Thinking at the same moment of that detail, that strange thing that was spoken of only in hushed tones (and Sabine said that she herself didn’t believe it, that it wasn’t true, that her grandmother had always told her it was a legend, a piece of slander, scandal spread by the servants in the pay of political enemies—the sans-culottes, her grandmother said, forgetting that he happened to have been on their side, so that if slander had been spread about him after and concerning the circumstances of his death it could only have been by the royalists, which, in a sense, confirmed at least in part the exactitude of the reports: since the source of these rumours was very likely from the servants, by virtue of the law that men linked to others by servile connections are fiercely loyal—like a sort of justification of their condition—to a strictly hierarchized society, so that if the adherents of the ancien régime had, as was in fact likely, sought allies against Reixach, they had probably found the best ones among his own servants), that circumstance which, true or false, gave the story a quality of ambiguity, of scandal: something in the style of one of those prints called The Surprised Lover or The Seduction that still decorated the walls of the room: the valet leaping up at the sound of the shot and running in, dressed haphazardly, his wide shirt half hanging outside his breeches pulled on as he jumped out of bed, and perhaps behind him, a servant girl in a nightcap and almost naked, one hand in front of her mouth to stifle a scream and the other clumsily holding together the garment that in slipping off her shoulder reveals a breast (and perhaps it is not to stifle a scream that she raises her hand: instead, the fingers spread to shield the flame of a second candle (which explains why she is visible though she is placed in the background, not yet having stepped across the doorstep, still in the shadow of the hallway) which she is trying to protect from the draught caused by the bursting-open of the door (the gleam of the flame passing between her fingers, so that it apparently produces in the centre of each the vague shadow of the bones enveloped by the transparent pink of the flesh): holding at the same time in one hand that shift that scarcely covers her breast and the candle she is protecting with the other, so that her young terrified face is lit from below, as though by the footlights of a stage, the shadows reversed, that is, placed not beneath the masses but above them, the parts in darkness being the lower lip, the ridge of the nose, the upper part of the cheeks, the upper eyelid and the forehead over the eyebrows), the valet seen from the back, his right leg forward, half bent (in other words, his whole weight resting on the right leg: not a phase of walking or even of running, but instead the position of a dancer landing after a leap, the attitude eloquently expressing what has just happened: the rush of the body against the door, the straight leg bent again and raised, the last effort, the last impulse given by the left leg, then—at the third or fourth attempt—the door (or rather, the lock) yielding in a screech of nails torn out and wood bursting in splinters, and at that moment the valet’s body catapulted, unbalanced, falling back on the bent right leg while he seems to draw his left leg behind him, the latter extended, its thigh, calf and foot in the same line, the heel raised, the foot (bare, for he—the valet—has only had time to pull on his breeches) touching the floor only with the tips of the toes, the right arm raising high the candle which is virtually in the centre of the scene, so that the valet is silhouetted against the light, the part of his body that can be seen—that is, his back—being almost completely in the shadow which the engraving needle indicated by fine cross-hatchings following the modelling of the masses, so that at close range the shapes and particularly his muscular forearm look as though they were wrapped in a kind of netting whose mesh grows finer where the shadow is deeper), all the light being so to speak concentrated, absorbed by the long body lying at the foot of the mantelpiece, pale and naked.