And Georges: “Yes. Of course. I know. Yes. Maybe it wasn’t only the fact of that battle, a simple defeat: not just what he saw there, the panic, the cowardice, the runaways throwing down their arms, screaming treason as usual and cursing their leaders to justify their panic, and gradually the shots coming at longer intervals, then isolated, without response, without conviction, the battle fading, dying of its own accord in the late-afternoon languor. We saw that, we knew that: the slowing-down, the gradual immobilization. Like the wheel of the country-fair lottery, the dry crackle of the metal (or bone) tongue on the shiny circle of stoppers gradually decomposing so to speak, the clicking that made only a single continuous rattle separating, dissociating, rarefying, those last hours when the battle seems to continue only by virtue of the momentum it has built up, to slow down, start up again, break out in absurd and incoherent starts, only to collapse again while you begin to hear the birds singing, realizing suddenly that they have never stopped singing, any more than the wind has stopped swaying the branches of the trees or the clouds have stopped running across the sky—a few shots, then, unexpected now, absurd in the evening’s peace, a few last exchanges between rearguards and pursuers, and probably not the Spanish troops properly speaking (that is, regular, royal, that is, probably composed not of Spaniards but of mercenaries, of Irish or Swiss hirelings and commanded by some boy of a prince or some old general with a mummified pharaoh’s head, with papery hands covered with rusty blotches, equally (the boy or the old mummy) covered with gold, with medals, with diamond orders like reliquaries, like madonnas, with their immaculate white uniforms, their wide diagonal ribbons of sky-blue moire, their ringed hands, the boy prince astride his roan at the top of the hill, amusing himself watching through a spyglass he doesn’t know how to work while the last enemy troops beat a retreat, the old papery mummy sitting in his carriage and by now already worrying about the billet, the farm, the dinner, the bed—and perhaps the girl—his officers will find for him), but fired (the sporadic shots) by those occult and mysterious allies which every victorious army seems to generate spontaneously around it, before and behind it, probably peasants, or smugglers, or highwaymen of the region armed with old blunderbusses and makeshift pistols, a chaplet of medals and ex-votos around the leader’s neck, and almost the same head, the beak and the talons of that honourable gentleman of Calabrian or Sicilian ancestry who is running the poker table over there, disguised as a soldier, and who sells cigarettes at the rate of two for the price of about four days’ work, and kissing (the peasants, the smugglers) an old, filthy cross pulled out from under their shirt before firing their old blunderbuss at point-blank range from behind a cork oak or a thicket at a wounded man or a straggler with that kind of sacred rage, that holy and murderous fury, shouting at the same time as the bullet is fired something like: ‘There, you bastard, eat that!’ and he (de Reixach) apparently deaf and blind (to the shots, to the birds singing, to the sun setting), sullen, vague, letting his horse choose the way, the reins loose, already having reached or penetrated another state, another degree, whether of consciousness or sensibility—or insensibility—and then a man—a bareheaded soldier with neither insignia nor weapons—coming out of somewhere (from behind the corner of a house, from behind a hedge, from the ditch where he had been lying) and beginning to run beside him shouting: ‘Take me with you, Captain, let me come with you!’ and he not even looking at him, or perhaps the way you look at a stone, a thing, and immediately turning his head away, and only saying a trifle louder than his conversational tone: ‘Get away,’ and the soldier still running beside his boot—or rather trotting, and probably he wouldn’t have had to trot, would have only needed to take longer strides to keep up with the horse, but probably the notion of running was the thing that spontaneously corresponded in his mind to his desire to escape, to flee—panting, chanting: ‘Take me with you I’ve lost my regiment take me with you Captain I don’t have any regiment left take me let me come with you . . .’ and he not answering now, not hearing him, probably not seeing him either, withdrawn, immured in that arrogant silence in which he was speaking now perhaps already as an equal with all those barons those dead ancestors all those Reixachs who . . .”