For perhaps that virile hunter’s outfit—the firearm, the wide red leather strap of a game bag postulating dead animals, something in which were confounded furs and spotted feathers as in a still life with a heap of hares, partridges and pheasants—was there only to provide him with an attitude, a pose as today people have themselves photographed at country fairs sticking their heads in those oval holes that replace the faces of characters (whimsical aviators, clowns, dancers) painted on a canvas backdrop, Georges staring with a kind of fascination at the rather fat, feminine and well-cared-for hand whose index finger, in the confusion of a far-off night, pressed the trigger of the weapon aimed at himself (he had seen it too, had touched it: one of the two long pistols with chased hexagonal barrels lying in opposite directions in the middle of the complicated paraphernalia, bullet moulds, powder horns and other accessories, each one set in its appropriate place hollowed into the moth-eaten billiard-green material inside the mahogany box that was still enthroned on the chest of drawers in the salon, wide open on days when company came, closed the rest of the time for fear of dust, and this: his own hand holding the weapon that was too heavy for his child’s arm, cocking the trigger (but for that both hands were necessary, the curved butt pressed between his knees, his thumbs squeezing together to overcome the combined resistance of rust and the spring), setting the barrel against his temple and pressing, his tightened finger whitening under the effort, until the dry, insignificant (the flint had been replaced by a piece of wood wrapped in felt) and mortal click of the trigger came, falling in the room’s silence, the same room—which was now the one where his parents slept—and where nothing had been changed except perhaps the wallpaper and three or four of those objects—vases, frames for photographs, electric lamps—placed or rather introduced here, utilitarian and too new, like noisy and shiny supernumeraries picked up at the employment office to serve an assembly of ghosts: the same lacquered furniture, the same faded striped curtains, the same prints on the walls showing courtly or rural scenes, the same mantelpiece of white marble with pale-grey veins against which Reixach had leant to blow his brains out (they said, that is, Sabine said—or maybe she had invented it, embroidering in order to make the scene more effective—each time she told the story) and near which Georges had often imagined him, sitting there, his legs in muddy, steaming boots extended in a V towards the fire, one of his dogs at his feet, the little chubby and carefully manicured hand emerging from the lace cuff of one of those shirts with puffy pleats, this time holding not a pistol but something (for him, who had been taught only the exclusive and innocent handling of horses and dogs) just as dangerous, explosive (that is, to which the pistol shot had perhaps been only the ineluctable conclusion): a book, perhaps one of the twenty-three volumes that composed the complete works of Rousseau and across the flyleaf of which spread the same paraph, the proud, possessive Carolingian handwriting calligraphing with the goose quill whose scratching he seemed to hear on the coarse and yellowed paper the invariable formula: Hic liber—the H disproportionate, emphatic, in the shape of two parentheses back to back and connected by a wavy line, the tips of the parentheses rolled up into a spiral like the ornaments of those rust-corroded gates that still guard the entrance to parks invaded by brambles—then underneath: pertinetadme, all in one stroke, then, in diminishing characters, the Latinized name without any capital letter: henricum, then the date, the millesimal: 1783.