—Blaise Pascal, Pensées
(trans. W. F. Trotter)

If you’d send me your bagpipes, and all the other little trinkims belonging to it, I would put them in order, and play some melancholy tunes, well adapted, I might add, to my unpleasant situation as a prisoner.

—Letter from Audl-Reckie

FRÉDÉRIC owns the sawmill on the road to Avers. He took it over from his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather—from all the Frédérics.

It’s on the side of the road, exactly at the hairpin bend. There’s a beech tree there; I’m sure there’s none more magnificent anywhere. It’s the Apollo Citharoedus of beech trees. There cannot possibly be another beech, anywhere at all, with skin so smooth and so beautiful a color, a more flawless build, more perfect proportions, with such nobility, grace, and eternal youth. Definitely “Apollo” is what you say the instant you catch sight of it, and you say it again and again for as long as you look at it. What is most extraordinary is that it’s both beautiful and so simple. No question about it: it knows itself and judges itself. How can such perfection not have a consciousness, when all it takes is a puff of north wind, an unfortunate shift of evening light, an odd tilt to its leaves for its beauty, defeated, to lose all its power to awe?

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In 1843, ’44, and ’45, Monsieur V. used this beech quite a bit. Monsieur V. was from Chichiliane, a commune about twenty kilometers from here by a twisted road, at the bottom of a deep valley. No one goes there, they go elsewhere, to Clelles (in the other direction), to Mens, or to countless other places even farther away, but not to Chichiliane. What would a person do there were he to go? What is there to do in Chichiliane? Nothing. It’s just like here. Elsewhere, too, of course; but elsewhere, whether to the east or the west, there can be things to discover, copses, crossroads. Twenty-one kilometers in 1843 was far, just over five leagues, and if you went out it was wearing a smock and boots on a plodding hinny. So Chichiliane was no ordinary destination.

I don’t think there are any V.’s left in Chichiliane. The family hasn’t died out, but there’s no one named V. anymore—neither the café owner nor the grocer—and no one by that name appears on the plaque of the monument to the dead.