As is the way in the provinces, when she reached thirty people ceased talking about her; that lasted for five or six years. But just as she was about to reach the age at which it is vaguely said of distinguished ladies who have contacts and come from a wealthy family that they ‘do good works’, the city suddenly learned that she was to marry General B. D.

At the time, this seemed odd (for in the provinces even the most obvious things seem strange), though in truth no one managed to explain why. When, however, a little later, they managed to get to know the general, seeing him at meals or out hunting, it finally came to people that if she had behaved in that way for years, defying the world with invariable calm, scorn, irony and shadowy suggestions of a presumably unhappy future, it was with the certainty that what had now happened would happen.

Initially, the general was a disappointment. Then, suddenly, everyone found him to be elegant – slightly conventional, but elegant – and discovered that his elegance lay precisely in the fact that it had been noted only by chance, and after some time. From that point on, little by little it came to be acknowledged that he was a man of spirit and wit. ‘Ah, but he’s a man of spirit … But he has wit, let’s face it,’ they found themselves saying, as though they’d been contradicted or the matter was particularly important.

If the truth be told, the general’s looks and manners had nothing of the soldier in them: his bearing was as unmilitary as one might reasonably be asked to put up with. He had been about in the world, and his assignments had been vaguely bureaucratic and political, he had taken part in campaigns only rarely and at a distance; no victory bore his name. On the other hand, he had never committed any errors or stupidities; he had never been the object of ridicule. That dispassionate irony with which he viewed his career and, at heart, all his actions, had always kept him from disaster. Be all that as it may, military figures – some of them celebrated, with names that appeared in the newspapers – often sought his advice.

He arrived among us at the beginning of October. And for a few days, like some discreet tourist, he seemed to be everywhere, with a Scottie by his side. She was often absent. But no one noted how this absence was, in its own way, a reinforcement of her presence. Then one afternoon she was seen by someone or other hunting in the neighbourhood, dressed in fustian olive-brown and reddish riding boots; and the little Scottie dog was always by her side.

By the end of the month the marriage ceremony took place and we never saw her again.

As I found out later (and I confess I did everything in my power not to lose them from sight for too long), they had gone to live in an old country house of his to which, during the hunting season, he had long been accustomed to retire. But we heard nothing more about them. For that matter, even the locals seemed not to have had much to say – admitting, that is, that the locals could find much to interest them in a couple so reasonable, so self-contained and so little given to extravagance. Only a diary might have had something to say. But diaries, in which the gaps speak louder than words, are getting rarer and rarer; and in those days, I’d be willing to swear that Signora Nodier had not yet thought of keeping one.