Imagining him then, seeing him conscientiously reading one after the other each of the twenty-three volumes of sentimental, idyllic and confused prose, ingurgitating pell-mell the prolix and Genevese lessons in harmony and solfège, in education, silliness, effusions and genius, that incendiary chatter of a jack-of-all-trades vagabond, musician, exhibitionist and cry-baby which would ultimately make him press against his temple the sinister icy mouth of that . . . (and then Blum’s voice saying: “All right! So he found, or rather he found the means of finding what’s called a glorious death. In the family tradition, you say Repeating, doing over what a hundred and fifty years before another de Reixach (who called himself if I heard you correctly just Reixach since, by an overmeasure of nobility, of stylishness, of elegance, he had dropped that particle his descendants have subsequently stopped to pick up and hang on to the front of their name again after having it polished up by an army of servants—or orderlies—in Restoration liveries—or uniforms), what another Reixach, then, had already done by choosing to put a bullet through his head (unless it happened quite clumsily while he was cleaning his pistol, which happens all the time, but in that case there would be no story, at least no story sensational enough for your mother to have filled your ears with it and the ears of her guests, so let’s admit, let’s concede that’s the way it really happened) because he had so to speak cuckolded himself, deceived himself: cuckolded then not by a faithless feminine creature like his remote descendant but somehow by his own mind, his ideas—or, in their absence, by other people’s ideas—which had played that nasty trick on him as if, lacking a wife (but didn’t you tell me that he had one into the bargain and that she too . . .), so instead: as if not satisfied with having a woman to support he had also burdened, encumbered himself with ideas, with thoughts, which obviously for a gentlemanfarmer from the Tarn constitutes, as for anyone, a much greater risk than marriage . . .” and Georges: “Of course. Of course. Of course. But how can you tell?. . .”)