Suddenly, before I could see what was happening, it was his turn to be grabbed and thrown to the ground. I got up quickly and saw Pepita, my maid, kneeling on top of him. She was clinging to him like a furious wildcat, frenziedly tearing out his hair and clawing the skin of his face. Then, as if suddenly overwhelmed by another instinct, she got up and threw herself now on the other man’s dead body. She clasped it to her bosom, kissed the eyes and the mouth, searching desperately for some breath of life beyond her lover’s precious lips.

My husband, now on his feet again, stood and watched. As understanding dawned upon him, he flung himself at my feet.

‘My darling! Forgive me! I thought you were being unfaithful to me. It’s this poor girl’s lover I have killed … my watchman!’

But I was watching the terrible sight of the living girl, her distracted kisses raining on the dead man and her pitiful starts of despair as she sobbed.

It was then that I decided to give my husband real grounds for suspicion.

COCKCROW

Madame Berthe d’Avancelles had rejected the advances of her admirer Baron Joseph de Croissard to such an extent that he was now in despair. He had pursued her relentlessly throughout the winter in Paris, and now at his château at Carville in Normandy he was holding a series of hunting parties in her honour.

The husband, Monsieur d’Avancelles, turned a blind eye to all this. It was rumoured that they lived separate lives on account of a physical shortcoming of his which Madame could not overlook. He was a fat little man with short arms, short legs, a short neck, short nose, short everything in fact.

Madame d’Avancelles, in contrast, was a tall, chestnut-haired, determined-looking young woman. She laughed openly at old Pipe and Slippers as she called him to his face but looked with tender indulgence on her admirer, the titled Baron Joseph de Croissard, with his broad shoulders, his sturdy neck and his fair, drooping moustache.

Until now, however, she had granted him no favours despite the fact that he was spending a fortune on her, throwing a constant round of receptions, hunting parties, and all kinds of celebrations to which he invited the local aristocracy.

All day long the woods rang to the sound of hounds in full cry after a fox or a wild boar and every night a dazzling display of fireworks spiralled upwards to join the sparkling stars. A tracery of light from the drawing-room windows shone on the huge lawns where shadowy figures occasionally passed.

It was the russet season of autumn when leaves swirled over the gardens like flocks of birds. Wafting on the air came the tang of damp, bare earth, caught as the smell of a woman’s naked flesh as her gown slips down to the floor after the ball.