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further interest in this war. What mattered was Madeleine. He took a seat on the terrace of a café and ordered some mineral water… Madeleine dreaming in front of Pauline’s tomb… Homesick! For the grave!… No, it was impossible. But who really knew what was possible or not?
    He went home with a headache. He turned over the pages of his encyclopaedia—the volume with the L’s, of course—and naturally found nothing. He knew very well the name of Lagerlac wouldn’t be mentioned, but he couldn’t have gone to sleep before making sure. An off-chance, but it had to be checked… He had a feeling he was going to do lots of silly things ‘on the off-chance’, from now on. He had only to think of her to lose his sense of proportion. La femme à la tulipe! He tried to make a sketch of her, leaning over the parapet, staring at the river. No good. He crumpled up the sheet of paper and took a couple of aspirins.

THREE
    Madeleine walked past the Chambre des Députés, in front of which a sentry, with fixed bayonet, was pacing up and down. As on the previous afternoon, she had left the house almost immediately after Gévigne. This time, however, she walked quickly, and Flavières kept close on her heels, afraid she would be run over, for she sailed across the road without the least regard for the traffic. Where was she going to in such a hurry? She was dressed quite differently today. Instead of her smart grey suit, she wore a very ordinary brown one, with a simple beret on her head. But that only made her look younger: there was something of the bachelor girl about her. She took the Boulevard Saint-Germain, keeping to the shady side. Was she making for the Luxembourg? Or the Salle de Géographie? To a lecture on occultism, perhaps, or a séance .
    All at once Flavières understood. He drew closer behind her, to be all the more sure of not losing her.
    He could smell her perfume. A complicated smell, which had affinities with rich earth and dead flowers. Where had he come across it before? The previous day, of course, in the deserted part of the Cimetière de Passy… He liked it. It reminded him of his grandparents’ house near Saumur, built on the side of a steep rocky hill with caves in it. People lived in the caves. To reach their houses, they had, like Robinson Crusoe, to use a ladder. Here and there a stovepipe peepedout of the rock, and above it a long smudge of black stained the white stone. During his holidays he had loved to explore this strange settlement, peering in through the openings at the beautifully polished furniture inside. Once he had gone into one of those dwellings that had been abandoned. Only a little light penetrated to the far end of the cave. The walls were cold and gritty and the silence was terrifying. At night they must have been able to hear moles burrowing in the ground, and perhaps an occasional worm would fall writhing from the ceiling. A rickety door at the back led into the ‘basement’ which was rank with mouldy air. He hadn’t dared explore further into the forbidden world of galleries and passages which ramified in all directions, extending beyond the sprawling clumps of grey toadstools growing just beyond that door.
    The whole place was imbued with that scent—the scent of Madeleine. And there on the sunny boulevard under the budding trees, Flavières experienced once again the fearful attraction of the shades, and he understood why, at the first glance, Madeleine had touched him.
    Another image surged into his brain. At the age of twelve, under the shadow of that hill, he had read a translation of that unforgettable book of Kipling’s The Light that Failed . The frontispiece was a picture of a boy and a girl who were leaning over a revolver, and the absurd caption had remained in his mind and had never failed to bring tears to his eyes: C’était the Barralong qui faisait route vers l’Afrique Australe … The young girl, dressed in black, resembled Madeleine—he was sure of