Perhaps it was at this same moment that the General had killed himself? He had nevertheless a car, a driver, petrol. All he had to do was put on his helmet, pull on his gloves and leave, walking down the front steps of that villa (I suppose it must have been a villa: that’s the usual place where a brigadier general’s command post is installed, the chateaux being traditionally reserved to the division generals and the farms to mere colonels): a villa then, with probably a plum tree in bloom on the lawn, a gateway painted white, a gravel driveway turning between the aucuba hedges with their mottled leaves, and a middle-class salon decorated with the inevitable bouquet of holly branches or dyed feathers—silver or autumnal red—on the corner of the mantelpiece or the grand piano, the vase pushed back to make room for the sprawled-out maps, and from which (the villa) had issued for the last eight days, orders and directives almost all as useful as those given during the same period by the strategist of a provincial café commenting on the daily communiqué: he had, then, only to walk down those steps, climb calmly into his car with its flag, and drive straight ahead without stopping to the division headquarters or to his army corps headquarters, and to wait around there long enough for someone to give him a new command, as they did to the others. And instead of that, when his officers were installed in the second car, the motors already running, the motorcycles of the three or four couriers still sputtering, the car with its flags waiting with the door open, he blew his brains out. And in the racket of the motors and the cars no one even heard it. And perhaps it wasn’t even the dishonour, the sudden revelation of his incapacity (after all perhaps he wasn’t absolutely a fool—how could anyone tell?—perhaps it wasn’t impossible to imagine that his orders weren’t stupid but the best, the most pertinent, even inspired—but again how could anyone tell since none of them ever reached its destination?): probably something else: a kind of void a hole. Bottomless. Absolute. Where nothing had any meaning any reason for being—otherwise why take off his clothes, lying there that way, naked, unconscious of the cold, terribly calm probably, terribly lucid, carefully arranging on a chair (touching them, folding them with a kind of disgust and infinite precaution as if they had been rubbish or explosives) the frock coat, the trousers, setting the boots down in front, crowning everything with that hat, that extravagant headpiece like a bouquet of fireworks, as if they had dressed, shod, hatted some imaginary and non-existent character, looking at them with that same dry, cold, astringent gaze, and stepping back to consider the effect, and finally knocking over the chair with the back of his hand, since in the print it was lying on the floor and the clothes . . .”