And Blum: “. . .coming in unexpectedly (or else tell me why he should come back at all if not for her? Because it seems to me that as far as hurrying yourself into the next world is concerned, you could just as well do it anywhere, the way you leave rubbish behind the first bush you come to, because I don’t think it’s very necessary at such moments to insist on special comfort . . .), so leaving his defeated troops, the infantrymen, the runaways probably screaming too at the top of their lungs, a prey to that panic, that kind of moral diarrhoea (have you noticed that it’s also called the runs?) impossible to hold back, unreasoning—but isn’t all that’s asked of a soldier, isn’t all the training he undergoes precisely in order to make him accomplish as though by second nature actions in one way or another contrary to reason, so that in running away he probably merely surrenders to the same force or, if you prefer, to the same despair that in other circumstances has impelled or will impel him to an act which his reason can only disavow, as for instance to throw himself shouting in front of a machine gun firing at him: hence probably the facility with which a squadron can turn in a few seconds into a runaway and panic-stricken herd . . . And twice a traitor—first to the caste into which he was born and which he had renounced, disavowed, destroying himself, virtually committing suicide a first time for the sake (so to speak) of a sentimental Swiss ethic of which he would never have been able to have any knowledge if his fortune, his rank hadn’t given him the means, in other words the leisure and the power to read—then a traitor to the cause he had embraced, but this time by incapacity, in other words guilty (he, the nobleman by birth and whose speciality was war—that is, in a certain sense, self-forgetfulness, that is, a certain casualness or futility, that is, in a sense, the inner emptiness) of having tried to mix (or conciliate) courage and thought, a disregarded and irreducible antagonism that opposes all reflection to all action, so that now he had nothing left but to watch or rather avoid watching (suffering something like a terrible nausea, I suppose) that rabble leaving the ranks on all sides (what else, what other word besides rabble, since they knew too much now—or not enough—to go on living as cobblers or bakers, and on the other hand not enough—or too much—to be capable of behaving like soldiers) which in his imagination or his dreams he probably already saw promoted to that superior state to which, he supposed, you could accede by the undigested reading of twenty-five volumes . . .” and Georges: “Twenty-three,” and Blum: “Twenty-three tomes printed by a bookseller in The Hague for export and bound in full calf with the arms . . . You said three ducks without heads, didn’t you?. . .” and Georges: “Doves, not du . . .” and Blum: “The three pigeons then, symbolically decapitated . . .” and Georges: “No!” and Blum: “. . .that constituted the somehow prophetic blazon of his family: because he had merely forgotten to use his brain, if he ever had had one inside his well-brought-up thoroughbred’s skull,” and Georges: “Oh yes. Unfortunately this coal heap, this historical coal heap . . .” and Blum suddenly seized with frenzied agitation, leaping in the blackish puddles, waving his arms, saying: “All right, all right: let’s work at history too, let’s write our daily little page of history too! After all, I suppose there’s nothing more dishonourable or stupid about shovelling a mountain of coal than dying gratis for the King of Prussia, so let’s give that Brandenburg Mozart his money’s worth . . .”, the fork coming and going several times, sending a total of about three and a half lumps into the air, two falling outside the truck, then stopping, winded, saying: “But I wasn’t done! I haven’t told you everything. Where was I, oh yes, here: he came back then unexpectedly, he left his cobblers in chaos, his illusions, his idyllic dreams, in order to seek refuge with what still remained to him—at least that’s what he thought—that is, with what he could still consider a certainty: not perhaps the heart (for probably he had after all managed to lose some of his naivety) but in any case the flesh, the warm and palpable body of that Agnes . . . (didn’t you tell me she was twenty years younger than he was so that . . .” and Georges: “No. You’re mixing it all up. You’re confusing him with . . .” and Blum: “. . .his great-grandson. That’s right. But I think you can still imagine it: they used to marry off thirteen-year-old girls to old men in those days, and even if in those two portraits they look about the same age that’s undoubtedly because the artist’s savoir-faire (I mean his savoir-vivre, I mean his savoir-flatter) had made the bride look somewhat younger. No, I’m not making any mistake, I said the bride—I mean attenuate, temper what showed of her real experience, which in lies and duplicity would have made her about a thousand years older than he was.) That philanthropic, Jacobinical and soldierly Arnolphe, then, definitively renouncing the perfection of the human race (which doubtless explains why, reinforced by his memory and a wiser man, his remote descendant exclusively dedicated himself to the improvement of the equine race), and covering at full gallop the two hundred kilometres that separated him from her . . .” and Georges: “Three hundred,” and Blum: “Three hundred kilometres, which in the measurement of the period makes almost eighty leagues, which by killing a horse represents at least four days (let’s say five), finally arriving late on the fifth night, exhausted and covered with mud . . .” and Georges: “Not mud: dust. It almost never rains there,” and Blum: “Good God, what does it do then?” and Georges: “The wind blows. So to speak. Because it’s about as much like the wind as a cannonball is like a popgun. But what do you . . .” and Blum: “All dusty, then, as if he had carried on himself an impalpable and tenacious dust of rubbish, the pulverized remains of his disappointed hopes: whitened precociously by the ashes of the stake where doubtless, during four days and five nights, on the roads of defeat, he had pondered, reviewed and burnt all that he had adored, no longer adoring anything now but the woman he was burning to see again, and this: in the night’s silence, noises, a trampling of hoofs, for probably he wasn’t alone, he also had with him, had been followed by a faithful valet, just as the other one had brought along to the war—to take care of his horse and polish his boots—the faithful jockey or rather stud his unfaithful Agnes had provided him with, or rather who had, as they say, lit up the young . . .” and Georges: “Oh for God’s sake!. . .” and Blum: “But you can imagine it: the vague trampling of hoofs on the cobblestones, the exhausted animals whinnying, the night—or rather the beginning of dawn—bluish, the lantern the porter was holding sculpturing in the round the muscles of the red and smoking horses’ chests, and a swirl of cloaks as they dismounted, and he throwing the reins to the jockey, giving a brief order or not even that, no orders, not even making a sound with his voice, nothing but his footsteps, the clatter of spurs as he quickly reached the doorstep, stepped over it: all this she heard, waking up with a start, still in that soft languor of sleep and pleasure but already thinking -perhaps not her mind since she was still half asleep, but something in her that neither sleep nor pleasure could blunt, and which had no need to wait until she was wide awake to begin functioning at top speed and infallibly: instinct, the cunning that has no need to be learnt, so that with her head, her brain itself still asleep, the agile body started up (pushing away the sheet, the legs showing for a second, kicking free, revealing in a flash the swift thighs, that shadow, that flame—but didn’t you say she had blonde hair?—then: that honey, that golden fleece that had already vanished when she pivoted, the pushed-up nightgown revealing now the flow of her legs close together and parallel, the dazzling pearly flesh, the feet tinged with pink groping for the slippers) thinking all the time (the body), calculating, organizing, planning with lightning-like speed at the same time that her ears followed the noise of the boots climbing the stairs by fours, crossing the landing, coming closer (the legs out of sight now, the nightgown having fallen back), and she—the virginal Agnes—standing up, pushing the lover by the shoulders—the coachman, the groom, the dazed bumpkin—towards the inevitable and providential closet or cabinet of farces and tragedies that is always opportunely where it should be like those enigmatic boxes in vaudeville tricks whose opening could eventually release an explosion of laughter just as well as a shudder of horror because vaudeville is always only an abortive tragedy and tragedy a farce without humour, the hands (still the body, the muscles, not the brain which at this moment was only beginning to tear itself from the viscous mist of sleep, the hands alone then) picking up in passing the articles of masculine clothing scattered here and there and throwing them pell-mell into the closet too, the sound of the boots having stopped, standing (the boots, or rather the absence, the sudden and alarming cessation of sound) just outside the door, the handle shaken, then the fist pounding, and she screaming: “Coming!”, shutting the closet, turning round, heading for the door, then noticing a vest or a man’s shoe, picking it up, shouting: “Coming!” at the door and running back to the closet, opening it, savagely throwing inside what she had just picked up without even looking, the door echoing now under the terrible blows of his shoulder (the door you heard burst into splinters under the furious assaults of a man—but it wasn’t the valet!), then she standing there, childish, innocent, disarming, rubbing her eyes, smiling, holding out her arms, explaining that she locked herself in for fear of thieves pressing herself against him, enlacing him, enveloping him, the nightgown accidentally slipping off her shoulder, revealing her breasts whose bruised tender points she presses, crushes against the dusty tunic she is already beginning to unfasten with her feverish hands, talking to him with her mouth on his so he cannot see her lips swollen with another man’s kisses, and he standing there in that disorder of spirit, that disarray, that despair: confused, disoriented, disconcerted, dispossessed of everything and perhaps already detached and perhaps already half-destroyed . . . Wasn’t it like that?” and Georges: “No!” and Blum: “No? But what do you know about it?” and Georges: “No!” and Blum: “He who had wanted to act out the fable of the two pigeons, only he was the pigeon, that is, returning to the dovecote with his wing broken, his dreams limping, realizing his wreck, and not only because he had the inopportune notion of going off, he the gentleman farmer, to fornicate in the forbidden domain, the muddy wallows of thought, but also that of leaving alone behind him his little chick or rather his beloved little pigeon who had taken advantage of his absence to fornicate in the most natural way in the world, in other words the way it’s been done since the world began, taking for a partner not chlorotic reveries but merely a boy with a strong back, and when he realized it, it was too late; he no doubt saw himself there, naked—probably she had managed to undress him by taking advantage of that kind of daze, of paralysis—with that twenty-year-old pigeon cooing and rubbing up against him, and he (perhaps he noticed then the voluptuous disorder of the bed, or heard a sound, or else it was by instinct) pushing her away and walking with a firm step—although she clung to him now, pleading, denying, trying to hold him back, but probably it would have taken more than that, probably he could have dragged several more like her with him, he who had already been dragging for the last four days the heavy, rotten and stinking corpse of his disillusions—to the closet, opening the door, and then receiving in the head that pistol bullet fired at point-blank range, so that a kindly fate spared him that at least, that is, knowing what was in the closet, knowing that second and supreme disgrace, the farcical and vaudeville cabinet functioning providentially, the gunpowder doing its work, in other words putting an end to such painful and unendurable “suspense”, producing the welcome relief, the salubrious reaction by, so to speak, blowing his brains out . . .”