But then there is another way of looking that includes the first, according to which Abraham and Isaac proceed logically, one following the other, toward Mount Moriah; in which the obsidian knives of the priests of Quetzalcoatl logically drive deep into selected hearts. And it is through beauty that we come to know this. Impossible to live in a world believing that the sublime splendor of the guinea fowl’s plumage is meaningless. Just as an aside. I wanted to say it. I have.

Blood, however, is not an aside. It is everywhere in the novel: in allusions to the bloodlines of the villagers, to Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval mesmerized by three drops of goose blood in the snow, to the gory evidence of the murders, to the very nickname Sausage—a euphemism for boudin (blood sausage), the disparaging slang term for an aged whore. And yet blood also is pulsing everywhere concealed: beneath human skin and clothing, under the pelts of animals and whatever survives beneath the winter snow.

Monsieur V.’s crimes gradually fade in relation to the story of Langlois’s astonishing response to them, an act that, despite its obviously willed nature, he will claim is “an accident.” This unfathomable action will dominate the remainder of the novel. Langlois will return to the village a year later, in 1846, bearing a new title: commander of the Louveterie (the Wolf-Hunting Corps). His commission places him at the highest rank of those officers, dating back to Charlemagne, who were charged with ridding the French forests of wolves. The villagers are amazed that he has decided to settle among them permanently and suspect he has been disgraced. But his friendship with the respected royal prosecutor and his cordial ties to the officials and upper-class families of nearby towns belie that possibility. In the meantime, he will be preoccupied with the welfare of the murderer’s widow, who has retreated to Diois (where her Sylvie-reading descendant was found). And eventually, disastrously, he will enlist Sausage’s help in finding a wife.