He had been under no illusions about his legal position. He was about to become a deserter from the army, which had been ordered to lay down its weapons. As de Gaulle had already been sentenced to death in absentia by a military court, Theo could not expect more lenient treatment. He decided to save his family from the confiscation of his property by disappearing from the records in the neatest possible way: he would fake his own death. Maniotte, who obtained the appropriate papers and saw to their countersigning, said to him, ‘This is the first time in my medical career I have ever committed a fraud. I’m now a criminal.’

‘You’ll do it many more times before we’re through,’ was Theo’s robust reply.

Before the Armistice in June 1940, Maniotte had sent his family to his house in the free zone, very close to Bonnemort. Theo persuaded him to join him in crossing the Line of Demarcation, still officially closed. Only Ariane had seen him on that brief visit to his home. He had told her of what he intended with a clarity which showed that no other plan was possible. He warned her to expect notification of his death, a fiction she should maintain with all the other members of the family. He promised to send messages when he could, but she would have to accept that there would be no way of knowing if the pretence had become reality until the war was over. She had not argued with him. He was not sure now whether she had approved of his actions, or was simply too shocked to attempt to dissuade him. He had left early the next day, shedding his name, his country and his past.

If some abstract idea of nation and people had determined him to resist when defeat came, the more personal vision of his home and his wife had made him endure the years of exile. Now, with that ideal shattered, he was overtaken by a profound sense of pointlessness. Corruption was everywhere; nowhere was safe if it had penetrated to the remoteness of Bonnemort.

His encounter with his wife, about which he had told no one, pressed on his vision and he began to realise that it entailed larger consequences than personal grief. Having a ‘collabo’ as a wife was not just emotionally painful, it did not look good. The communists, who declared themselves the party of the martyrs of the Resistance, would certainly make use of it, not just against him, but against the Big Man, too. Even within his own camp, there were those who would like such information for the damage it could do him. So one course of action open to him was to embrace the general’s policy of not enquiring too deeply. He had suppressed a smile during that lofty discourse. The general himself was slow to forget a wrong. In Theo’s experience, his long-burning resentment never faltered.

Theo felt, like Othello, that he would have found life sweet if he had not known. But he did know, and, he wanted to know more. He wanted every detail. Who had shaved her head, who had watched, with eyes full of guilty pleasure? He was astonished at the power of his imagination. Sitting at his desk in the Ministry of War, he would be roused by the sound of the telephone, or the entrance of an assistant, and realise he had been thinking of his wife for the last fifteen minutes. If only he could discover what had really happened, perhaps he could rid himself of his most persistent and disgusting obsession: picturing Ariane with the unknown officer, his enemy, the occupying German, dining with him, drinking with him, fucking him. He had become a perverse voyeur, creating images he did not want to see and shuffling through them, like a vendor of pornographic postcards. No forgetting would be possible before he knew what he had to forget. Fantasy was unforgettable; it recurred, with embellishments. Only the truth could be forgotten.