For that was the legend (or, according to Sabine, the scandal invented by his enemies): that he had been found entirely undressed, that he had first removed all his clothes before firing that bullet into his head beside that mantelpiece at the corner of which as a child and even later Georges had spent how many evenings instinctively searching in the walls or in the ceiling (although he knew perfectly well that the room had been repapered and repainted several times since) for the trace of the bullet in the plaster, imagining, reliving it, thinking he could see him in that obscure, voluptuous and nocturnal disorder of a scène galante: perhaps an armchair, a table overturned, and the clothes, like those of an impatient lover, hastily, feverishly torn off, thrown aside, scattered here and there, and that body of a man whose complexion was delicate, almost feminine, lying there huge and incongruous, the candle’s shifting shadows playing over the white and transparent skin, ivorine or rather bluish and in the centre that bush, that tuft, that dark blur, fluffy and dark, and the delicate sex of the reclining statue, lying across the groin, over the top of the thigh (the body in falling having slightly pitched to the left), the whole scene stamped with that element of the obscure, the equivocal, both clammy and frozen, fascinating and repugnant . . .