‘Don’t you see I can’t bear it any longer? It’s destroying me. This question always, always torturing me every time I see them. It’s driving me insane.’

‘You’ve suffered a lot, have you?’ she asked.

He replied in a small, sad voice: ‘I’ve just told you. Every day is an unbearable torment to me. Why do you think I came back? Why, if I didn’t love each and every one of them, do you think I returned to this house and lived here with both you and them? Oh, you’ve been so cruel to me! You know very well I love my children with all my heart. I’m an old-fashioned father to them just as I’m an old-fashioned husband to you. I’m a man of instinct, a man of nature, an old-fashioned type of man. I do admit you made me hideously jealous because you’re a woman. You’re practically a different race. You have a different kind of soul, different needs. Oh I’ll never forget what you said to me! From then onwards I didn’t care what happened to you. I didn’t kill you because you were the only means on earth I had of discovering which of our … sorry, which of your children was not mine. I held back but I’ve suffered more than you can possibly imagine. I dare not love them now apart from the two elder ones, possibly. I daren’t look at them or call them or kiss them. I can’t take any of them on my knee any more without wondering: Is this the one? For six years, you have to admit, I’ve behaved well, even generously towards you. Tell me the truth and I swear I won’t do you any harm.’

In the darkness of the carriage interior he sensed that she was beginning to yield, that she might after all speak.

‘Please, please,’ he said, ‘I implore you.’

She murmured: ‘You may find that I have been more guilty than you think. But I could not, I could no longer carry on with that terrible life of pregnancy after pregnancy. I had only one way of driving you away from my bed. I lied before God, and I lied on the heads of my children. I have never been unfaithful to you in my life.’

In the shadows he grabbed her arm and held it as he had on that terrible drive to the Bois. He stammered: ‘Oh will it never end? Am I to be racked by doubt forever? How can I believe you now? How can any woman be trusted? I’ll never know what to think in future! I’d rather you’d said it was Jacques or it was Jeanne!’