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twenty-two.
    I wanted to do what was right, I have told you that, and I repeat it. I don't even know if she was pretty. But I knew that a man, at a certain age, ought to get married.
    Why Jeanne? She used to smile at me shyly every time I came to the house. And she it was who served the glass of white wine that is traditional with us. She always wore a discreet, self-effacing air. Everything about her was self-effacing, to such a point that after sixteen years I can scarcely remember what she looked like.
    She was gentle, like my mother.
    I had no friends in the village. I seldom went to La Roche-sur-Yon for, in my free moments, I preferred taking my motor-cycle and going off somewhere to fish or to hunt.
    I might say that I never really courted her.
    'It seems to me,' my mother said one evening as we were waiting for time to go to bed, 'that you're beginning to take quite a fancy to Jeanne.'
    'You think so?'
    'She's a very nice girl ... No one could say the contrary ...'
    One of those young girls, you know, who dons her summer dress and her new hat for the first time Easter Sunday and her winter coat on All Saints' Day.
    'Since you won't remain a bachelor all your life ..
    Poor Mama. She would certainly have preferred my being a priest.
    It was my mother who married us. We were engaged for almost a year because in the country if you marry too soon, people are sure to say it was a marriage of necessity.
    I can still see the Marchandeaus' garden and, in winter, the living-room with its log fire, where the old doctor would promptly fall asleep in his armchair.
    Jeanne worked on her trousseau. Then came the moment for deciding about the wedding dress and finally the period when we spent our evenings drawing up and revising the list of guests.
    Is that the way you were married, your Honour? I think in the end I began to be a little impatient. When I would kiss her good night at the door I was troubled by the warmth that emanated from her body.
    Old Marchandeau was happy to see his last daughter settled.
    'Now, at last, I'll be able to live like an old fox .. .' he would say in his slightly cracked voice.
    We spent three days in Nice, for I was not sufficiently affluent to pay a substitute, and I could not very well leave my patients for any longer than that.
    My mother had gained a daughter, a daughter more docile than if she had been her own child. She continued to take charge of the house.
    'What shall I do, Mama?' Jeanne would ask with angelic sweetness.
    'You must rest, daughter. In your condition ..
    For Jeanne became pregnant right away. I wanted to send her to the hospital at La Roche-sur-Yon for her confinement. I was a little frightened. My father-in-law laughed at me.
    'Our midwife here will do the job just as well... She has brought a good third of the village into the world .. .'
    It was, nevertheless, a difficult confinement. But my father-in-law continued to encourage me:
    'With my wife, the first time, it was even worse. But, you'll see, with the second one ..
    I had always talked about a son, I don't know why. The women - I mean my mother and Jeanne - had set their minds on this idea of a boy.
    It turned out to be a girl, and my wife was laid up for three months after the baby was born.
    Excuse me, your Honour, if I speak of her in what must seem a somewhat cavalier fashion. The truth is that I did not really know her, that I never knew her.
    She was a part of the background of my daily life. A part of the conventions. I was a doctor. I had an office, a cheerful sunny house. I had married a sweet, well-bred young girl. She had just presented me with a child, and I was giving her the best possible care.
    In retrospect this seems to me terrible. Because I never tried to know what she thought, to know what she really was.
    We slept in the same bed for four years. We spent our evenings together with Mama, sometimes with her father, who would drop in for a nightcap before going to bed.
    For me it is a photograph that