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The stairway is quite dark. The boards creak under each footstep. The walls are dirty, and even the bannister is dusty. A girl who has just reached the floor above stops, hesitates and turns around. She walks back down several steps to ask, "Could you please tell me where Mademoiselle Duret lives?" But in the silence of the house the sound of a voice and a jazz tune can be heard from some floor above. The girl turns around and walks on, this time heading for the door through which come the sounds of people dancing. She is tall, slender, very dark. She wears her hair unfashionably long. Tacked to the door of the Duret apartment is a large card with a single word written on it in red letters: HERE. Moreover, the stamping of the dancers now makes the whole ancient building tremble. The door opens, casting a flood of light on the girl's face. She has a high, prominent forehead. Her fur coat and luxurious bag suggest a prosperity not at all appropriate to the bohemian apartment where the party is being given. Nevertheless Francine Duret embraces her effusively, before indicating her surprise: "You already know Marianne?" "No," Marianne says, "we met on the stairs." She has a clear, precise voice. She makes no special effort to seem friendly.

{(if: $p111 is not "true")[(set: $p111 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The apartment door opens on a long slender figure in a black hat. The silky hair brushes the shoulder of the fur coat. The toque of the same fur is fastened with a gold pin. Marianne seems a little intimidated, but walks in decisively. Without listening to the excuses, the young woman makes her way into the messy room. It is embarrassing to be caught in pajamas, in a studio so unprepared to receive such an elegant visitor. Without a word, Marianne draws off her black gloves and slips out of the heavy coat, which she surrenders to hands eager to take it. The situation is embarrassing. Yet Marianne seems to relax as she glances quickly at the books on the shelves, the records lying on the rug. She walks to the mantel, looks at herself in the huge mirror over the cracked marble, and makes a funny face at her reflection before putting her finger on the tip of her nose and pushing it up. She turns around and says, "My nose is my despair. I wish it were shorter. Don't you?" How to keep from telling her, and sincerely, that she is wonderfully desirable? Marianne hesitates a moment and then, as if she were taking the plunge, says, "I think I'm in love with you." And she adds, with an appealing, very unexpected confusion, "You mustn't be disappointed with me. I'm horribly inexperienced. It's the first time."

{(if: $p112 is not "true")[(set: $p112 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The doctor explains that Marianne should be in the hands of a good psychoanalyst. Her case, however, is not a serious one. A brief series of treatments would doubtless be enough for her to recover her equilibrium. The facts of the problem are simple enough. The young woman is undermined by a morbid fear of death and also by certain anxieties of a metaphysical order that keep her from enjoying life. As a matter of fact, she regards herself as a dead woman who has been reprieved. This is the explanation of her apathy and her refusal to make any effort to improve her daily existence. This is also the explanation of those dreams which drag her from her sleep convinced she is dead, naturally such nightmares keep her from getting any real rest. And this is doubtless also why Marianne refuses to go to bed until she collapses with exhaustion around two, three or four in the morning—for fear of dying in her sleep. But, of course, psychoanalytic treatment requires the patient's co-operation. Yet Marianne categorically refuses to take care of herself. She refuses even to admit that her state is abnormal, not to say alarming. Besides, she may be right. Perhaps there is another explanation. The doctors still know so little about such sicknesses and their cures. Marianne thinks a person would have to be crazy to live as if no one ever had to die. She adds that the doctor himself is abnormal, armored as he is against the fear of death by the spectacle of the deaths for which he is responsible. She'd like to put him in the hands of a good psychoanalyst.

{(if: $p114 is not "true")[(set: $p114 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar is sitting on the low couch, her legs folded under her. Her face is lit by the lamp on a little table. The red shade filters the light and gives it a tint that is flattering to the young woman's complexion. Dagmar takes a cigarette out of the case lying beside her on the striped spread—a Mexican serape, souvenir of a trip, no doubt. She raises the cigarette to her lips, which pucker into a sulky pout quite unexpected from her smooth and generally impassive features. Then she holds her face toward the offered match. Tiny flames dance in her eyes, then disappear. Dagmar straightens up. Her well-manicured fingers take the cigarette from her lips, and the young woman slowly exhales the smoke, which blurs her expression for a moment before dissipating itself. She smokes with a kind of reserve, apparently observing the futile gestures that are repeated several times. The hand raises the cigarette, the lips part, the smoke rises slowly in front of the face, the fingers slip the cigarette into the pouting mouth once again. She has nothing of the casualness of some women who smoke with annoyance, as though to be done as soon as possible, or who, in order to keep the cigarette in the mouth, perform a facial gymnastic which produces the same grimaces as those of someone wearing a monocle. The cigarette is stubbed out in the ashtray. Dagmar throws back her shoulders and holds out her lips, waiting for the kiss.

{(if: $p113 is not "true")[(set: $p113 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The motorcycle policemen are in ambush at the street corner, out of sight from the boulevard. The one sitting on his machine, whose motor is still running, seems to melt into his mount in a fusion of metal and leather in which the man himself plays only a small part. He is no longer anything but a police tool, a well-geared mechanism, a wound-up clock ready to chime at the right moment. A machine to catch criminals. A robot with ingenious wiring intended to make him function according to a program prepared in advance, without his taking any initiative. Standing beside him, watching the passing cars, his colleague blends into the landscape. Camouflaged for his sentry duty, bundled up in his gear, he is only one more lamppost on the sidewalk. The attention of the two monsters is caught by a car which has crossed the intersection against the light. The motorcycle roars off after the culprit, whom it passes and forces to stop. The man left behind relaxes his vigil to observe the outcome of the incident. There must be defects in the machine, or else this one is wound too tightly to adapt itself to any circumstances that are more than routine. The road is open to all fugitives from justice, all escaped convicts, all the most-wanted men, while the motorcycle police lecture an absent-minded driver. The culprit tries vainly to protest as he takes out of his wallet, one by one, the many papers the stiff robot demands to see in the prescribed order.

{(if: $p115 is not "true")[(set: $p115 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar walks away without another word. She does not tum back. The tall, delicate figure wavers a moment in the crowd. A child, stepping between, already hides the long legs and the bottom of the skirt. Dagmar takes another step. Now there is a man behind her who covers half her back and the precise spot, at her waist, where it is sweet to feel Dagmar arch her back under the caress. Another man who has just passed the young woman almost obliterates her. There remains nothing but a patch of material between the two shoulders under the bright blond hair. Dagmar continues on her way, taking long, calm strides toward the corner. For another second the pedestrians part like a theater curtain, revealing the undulating line of her hips. The young woman still doesn't turn around. Only her hair bobs above the other heads, like a signal. But it is not a summons. Dagmar's decision, like all her decisions, cannot be appealed. Wrapped in her great rage as in a cape, Dagmar approaches the comer. And the pedestrians who conceal her final image, sometimes turning around to admire her harmonious body, seem to know that they are closing the curtain on an episode. That the play is over. That the game is lost. Finally Dagmar vanishes, and nothing remains but the street filled with hurrying people eager to efface every trace of the quarrel and even the memory of the haughty figure and the pitiless words.

{(if: $p116 is not "true")[(set: $p116 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar simply cannot understand what makes people tell lies. For her, frankness is a duty as obvious as washing or wearing clean clothes. "But I know you don't like her," Dagmar says. "I know it because I feel it. You went out with her only so you could lie to me. You needed to lie to me." Dagmar shakes her long blond curls. She doesn't understand. She can't understand. At twenty-five, she knows how to take responsibilities and doesn't stand for anyone's hiding behind a lie as though behind a smoke screen, simply to keep safe. Safe from what? "Instead of making up the whole story, all you had to do was say you were going out with a girl friend," Dagmar continues. For the first time, she is merely a helpless and vulnerable child. All distance between herself and the world is abolished. She has been hurt. But somehow she is on the other side of a gulf that can no longer be crossed. She has been hurt, but at long range. As though by a rifle bullet. She has been hurt, but only to renounce. Renounce this futile race with her shadow which, for her, is the expression of love. "I loved you," Dagmar says. With the same hunted expression that Helga has, held inert on the bed. From behind, Dagmar's silhouette preserves a sovereign elegance. She doesn't turn around.

{(if: $p117 is not "true")[(set: $p117 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The croupier drawls, "No more bets." To the right, a young woman freshens her makeup with a careful gesture. But no one seems to see what she's doing. She slowly passes a lipstick over her upper lip, watching the operation in a tiny mirror in the lid of the tube. Then she rubs her lips against each other. To the left, an elderly man watches the little ball with a concentrated, obsessed expression. He tries to guide it by an effort of will. His face remains impassive, but his very immobility appears to be moving. His features suggest a sudden fall, an uncontrollable collapse. His cheeks are drawn and the corners of his lips turn down. His flaccid, papery skin is distorted by the weight of an infinite weariness. Only his eyes gleam and stare at the ball with feverish intensity, snatching at it and pushing it toward the fatal number. Beyond the old man, hands toy with some chips. Nervous, shapely, carefully manicured hands. But a man's hands, though very white. The croupier's rake, with a hideous clatter, pulls in the bets. Just behind, a few young and playful voices discuss a loss in a tone which betrays them as inexperienced bettors. The kind who gamble only for fun. And very rarely.

{(if: $p118 is not "true")[(set: $p118 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne's room is a wonder of equilibrium, and to move anything in it is strictly forbidden. If any hand but hers touches the smallest object or piece of clothing, Marianne refuses to use it again. The fur coat is on the rug. That is where it belongs. No one has the right to put it on a chair, to hang it up in a closet, because it is contaminated by the outside air. In a huge suitcase, always ready for an improbable trip, all the belongings of the mistress of the house are piled in a heap. From time to time, she take out a suit or a pair of pajamas and stuffs in something she no longer wants to use for the time being. Around the suitcase, the clean linen delivered by the laundry lies on the rug. The bed is perpetually made and open; occasionally, during the day, Marianne pats it lightly to make it a little more tempting. On the dressing table, on the mantel, hundreds of medicine bottles, covered with dust, most of them unopened. When Marianne wants to "do" the room, which happens once or twice a week, she carefully guides the vacuum cleaner around the objects strewing the floor.

{(if: $p119 is not "true")[(set: $p119 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The temperature chart attached to the foot of the bed shows a cross-section drawing of high mountains. Peaks and plateaus between shallow valleys. Above, the air is cool, but the mountain climbers are too bundled up to feel the wind. In fact, they are too warm under their windbreakers. The nurse soars high in the sky, like a white cloud floating over the peaks. Her face glows in the sunlight of the lamp. She has large eyes and white teeth. As soon as she leaves the room the day grows dim and the climb resumes. Before leaving, she has drawn a new slope on the chart. It is the hardest to scale. Afterward, perhaps, it will be possible to breathe, if at least there doesn't appear, beyond this one, a final peak temporarily hidden from the string of climbers. The slope grows steeper and steeper. The stones roll underfoot, and suddenly there is an avalanche, the free dizzying fall and that heap of stones which continues to pile up like a cataract, crushing the chest, nailing the limbs to the ground. The nurse returns. Her hand is cool, restful, liberating. But as soon as her back is turned the expedition sets out again. Linked to each other, the mountains assault this last Himalaya. Together, the pines and hills of the temperature chart fling themselves upon the slopes of their rival. The peaks on the chart look like the Christmas trees drawn by children, with their sharp points. A veritable forest is silhouetted at the foot of the bed.

{(if: $p120 is not "true")[(set: $p120 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The car drives through the uproar and floats for a long time on a river of exclamations. Eyes closed, as in an egotistic act of love in which the partner dissolves, suddenly no longer exists; when the body relaxes and floats, all ties severed. But the smell of leaking gas indicates that the crossing is over. The motor must be turned off at once. Behind the closed eyelids, or beyond, the ignition key escapes and the exclamations grow more and more imperious. "Get an ambulance!" "Get him out of the car" ''You can see he's fainted!" And, quite close, a louder voice, pleading a lost cause with all the energy of a culprit still denying his guilt: "I had the right of way, he was driving much too fast!" The police sirens on the quay drown out the arguments. After the darkness, the daylight is blinding. The pavement comes up very fast and echoes like a slap, restoring darkness. But the smell of gas remains like a wave from the earth and carries the shipwrecked survivors out of their element. The swaying of the stretcher bearers is a ground swell. The floor of the police emergency van hardens under the body like a contracting muscle. The iron doors slam with the sound of a prison. The policemen exchange comments in their thick voices. "He's lucky to get out of it alive." "Awful to see a car in a state like that." The siren is superimposed on the vibrations.

{(if: $p121 is not "true")[(set: $p121 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The harrow is standing on the sidewalk, at right angles to the roadway. It is a hideous weapon, but of childish simplicity: an iron plate bristling with steel points about eight inches high. The harrow is attached to a rope thrown across the street. On the opposite sidewalk, a policeman holds the end of the rope. A gesture from him is enough to bring the harrow in the way of a car and explode the tires. But the whole thing is more like a schoolboy joke than a dangerous police stratagem. Some twenty yards on either side of the harrow, two policemen critically scrutinize the passing cars. They stop some, blowing their whistles. The vehicles come to a stop with a strident groan. Then start up again, after the drivers' papers have been checked. The wheels pass over the rope which the harrow man is holding. Children sometimes play a game with a wallet this way, leaving it out on the sidewalk and jerking the string when a pedestrian bends down to pick up the object. It seems that the police are making a random check. They stop cars of all kinds. They must not know what kind of vehicle their intended victim is using. Perhaps they don't even know if he's using a car. And perhaps, after all, this is only a routine check that permits the men to familiarize themselves with their barbarous, primitive, but effective instrument.

{(if: $p122 is not "true")[(set: $p122 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The rosebush is planted in a pot on the balcony. Next to it, in a green plastic bottle with a spray top, is the insecticide which helps protect the leaves against aphids. The plant's brown stem appears for several inches above the earth in the pot. Three long shoots rise along wrought-iron spirals of the crumbling balcony railing. Each shoot is attached to a bamboo stake about four feet long. Under the clippers, the short branches fall with their cluster of leaves. It is difficult to decide which should be sacrificed, and each choice is a tiny pang. Yet roses have to be pruned. That's what the professional gardeners say. But they know how to do it, and they cut without hesitating. Besides, this rosebush produces only a few blossoms every spring, and it seems silly to struggle all year long over it for the sole pleasure of seeing half a dozen buds bloom in May. Actually the rosebush is a constant bother. The earth has to be kept moist. And the pot protected during the winter so that the roots won't freeze. Besides, it's scarcely possible to enjoy the roses more than a few brief moments every day, for the balcony is too narrow for even a garden chair. So it's all just pure sentimentality.

{(if: $p124 is not "true")[(set: $p124 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga palpitates in the hand like a captive Bengali. She struggles, but her wrists are pinned against the couch. Her arms are spread wide. Then comes a moment of calm during which everything is still possible. Held fast on the couch, the girl seems to be trying to dig her way to safety with her back. She waits without speaking, and her huge eyes glisten like a bird's. Now and then she turns her tiny red beak from right to left, from left to right, but the pupils seem to be staring only into themselves. They gleam so brightly it is hard to resist kissing them. The lids close. Helga does not evade the faint contact. Or else she is concentrating on how to escape, or reacting to the pleasure rising within her. The eyes open again, with a gleam of complicity. Her limbs are terribly delicate. The forearm, held back against the bed, reveals its defenseless pallor, which the lips caress, provoking a shudder along their path. Her flesh is elastic and sinks under the mouth. A pinch of skin is caught between the teeth, which make a red, quickly fading imprint on it. With a movement of her hips, Helga attempts to escape again, but without much conviction. The thrust already suggests the movements of pleasure. With a little pressure, it is easy to immobilize the girl's belly, which yields, then resists and returns the embrace. That did it. Her breast throbs hard under the hand. Helga's freed hand lies weakly over that other hand devouring the young breasts.

{(if: $p123 is not "true")[(set: $p123 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The cheeks reddened by slaps look as if they owed their color to nothing but the girl's youth. The huge, astonished eyes close each time the sensations grow too strong. The open blouse reveals two pretty little breasts, whose pink tips stand erect. The shoulders, at right angles to the neck, still seem to rise proudly to the challenge; they are shaken with sudden movements under the hand that caresses their nakedness. In the hollow of the collarbone a particularly sensitive spot is exposed. Under the skin the muscles of the breasts form supple cords that can be made to roll between the fingers. Below, in the round, firm breasts themselves, the glands must be looked for, found, isolated. Helga utters a moan and closes her eyes. On the side, the breast inclines in a satiny slope toward the armpit. The hand rises again, gently moves the abandoned arm aside and penetrates the faint down that Helga must have shaved a few days ago. The fingers close around the upper arm. The hollow of the armpit opens spontaneously under the caress. The expression on the face is now the same as Dagmar's. The braid seems to have disintegrated, and loose hair springs out of it in all directions.

{(if: $p125 is not "true")[(set: $p125 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The girl crumbles the rest of her cake for the pigeons. She is tall, slender and not at all embarrassed about stretching out her provocative crossed legs. Long blond hair falls to her shoulders. She smiles, showing brilliant white teeth, at the guards passing, the children and the pigeons. And also at the people sitting on the bench beside her. When she stands up, she brushes the wrinkles out of her elegant suit with a slender hand and flicks off the few crumbs that may have clung to the fabric. She has patrician shoulders and her gait reveals a certain arrogance belied by the sweetness of her smile and the sensuality of her lips. Without answering, she looks questioningly at the insolent person who speaks to her, to take his measure and also to give herself time to think. Yet she continues on her way without opening her mouth, but without hurrying either. She hesitates a moment before going through the little gate of the square which a hand has opened in front of her. Then she decides to express her thanks with a nod and takes a few steps on the sidewalk. Then she changes direction, without thereby indicating that she really wants to get rid of a troublesome person. She is walking slowly now, and listening with interest, though still not answering. When she finally makes up her mind, she says with a slight reticence, "My name is Dagmar."

{(if: $p126 is not "true")[(set: $p126 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga no longer offers any resistance. She even takes a secret pleasure in passively yielding, her body obeying even the slightest suggestions. She is playing dead, emphasizing even more the childish nature of her character. Something has been interrupted, cut off: not the will to resist—if there is a will, which is not certain—but the will to struggle to the end. The calm which follows the slaps is a little alarming, for nothing suggests what is going on behind the pacified little face. The lips are soft under the kisses. Dead flesh that cannot be warmed again. Under the hand, the smooth legs submit to every order, without stiffening or jerking. The body is entirely relaxed. As though broken. It is a body of silence rather than consent. A body which no longer expresses anything. The limbs abandon themselves. If it weren't for the fluttering of her eyelids, Helga might have fainted. The silence continues. It seems as if no caress could ever make these slender muscles tremble again. And now there is not much more time. The body must be wakened to pleasure before it is too late, before the game is lost for good. But youth is victorious, and the energy of a flesh that cannot keep itself from reacting. The breasts once again grow firm.

{(if: $p128 is not "true")[(set: $p128 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga turns, is motionless, goes tense and then limp. Her hard arms are like an iron collar as she clutches her torturer. Eyes closed, her face, offered up to some unknown vision as an expiatory sacrifice, cast into a void she alone can see, goes taut in an agony of pleasure that nonetheless seems to fascinate her. She flings her head suddenly from left to right, then stops and for an instant rests the nape of her neck on the pillow. Her face, slack now, seems to collapse. The girl tries to dig her neck into the couch. A grin appears on her lips. The fresh mouth twists into a hideous carnival mask. The cheeks are mottled with red spots. The two short braids are disheveled and stiff with static electricity. The body follows the movements of pleasure, cleaves to love. The shoulders try to rise in order to lift the small breasts toward the flesh that flattens them. Like a puppy, she emits a first yip, then another. Then a brief moan. In a few seconds, as the young girl becomes a woman, the little animal reaches maturity. The moans grow louder and louder, and more sustained. The last is a violent, savage cry that immediately precedes sobs. The arms open. Helga falls back onto the sheet, at the end of her strength. Her breast heaves with dry sobs. A tear appears and clings to the corner of her eye, sparkling.

{(if: $p127 is not "true")[(set: $p127 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Helga is becoming aroused. First, a stiffening of the whole body. The young flesh swells under the hand, as if each muscle were straining to follow the caress, to catch the fingers sliding over the skin. Each inch of epidermis tries to hold on to the touch. Wherever the lips come to rest along the girl's neck, it is like a rising in arms. And Helga slowly turns her head, eagerly accompanying the movement of the kisses. This is no longer a powerless child letting herself be looted, but a woman in the making who greedily collects each scrap of emotion. Her whole body suddenly becomes vigilant, as her will dissolves. In a childish but ardent gesture of possession, Helga flings her arms around her emotion. Their long, delicate muscles strain against the body from which she takes her pleasure. She gasps softly. Her eyes dim, then gleam again. The lids beat rapidly, releasing sudden flashes; she closes them again at once, embarrassed to know she is being observed at such a moment, jealous of letting even a little of her ecstasy escape. And suddenly she is nothing but a glowing torch from head to foot.

{(if: $p129 is not "true")[(set: $p129 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The policemen walking under the windows can't have been alerted yet. They stroll casually and don't glance up toward the panes. Great black insects hunting for a leaf to eat or a slug to gobble up, they crawl along on their long uniformed legs, looking peaceful enough. But their strength shows. It is a strength constituted by a system of which they are an integral part and which can be set in operation by the mere whine of a siren or a simple telephone call. They stop a moment, look around. Everything is calm in the vicinity, but their instinct warns them of the presence of their quarry. They seem to be sniffing the scents the wind carries to them. As a matter of fact, they suspect nothing, scent nothing, have guessed nothing, they are simply chatting, with the tranquillity of wild beasts whose prey has eluded them, provided nature has granted it a means of defense: a color that blends into that of the surrounding landscape, agility in flight, cunning. The two guardians of law and order continue their bored, echoing walk, exchanging the inevitable remarks about their wives and their chief. The boots pound the sidewalk. Walking heavily, they vanish to the right, as though disappearing into the wings of a stage.

{(if: $p130 is not "true")[(set: $p130 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ A caldron is placed in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the club's door. Suspended from a tripod, it offers its potbellied shape to the pedestrians. In the December cold it seems to call for the fire that will make its contents simmer. But the pot is empty and no steam rises from its gaping mouth. A few coins and a couple of banknotes are the only contents. Standing one on each side of the caldron, two Salvation Army officers blow on their fingers and ring their bells. Their noses are red and the ribbons tied under their chins make their faces look like Easter eggs. Their old-fashioned bonnets serve as a kind of emblem in the crowd along the boulevard. It has been a good night at the club, marking the end of a long period of bad luck. The cards have been favorable for hours, in exactly the right order and at the right moment, as though magnetized. In record time a fortune has been miraculously accumulated. The Salvation Army women stare indifferently. Then with increasing astonishment; they seem ready to throw themselves on their knees to thank the Lord on the spot. The notes fall together into the bottom of the pot and cover the small change that is lying there. The whole night's winnings have gone in.

{(if: $p132 is not "true")[(set: $p132 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ A black bulk, like an outboard motorboat at top speed, appears to the right, floating at the level of the window. Quite close, within arm's reach, the windshield suddenly springs up; behind the glass two men's faces freeze in an expression of horrified surprise. The black hood seems to rush into the car, powerful and broad above the raging ocean. The other car gleams with swordlike flashes. It is transformed into India ink that flows across the glass and covers everything. And this gasoline-impregnated lake has to be crossed. Out of the shadows an elusive steering wheel must be snatched so that the car can be driven like a submarine through the ocean depths. The sub no longer obeys the instruments and drifts on its own momentum. The steering wheel has vanished, returns, floats inside the car. The smell of gasoline penetrates everywhere, while the vessel founders. Death is so gentle it makes indifference easier. There is nothing else to do but yield. Nothing counts now except this comforting maternal darkness which benumbs all desire to struggle. The living are bustling about. They tug, push, shout, try to wipe away the ink whose black waves submerge everything. No use telling them how ridiculous their efforts are. The police emergency squad, nothing but silhouettes, become deep-sea divers and restore the sunlight to the depths of the tunnel.

{(if: $p131 is not "true")[(set: $p131 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ "We'll take care of you after school." Buisson, the toughest boy in the class, repeats excitedly, ''You'll see, we'll take care of you." And the gang laughs noisily, smashing their fists against the air. It's not clear how it all started. He shouldn't have told the professor who assigned twenty lines of Racine that the substitute had already done the same scene two months ago. Who can tell, in such cases, if the schoolboy code of honor has really been violated? Most of the students had already shown by their attitude that the prof was making a mistake. But the Buisson gang want to make an example of someone. Why, though? None of the tough kids learned the lines last time; none of them will learn them now. Still, they have to have a scapegoat. The important thing is to fight hard and to get in at least a few good ones. At the bell, he must run to the top of the stairs, a strategic position, where it is easy to knock a few attackers down to the bottom. Before being sent there himself. Buisson and his friends know the trick too well to risk a fight under such conditions. After pretending to look for their enemy, they pick up their satchels and go home. Which doesn't keep them from telling everyone that ass-kissers are cowards and run away as soon as the bell rings. It takes time to live down a slander like that.

{(if: $p133 is not "true")[(set: $p133 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar is at the vanishing point. She gradually diminishes as she moves away toward her horizon. As if she were being watched through the wrong end of a telescope. She is nothing more than a black patch with a blond luster at the top. But she remains in suspension in the distance, where she should disappear, where the sun is setting. And this whole distance is a vast field of suffering. On this side of Dagmar extends the barren waste, with only reeds growing on it; here and there is scattered the flotsam of wrecked ships: the click of the telephone when she hangs up without answering, the carcass of a boat worn by time. Dagmar stretches her legs with an insolent perfection, in the square where she is feeding the birds. She stands up, smiling at the children playing nearby, the uniformed guard, the strangers sitting beside her on the bench. Dagmar doesn't turn her head to answer the bold man who approaches her in the street, but gradually lets herself be interested by the remarks he makes to her. Attentive despite herself, she slows down, no longer forces herself to stride on, and finally turns her head with a pensive smile in which occasionally appears the joy of living and knowing she is beautiful. Dagmar walks confidently, as though accompanied by an old friend, with a mounting assurance. Finally she answers, "My name is Dagmar." And everything begins. And everything is over. At the emptiest end of the memory Dagmar stands, a tiny point on the horizon, whose details melt into a black patch with a blond luster at the top.

{(if: $p134 is not "true")[(set: $p134 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar's forehead, in bold relief, is tilted back at an angle that catches the candlelight. The flames make the curls gleam like the angel's hair around the Christmas tree. Above her forehead the locks roll like transparent waves on golden sand, forming whorls that dissolve behind the black barrette carefully perched perpendicular to the part. To the right, over the left side of her face, the hair is fluffier and falls toward the ear loosely, in a way that from a distance, as in an impressionist painting, would appear as part of a well-planned composition. Dagmar opens her eyes and turns her face away, but without drawing back. The candle flames strike sparks from the large shadowy pupils. Dagmar turns her head toward the tree, and her eyes recover their usual green transparency. The cheekbones swallow up all the rest of her face below the forehead, on which the light casts a yellowish glow. The face comes near again and Dagmar closes her eyes. The darkened lashes make a black line across the eyelids. At each comer, the eyes show a dusting of what looks like charcoal, which elongates the eyes, although Dagmar's beauty needs no such exaggeration. The brows, taking the light at an angle, are gilded above, darker below. Dagmar opens her eyes again and draws back; the mouth takes shape below the short, straight nose. Around it the lipstick spreads in a pink pool. But the bitten and swollen lips look naked.

{(if: $p136 is not "true")[(set: $p136 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar walks down the street with her unconcerned but firm stride. As she passes she glances at the shop windows, contemplating her reflection, and her gloved hand pats the blond curls that fall to her shoulders. For this first meeting she wears a rather severe fall suit which accentuates her height without making her seem any less graceful. She walks on with assurance, despite the stares of the men who turn around to admire her. Her voice is cool, her greeting playful. She lets her arm be taken without diminishing by an inch the distance that separates her from the world. But under the material her arm is soft. As with all girls who are too tall, the summer dress she wears seems to project her into the middle of the sky. The bare arms, revealed by the sleeveless garment, spring out like water flowing. She walks on amid the crowd, and from a distance she smiles without walking any faster. Her golden chignon gleams over their heads. In the loose coat that conceals her long, soft lines, Dagmar turns the corner of the avenue. Only her face with its regular features emerges from the garment. In the same way, the Gothic saints on the porches of cathedrals conceal their desirable bodies under stiff drapery. With the same disturbing perfection. The same harmony of flesh and stone. The same evocative power.

{(if: $p135 is not "true")[(set: $p135 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Footsteps echo on the stairs. First one set, then several, and finally a whole trampling crowd. The barracks are filled by voices even before the first khaki uniform appears in the doorway. Like a tide flowing over the camp beds, advancing into the oblong room, uniformed bodies stretch out on the beds, stand around the sink; two men punch at each other and shake a third who is already lying, fully dressed, on his brown blanket. The barracks corporal tries to re-establish order. The heavy, rather melancholy gaiety of boys, under the meager light of the yellow bulbs, sweeps all before it. Everyone laughs to see the two boys wriggling head over heels while the bed collapses under them, amid the owner's protests. The two men stand up and dust themselves off. Calm is restored. The sergeant makes his daily inspection. Someone protests that the barracks smell even worse than usual, but his chilly comrades forbid him to open the window. The nights are cool. In dirty undershirts, their arms exposed, the men prepare for the night. The muscles are hard and prominent. The bodies are deeply tanned; above the beds are tacked photographs cut out of magazines. Beautiful girls with long legs, soft eyes, and smiles retouched by the photographer. A movie actress in a top hat, one leg on a bar stool, the other extended, her hair a golden tangle, tosses a provocative glance at this group of a hundred young males without feminine companionship who are going to spend another night alone.

{(if: $p137 is not "true")[(set: $p137 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar steps back to consider the effect. The canvas is covered with a thick layer of black paint, on which brilliant patches explode like flowers or rockets, long striations that rush to meet each other. The whole forms a strange, difficult, overpowering composition. Nothing in the painting suggests the young woman's measured movements, her exact and firm gentleness. "It's only my shadow," Dagmar says. The work is as tragic and somber as the girl is luminous. "It's me, only a negative," Dagmar also says. Calmly, deliberately, she adds a few lacerating touches that manage to obliterate whatever might be decorative about the painting. Ugliness is born under the brush, though it is difficult to see why this meaningless mass of paint gradually acquires such violence. Unlike abstraction, it is a monstrous distortion, a torment of the sensibility. Each stroke lives for itself, against the others, and this constitutes a world that turns on its axis, caught in a tracery of meteors, in bonds of falling stars. Suddenly Dagmar sets down her brushes and sits down, very straight, in an armchair. Her foot taps faster and faster. When she stands up, she seems to have difficulty controlling herself. And yet she goes on with her work, with a scrupulous slowness that consumes every motion and keeps it from being anything more than a motion like the rest. I'll call this //Composition Number One//," Dagmar says.

{(if: $p138 is not "true")[(set: $p138 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar's absence creates a void on the right side, where the young woman used to walk, her stride so graceful and assured. In the street an abyss opens on the right side and moves along through the city, creating a kind of trench which closes behind, like a molehill in the crowd, like a wave trough in the sea. And there is no supple arm on which to exert a tender pressure with each step. The city's silence has something tragic about it, now that the voice with its Rhenish accent is still. Without Dagmar's comments, the world is as incoherent as a foreign-language film without subtitles. The big green eyes are empty, like those of sightless statues in museums. Dagmar is no longer there to give these eyes that float through the street the luster of her presence, to illuminate the housefronts with will-o'-the-wisps. The whole city has gone out like a light, and the day has turned to stone. Dagmar has gone away, without turning back. There is nothing to do but wander endlessly, trembling at the sight of each blond head that floats above the rest, at desolate intersections, in the crowd that is no one any more. The city is dead, as after a bombing that has annihilated all the inhabitants and left only ghosts.

{(if: $p140 is not "true")[(set: $p140 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ For the summer vacation, Maman has decided to hire a girl to live in and take care of the two younger children. Preferably a German girl, so that the children can learn the language better. Besides, German students have the reputation of not minding work and being willing to accept their share of household tasks. The country house is enormous and difficult to keep up. The governess can have one of the third-floor rooms that is usually kept locked. Maman makes clear that no emotional involvement will be tolerated, which is quite natural. But the presence of a young girl in the old house suggests, even so, that the summer will be an unusual one. Maman is surprised by the lack of enthusiasm that greets her plan. In her opinion, the German girl could even be an agreeable playmate in her spare time. Considering how subtle Maman is, it would be best not to oppose the plan too openly. She would guess at once that girls do not necessarily constitute an object of contempt, as boys of sixteen or seventeen prefer people—at least their parents—to think. However good she may be at smelling out lies, Maman seems to have been taken in by this one.

{(if: $p139 is not "true")[(set: $p139 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The whiteness of the hospital penetrates the closed eyelids. Bells ring out in the calm air, distant, as at Easter, when they pierce the clouds, passing very high, over the route of the airplanes. Blond heads of hair serve as searchlights for their dangerous navigation. Dagmar wanders high in the sky, with her dancing gait. But it is Helga's face that leans over the bed, as from a balcony of desire. But desire is dead. Helga's eyes, with their thousand gold sparks, reflect fear and pleasure. The bells ring and the anesthetist says, "Count aloud." Nuns in white headdresses, summoned by the carillon, advance in slow procession, with muffled steps. A dark-haired bride among them, paler than her veil, sets foot on earth again. The guests whisper that this marriage should never have taken place. And yet it is a love match. The murmurs grow louder between the walls of the church, where the organ is playing, accompanying the choir of girls. Lilies stand straight and smooth, and float like swans on the silvery water. The murmurs that mingle with the bells lead the way to Dagmar, who tries to break the mirror of distance. The image is imprisoned behind the silvering, and Dagmar's eyes open wide on two gleaming tears. The anesthetist with chloroform hands repeats, "Keep on counting aloud." Black flashes streak the white night, in which big red flowers burst into bloom suddenly, all at once.

{(if: $p141 is not "true")[(set: $p141 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The night is pitch black. Luckily, for the bushes are not dense enough to conceal a man's presence. The German patrols are searching the environs of the farm, but without conviction. The soldiers must be convinced that they have caught the whole resistance group on the spot, and that no one managed to escape. Now and then screams burst from the house, like animals trying to escape. Impossible to recognize the voices. They no longer come from a man, but from a piece of crazed flesh. Since Jeannette's screams were silenced no sound has been identifiable. It would be better not to think of the dawn that will soon break over the underbrush. Now the Germans are coming out in a group. Among them, the prisoners can be distinguished from the police in civilian clothes by their staggering gait. Not one is able to walk normally. Someone falls. A soldier leans down. A shot. The soldier stands up again. The first cracklings are audible as the Germans and their victims get into the trucks. Among them is a tall, handsome girl with blond hair, to whom the officers politely defer. Jeannette's screams explode like a rocket, and immediately afterward the shouts of men and the lowing of cattle locked in the barn. The farm roof collapses as the trucks start moving. The glow of the fire begins to light up the bushes just as the convoy vanishes down the road.

{(if: $p142 is not "true")[(set: $p142 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The detachment has just entered the village without firing a shot. The Germans must have left this position yesterday at the latest. The villa door has been forced. The house is in excellent condition. The village hasn't suffered a single bombing. There is a brick fireplace in the living room. Despite the clement weather, this fireplace calls for a blaze. The delicate dressing table is quickly in splinters. "You apes," Clement says, "that's Louis Quinze at least. Couldn't you have picked something else?" The fire doesn't catch at first, but there has to be a supply of wood just in case. The little armchairs join the dressing table. "It doesn't matter," Rene says. "They belonged to Germans." The house isn't as attractive as it seemed, after all. Maybe the one next door will be better. Before leaving, Rene empties the marquetry commode to see if there isn't something useful inside. In the house next door, a cellar reveals a lot of bottles. The detachment brings up cases full of dusty flagons. The wine flows out over the carpet. This, at least, is really living; war has its good side.

{(if: $p144 is not "true")[(set: $p144 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar stands in the light from the Christmas tree, under the glow of twenty tiny candles with wavering, interlacing flames. In the halo of light, her hair, caught up in a chignon that reveals the graceful neck and the white shoulders, has exactly the same color as the flames and the glittering garlands. Her large eyes sparkle, her mouth is Christmas red beneath the Grecian nose. This face itself, animated by a transport of exaltation, resembles a Christmas tree. The light plays on the delicate neck, marks the shadow of the chin, descends toward the collarbone, scarcely visible beneath the skin, and streams over the shoulders. Through the tree's branches, Dagmar looks like one more fantastic toy. Each of her gestures recomposes a dancer's position. Even her legs instinctively assume a perfect attitude, one foot forward, as if the next moment Dagmar were going to make a great stage curtsy facing the audience. Calm, a little sad, as usual, interposing the pine branches between herself and the world, and half concealed, she measures all the distance that separates people, in love and out of love. She is presence and impulse. All the lines of her body are vanishing lines. She says gently, "I love you," as only she can say it—from a distance. She is naked.

{(if: $p143 is not "true")[(set: $p143 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ A sputter in the telephone receiver. One ring, two rings, three, four. Dagmar's voice follows the click. "Hello?" Just one word. Then nothing. She is listening, no doubt, at the other end, but doesn't answer. Then another click. She has hung up. Dagmar is on the line. She slips the receiver under the blond hair that falls in a cascade to her shoulders. She says, "Hello," quite indifferently. When she recognizes the voice at the other end, she hesitates a long time. She knows that she doesn't want to answer and that she won't. Perhaps she listens with a bitter pleasure to the voice she has loved, or still loves. Then she presses a finger on the phone and cuts the connection instead of setting the receiver back in its cradle. The contact is broken again. Dagmar walks rapidly toward the telephone, which is on an end table beside the couch. It has already rung four times. Perhaps she is expecting another call and hurries so as not to keep the caller waiting any longer. Her "Hello?" is expectant. But she immediately realizes her mistake. She is torn between her decision not to reconsider and her desire not to inflict pain. She listens for a minute to the distorted voice. Then she lifts the receiver from her ear. The phrase is no more than an incomprehensible sputter. She sets the receiver back in its cradle.

{(if: $p145 is not "true")[(set: $p145 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Dagmar sets two candles on the table. She lights a match and raises the flame to the two wicks. The reflections cast a light on her pale cheeks. Her blond hair suddenly gleams. The shadows playing across her face animate it with an artificial life. Her features seem much more mobile than by electric light. Before sitting down, she stiffens her body, offers her lips. Then she relaxes her muscles and leans her whole weight on the arms that receive her. Her breasts are sweet and fresh, but her mouth is tired. Encircled like a fortress by enemy troops, she tries to dissolve in the force that invests and is about to conquer her body. But she remains alien, impregnable. From her shoulders, from her legs, emanates exactly the same intensity of desire as before the brief surrender. The physical contact doesn't seem able to broach her solitude. She says, ''I'd like to be old, quickly." She is resplendent with youth in the candlelight. Her husk is a kind of rampart against which the besiegers raise their ladders, without being able to penetrate the city. From the top of the crenellations, the garrison pours boiling pitch, which flares up coldly. No use. She opens her eyes again and with the tip of her tongue licks a drop of blood on her lip. But even though, by childishness or primitive instinct, she did inflict this bite, she couldn't flow into another body. In her Rhenish accent whose sweetness is still another distance, she says, "Come on, let's have dinner. You eat with me so seldom."

{(if: $p146 is not "true")[(set: $p146 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Only one place is set at the table. Marianne serves the consommé and vanishes into the kitchen. When she returns she is holding a saucer, which she sets in front of her. She sits down at last. In the saucer she puts two grapes, and then, slowly, she raises one to her lips. I’m sick, very sick," Marianne says. "Tonight I can't eat a thing." She sucks the grape without letting go of it, and now and then she puts it back in the saucer. Disheveled, her face covered with patches of makeup, she looks like some tragic and ridiculous character in a children's puppet show. The audience must watch carefully lest, between one moment and the next, they miss one of the transformations of the sorceress Melusina, who can change herself at will into a grinning old crone or a silken beauty. Halfway through the metamorphosis, Marianne wavers in search of a lost equilibrium. With her nails she removes from her mouth the seeds and bits of the grape skin, which she arranges in front of her according to some complicated geometry. When she stands up to get the coffee, she arches her back for a second and suspends her vinelike body in the familiar landscape of the dining room. As she passes in front of the light in the elegant dress covered with stains, she recovers the figure of a young woman with high breasts, arrogant walk and refined elegance, lightly perched on delicate high heels. But when she turns around, the light plays on the irregularities of her face, exposing the wrinkles like tattoo marks.

{(if: $p148 is not "true")[(set: $p148 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The silence is very embarrassing. The boss seems to be reflecting deeply. He wrinkles his forehead and massages his jowls with increasingly marked irritation. When he finally brings himself to speak, it is with the laborious sympathy of a "progressive" judge trying to penetrate the criminal's psychology rather than apply the rigors of the law in a purely mechanical fashion. "What amazes me is that you declined to take a day off for the funeral. In other words, it wasn't in order to gain some advantage that you lied. But why then? Especially since you knew I have a connection with your uncle; sooner or later I'd have found out the truth. And that's just what has happened." Behind his glasses, his expression suddenly becomes severe. He must be thinking that the absurd and untrue announcement of a death in the family indicates a repressed desire to kill off a relative. Which is not the case. The boss would have preferred it had his offer of a day off for the funeral been accepted. Then the lie would have had an appearance of logic. A motive. At least that's what he's trying to explain. But the real reasons for a gratuitous lie are evidently beyond him. And his indignation gains the upper hand. He convinces himself that he's been flouted, mocked. "Go back to your office. I'll let you know." It will doubtless be necessary to look for another job.

{(if: $p147 is not "true")[(set: $p147 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ Marianne has been invited to the convention by one of her former professors, to serve as an interpreter. Among these scholars who pay little attention to their appearance, she is like a brilliant tropical bird among a flock of crows. Everyone crowds about her to pay compliments. Each is astonished to see this young woman who looks like a model play her part with such disconcerting intelligence and erudition. The foreign delegates are so amazed that they ask their French colleagues if there are many students of this caliber at the Sorbonne. And they praise the delights of Paris. During the little reception after the convention, Marianne explains several times that she has quite recently abandoned her prospects of a brilliant career in order to get married. She wants to make a success of her emotional life rather than to collect the vain honors of a professional career, however interesting. But the old professor of psychology develops a theory about this decision which is quite his own. According to him, Marianne, despite her enormous gifts, suffers from a strange weakness: lack of self-confidence. This inadequacy, combined with an excessive pride, keeps her from risking failure, even an unlikely one. Which is why she hasn't been tempted to enter the École Normale and why she doesn't take the examinations. Everyone protests. Marianne smiles nervously. In any case, she is always at the center of every conversation. It is her doing that the convention has been such a success.

{(if: $p149 is not "true")[(set: $p149 to "true")(set: $passageLog to it + (array: $passage))]}\ The debts are now so enormous that the lawyer advises mortaging the family property. He is a short, dry man with a delicate face and gold-rimmed spectacles. He speaks like a doctor called in for a consultation. He broods over the surveyor's report with the same concentrated expression as that with which the physician broods over his wrist watch when he takes the patient's pulse. The lawyer wants to visit the house himself, since he hasn't seen it in so long. It is a handsome three-story building at the end of a garden with several terraces and a lawn. The white stone façade rises impressively above the front steps. Flanking the entrance door, the two bay windows of the dining room and the living room. It was here that Grandmother died, in the boudoir that had been turned into a sickroom because she no longer had the strength to climb the huge staircase. On the second floor, the family bedrooms. The master bedroom whose two windows, at right angles, overlook the garden and a little orchard. Opposite, the children's room and the bathrooms. On the third floor, over the landing, is a skylight that spreads a whitish radiance. A hallway leads to the guest rooms and the servants' bedrooms. It is a residence of a rather lordly character that suited the days of family splendor and which now costs too much to keep up "We'll find you a nice little mortgage," the lawyer says.