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of those long, self-contained days, which were like faint little suns in a different universe where time flowed at a calmer pace.
    Daylight spread slowly up the silk-lined walls, once the colour of wine but now moth-eaten and pink, faded by many summers. When the sun’s rays reached the moulding, they became nothing more than a pale wash of light that slowly dissipated, leaving only the white, luminous ceiling to mirror the sky.
    It was the very beginning of autumn; the air was clear and cold, and if you listened closely, you could hear the ice-cream seller’s bell ringing as he drove down the avenue. In the courtyard the trees were almost bare, most of their leaves blown away by the August wind, when autumn is already starting in such climates – pared-down trees, decorated only at the top by dry leaves, pink with the sun that shone through them.
    One day Hélène went into her mother’s bedroom. She liked going in there. She had the vague feeling that, in this way, she could better take her mother by surprise, discover her secrets. She was beginning to become interested in her mother and in the mysterious life she now led entirely outside the house. She nurtured in her heart a strange hatred of herthat seemed to increase as she grew older; like love, there were a thousand reasons for it and none; and, like love, there was the simple excuse: ‘It’s because of who she is, and because of who I am.’
    She went into the room. She opened the drawers, played with her mother’s costume jewellery, things bought in Paris that had been thrown untidily into the bottom of the wardrobe. From the next room her grandmother called out, ‘What are you doing in there?’
    ‘I’m looking for some clothes to dress up in,’ said Hélène.
    She was sitting on the rug, holding a nightdress she had found at the back of the chest of drawers.
    The material was torn in several places; a heavy, strong hand had no doubt pulled at the lace shoulder strap so that it remained attached only by a few silk threads. It gave off a strange odour, a mixture of her mother’s perfume, which she hated, the scent of tobacco and a richer, warmer smell, one she didn’t recognise, but which she breathed in with amazement, with apprehension, with a kind of primitive sense of modesty. ‘I hate how this smells,’ she thought.
    She raised the torn silk to her face a few times, each time pushing it away again. An amber necklace had been thrown into the back of a drawer; she took hold of it, touched it for a moment, then picked up the nightdress again and closed her eyes, the way one does when trying to recall some distant memory, long forgotten. But no, she couldn’t remember anything; instead, her dormant, childlike sensuality rose up from deep within her for the very first time, making her feel anxious shame and ironic resentment. In the end she rolled the nightdress into a ball, threw it against the wall and trampled on it; then she walked out of the bedroom, but the scentlingered on her hands and pinafore. It stayed with her even as she slept, seeping into her childlike dreams, like a faraway call, like one note of music, like the husky, moaning cry of ringdoves in springtime.

6
    The Manassé family, whose son was a friend of Hélène’s, lived in a wooden house surrounded by a garden in an isolated part of the town. It was late autumn and the children were confined to the safety of their room, to protect them from the cold air that Russians feared as if it were a plague. That year, when Hélène came to play with the Manassé children on Sundays, their favourite game was to jump out of the schoolroom window, crawl along the sitting-room balcony and then jump down into the garden where the first snow had already fallen. Once there, they would throw snowballs at each other while playing at soldiers or highwaymen, dressed in old billowing capes, which they pretended were the romantic cloaks of warriors, and carrying branches – their wooden sabres and