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either and he had as yet no reason to bear any grudge against her.
    It was difficult to explain and yet, since then, he had had time to think about it.
    She was a stranger to him. But hadn't he made love many times, often with a certain exaltation, with girls whom he did not even know an hour before?
    These ones became friends straight away. What they did together, they did for their mutual pleasure. There would come to be a light-hearted complicity between them.
    Afterwards it was still possible to make jokes.
    'You certainly wanted that, I must say!'
    Or else:
    'You're a strange one, aren't you!'
    To which he always found something to answer back.
    It was a game, which had no consequences. If some of them put on amorous airs, and sighed in a melancholy manner, he was not tempted to reassure them or to pay them compliments.
    'You're pleased with yourself, aren't you? You're reckoning: another conquest!'
    Why not? He was performing his function as a young male. His father had acted the same way in the past, and so had all the others, who spoke about it sometimes with avid smiles as they emptied their carafes in the smoky dining-room at the inn.
    With Berthe, who had put a wild ardour into her love-making, ithad a mystic side, as if they were carrying out a ritual sacrifice together.
    It was almost a drama that they had played between them; and when she had suddenly bitten his lip, he had had an intuitive sense of a threat.
    It was too late. At La Bastide he did not immediately find her. Old Paola, who was peeling vegetables in the semi-darkness of the kitchen, where she always kept the shutters closed, gave him an ironical look.
    It was as if everybody knew already, as if everybody had been waiting for what had just taken place, as if everybody, in fact, had more or less participated.
    Even before he uttered a word, Madame Harnaud, the moment they met, looked at him with gratitude in her eyes and he wondered if she were not going to open her arms to him.
    'I've been meaning to tell you . . .' he began.
    He heard Berthe's footsteps overhead, which was all that he needed to make his task more difficult.
    'I think, if you still want to, you will be able to go to Luçon quite soon . . .'
    She made as if she did not understand, but her face was radiant.
    'Berthe and I have decided . . .'
    'Is it true?' she could not help crying.
    'If you agree, we'll get married . . .'
    'Kiss me, Emile. If only you know how . . . how . . .'
    She could say no more, for she was sobbing. Only a long time afterwards did she mutter:
    'If my poor Louis could only know . . .'
    It was another beginning.

III
    W OULD it have made any difference if they had had children, or if Emile had been older? The time had passed so quickly since he had left school that he still had dreams about it and even at times imagined he was on the playground.
    Like most of his classmates, no doubt, he used to play a role for himself when he was a child, more or less conscientiously, trying to show himself to the others as he would have liked to be. And the role he had chosen was that of a little tough guy, a cynical young thug who would not let himself be taken for a ride.
    Yet now already, scarcely grown-up, he was married, with a mother-in-law, responsibilities, a considerable business to manage.
    He was not one to analyse himself for the pleasure of it, nor to look at himself in a glass. Nevertheless he sometimes had the sensation of floating, ill at ease, as if he were wearing clothes a size too big for him.
    On these occasions he felt like a child of thirteen or fourteen whose voice is just beginning to break and who, at prize-giving, sticks on a false beard for the part of a knight, a king or an old beggar in the school play.
    The world was not real. His life did not seem clear-cut. On waking up in the morning he could have gone back to being the small boy who thought only of his lessons and his marbles, or the young apprentice sneaking a slice of ham when the chef had his