And Georges looking up, staring at him for a moment, perplexed, startled, and finally shrugging his shoulders, saying: “You’re right. Sorry. A habit, a hereditary taint. My father absolutely insisted that I get myself ploughed at the École Normale. He absolutely insisted that I profit at least a little from that marvellous culture which centuries of thought have bequeathed to us. He absolutely insisted that his son enjoy the incomparable privileges of Western civilization. Being the son of illiterate peasants, he’s so proud of having been able to learn how to read that he’s deeply convinced that there’s no problem, and particularly no problem standing in the way of humanity’s happiness, that can’t be solved by reading good authors. Not long ago he even found the way to keep for himself (and I can assure you that if you knew my mother you’d acknowledge the extent of the exploit, the amount of will and consequently the degree of emotion, of confusion it represents) five lines out of the insipid laments she spreads over her letters which are fortunately limited to the number of lines we are authorized to receive, to add to the concert his own laments by sharing with me his despair at the news of the bombing of Leipzig and its apparently irreplaceable library . . .” (breaking off, falling silent, able to see the letter without needing to take it out of his wallet—the only one he had kept of all Sabine had written and at the bottom of which his father usually contented himself with writing under the inevitable “We send you all our love” the tiny hen tracks in which only Georges knew the letters of the word “Papa” could be found—seeing again, then (still more hen tracks, still closer set, compressed by the lack of room and the desire to say as much as possible in the least possible space), the fine and delicate donnish handwriting, the clumsy telegraphic style: “. . .let your mother give you our news which is good as you see . . . in so far as anything can be good today knowing you thinking constantly of you there and of this world where a man strives to destroy himself not only in the flesh of his children but even in what he can best achieve and bequeath: history will say later what humanity lost the other day in a few minutes, the heritage of several centuries, in the bombing of what was the most precious library in the world, all of which is infinitely sad, your old father . . .”, able to see him sitting, elephantine, massive, almost deformed in the dimness of the summer house where the two of them had sat that last evening before he left while from outside came the now furious now muffled drone of the tractor on which the farmer was mowing the big field, the pungent green smell of the cut grass floating in the warm twilight, surrounding them, the heady exhalation of the summer, the dim figure of the farmer perched on the tractor with his floppy, ragged-brimmed straw hat like a black halo reflected twice in the glasses, slowly crossing the curved and shiny surface of the lenses in front of his father’s dim sad face, and the two of them opposite each other, having nothing to say, both walled up in that pathetic incomprehension, that impossibility of communication which had grown up between them and which he (his father) had just tried once again to overcome, Georges hearing his mouth which went on (probably had never stopped) talking, his voice reaching him, saying:) “ . . . to which I answered in return that if the contents of the thousands of books in that irreplaceable library had been impotent to prevent things like the bombing which destroyed them from happening, I didn’t really see what loss to humanity was represented by the disappearance of those thousands of books and papers obviously devoid of the slightest utility. There followed the detailed list of the positive values, the objects of prime importance which we need much more than the entire contents of the famous library of Leipzig, including: shoes, underwear, wool clothes, soap, cigarettes, sausage, chocolate, sugar, tinned goods, ma . . .”