These were the thoughts that went through his mind as he walked on, his shoulders hunched up inside his fur collar. He hailed a passing fiacre and had himself driven home. Rousing the valet who came to answer the door he said: ‘Louis, we’re leaving tomorrow night for Marseille. We shall probably stay for about two weeks. Make the necessary preparations, would you?’

The train was running alongside the sandy banks of the Rhône, then across golden plains, past whitewashed villages, and finally into a wide tract of land bound in the far distance by bare mountains. The Baron de Mordiane, awake now after a night in his sleeper, was looking sadly at himself in the little mirror of his travelling case. The bright glare of the southern sun showed him hitherto unsuspected lines and a decrepitude in his face which had remained hidden in the relative darkness of his Paris apartments.

He looked at the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, at the folds in his eyelids and at his bald temples and forehead.

‘Dammit!’ he said, ‘I’m not just getting on, I’m a wreck!’

He suddenly longed once again for rest, and for the first time ever to dandle grandchildren on his knee. At about half-past one in the afternoon, having hired a landau1 in Marseille, he arrived at one of those southern houses whose whiteness standing out in this case against an avenue of plane trees is almost painfully dazzling to the eyes. He smiled as he walked up the drive, saying to himself, ‘Well! This is good!’

Suddenly a little urchin of five or six appeared from behind a bush and stood at the side of the drive looking at the gentleman.

Mordiane went up to him: ‘Hello, my boy!’

The child made no reply. So the Baron leaned down and picked him up to give him a kiss. All at once a great wave of the garlic which seemed to permeate the child’s entire body made the Baron quickly set him down on the ground again and murmur: ‘Must be the gardener’s child.’

He walked on towards the house. Washing hung on a line outside the front door; shirts, napkins, dishcloths, aprons and sheets. Festooned across one whole window like strings of sausages in a charcuterie were line upon line of socks.

The Baron called.

A typically southern-looking maid appeared. She looked dirty and her unkempt hair was constantly falling into her eyes. Her skirt, despite the spots and stains upon it, was garish in colour and reminiscent of the fairground or the circus.

‘Is M. Duchoux2 at home?’ he asked.

This was the name which, as an already cynical young man, he had jokingly given to the foundling baby so that no one should query its provenance.

‘You want M. Duchouxe?’3

‘Yes.’

‘Inside. Doing his plans.’

‘Could you tell Monsieur Duchoux that Monsieur Merlin would like a word, please?’

She looked astonished.