At that time it was the same white structure, all colonnades and windows, built in the French taste which had prevailed in the century of Catherine the Great. But you must remember that the old house was much more dilapidated then than it is today. since it was only repaired thanks to you during the years of our marriage. Yet it should not be hard for you to imagine it as it was then: just remember how it was when you came there the first time. Certainly it had not been erected for a life of monotony; I suppose it had been built to satisfy the fantasy of some ancestor who wanted to show off, and for giving fêtes there (in the time when one still gave fêtes). All the houses of the eighteenth century are like that. They seem to have been constructed for receiving guests, and as a result we never feel more than uneasy visitors in them. The house was not very comfortable for us: it was always too big and perpetually cold. It also seemed to me that it lacked solidity; and, indeed, the whiteness of similar houses, so desolate in the snow, suggests fragility. One recognizes that they were conceived for much warmer lands, by people who take life easily. But I now know that this architecture, in appearance so light that one would assume it was meant to last merely for a summer, will endure infinitely longer than we shall, and perhaps longer than our family. Possibly it will one day belong to strangers; that will not matter to it, for houses have their own private life in which our lives matter little and which we do not understand.

In my mind’s eye I see the serious, slightly drawn faces there, the pensive faces of women in sitting rooms with white stucco walls. The ancestor I just spoke of had wanted the rooms spacious enough so that music would sound better there. He loved music. No one spoke of him very often; it seemed that they preferred not to mention him. He was known for having dissipated a large fortune. Perhaps they disliked him for that—or perhaps there was something else. The two subsequent generations were also passed over in silence, probably because there was nothing sufficiently remarkable in them to interest anyone. Then came my grandfather. He was ruined at the time of the agrarian reforms; he was a liberal; his ideas may well have been very good, but naturally they had impoverished him. My father’s administration was equally deplorable. He died young, my father. I remember very little about him. I remember that he was severe with us children, as people often are who reproach themselves for not having known how to be severe with themselves. Of course, that is only an assumption—I really know nothing of my father.