She managed that for a few consecutive months. That is, until March. Then, occasionally, she was again seen out and about. She made the odd unnecessary purchase; sometimes she spoke briefly with someone. It was during this period that she began to keep a diary. ‘Ah, I’m no longer the same woman. I’ve become so good,’ she wrote a few days later, ‘that I now manage to look with a good heart on the happiness of others close to me. I am no longer offended. Is this possible? I don’t even feel envy …’ And then, four pages later: ‘I am seriously worried. I really don’t know what to do: I could give away half of myself …’ And more of the same.

She was indeed disposed to yield half of her all: but certainly not to accept the other half that people necessarily wanted to give her in return. She soon had to realize that her gift could never be accepted unless she, in turn, accepted her reward. This was asking too much from her. To tell the truth, it was beyond her strength.

Furthermore, her peasants no longer showed the respect they had in the old days; they looked at her with a certain expression, as though she had some obscure guilt. For instance, the way in which she smiled at certain things, and at problems by which they swore; the way she was serene and distant, and offered them, fundamentally, little more than maternal irony, perhaps that of her own presence. ‘The general, well, he understood,’ she almost felt them thinking. ‘He realized that he had no time left … He went away just in time … He understood … But as for her, what’s she waiting for?’

Thus it came about that she reduced herself to spending all her time in the house; and, because the grounds included an old chapel which she undertook to restore, she no longer went out even to go to church. This little island was, in fact, her definitive salvation and, little by little, the general’s death was slowly transmuted into a bearable unhappiness – into, I can only guess, a sort of eternal evening. She might not have withstood a further shock; certainly she wouldn’t have survived the extinction of her unhappiness. It was an unhappiness that she had constructed day by day, as others build, day by day, their own illusions. In its own way, that unhappiness was an illusion too: as to the past and as to the future. Yet it was absolutely necessary to her; it was, in fact, her self. The villa now constantly spoke of the general and what he had, in his day, meant to her: the old ways, serenity, good manners and more. But she took marvellous care to avoid anything or anyone who could bring back to life, or make vivid, those memories. Had this happened, grief would again have supplanted this gentle unhappiness of hers, and that she did not want. For instance, she refused to go to a memorial service for the general; nor would she read a speech that recalled his death. One day, certainly, those two events would have become memories, and she would have discovered them bit by bit. Now, however, they were part of life; they spoke of a day barely past; and life was too much for her.