Roland briefly explained how he had found out about Le Sourd.

“You understand,” he said, “that until recently I had no idea of the service you had rendered me.”

“I know, monsieur.”

“I should like you to accept this, to show my gratitude,” said Roland, and handed him an envelope, which Luc quickly inspected.

“You are more than generous, Monsieur de Cygne,” he said. “I could open a restaurant with this.”

“Just don’t spend it at the races,” Roland said with a smile. “But the question now is, what should I do about Le Sourd? Do you have any idea why he wanted to kill me?”

“Non, monsieur. I never discovered.”

“I should like to talk to him. Do you know where he is?”

“Give me a day, and I shall find out, monsieur. But it might be dangerous for you to interview him.”

“I’ll take a pistol,” said Roland.

It was good to be back in the family house again. Now that he was based in Paris, he thought he might use the house, as far as his regimental duties allowed. Most of the rooms were under dust covers, but his old nanny was still living there with a housekeeper and a maid to keep the house going, and he spent a pleasant evening talking to her.

Most of the time, when he was away on his regimental duties, Roland did not need to reflect on political matters. But finding himself back again in his family’s old mansion, in the great historical center of France, he could not help being struck by the mutability of the past and present.

The ancestors who had lived in this house had doubtless considered England their traditional enemy, as she had been for so many centuries. Yet now all that was changed. Bismarck’s German Empire had arisen. France had suffered the humiliation of 1870, and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. When he was a boy, who had his teachers at the Catholic lycée along the street told him were his enemies? The Germans of course. His generation’s duty? To avenge France’s dishonor.

And who were France’s allies now against the kaiser’s German threat? The English, linked to France by the Entente Cordiale, together with the Russians, who feared the kaiser too.

Wherever one looked in the streets of old Paris, from the ruins of the medieval walls to Notre Dame, to the bleak grandeur of Les Invalides, it was always the same story: Men called to glory, or to defend la patrie; men killed, in many thousands. The struggle for power, and, intermittently, the attempt to find a balance of power among the nations, until the peace broke down once again.

Would his own generation do any better? he wondered.