“Duty,” says Gabriel, his eyes widening. He looks like he doesn’t have much fondness for the word.

“To your mother?”

“She writes letters telling me to return. We have a farm—sheep and tobacco.” His gestures suggest expansiveness. “I was the second son, but Marcellin is dead five years and my father is ill. He has not turned the soil this last year. I go back for my mother, for duty to my mother, who now sleeps in the bergerie and worries for bread. I should have returned home two years ago. I am two years too late.”

Élodie clears the soup bowls and presents slices of meat, of undisclosed variety, in a mahogany-colored sauce. Gabriel replenishes the glasses.

“I should perhaps have gone back, but I didn’t,” says Harry. “I know that it’s not easy.”

“My mother wants me to take Marcellin’s place in the fields and in his widow’s bed. But I do not return home with any enthusiasm. It is complicated.”

Harry watches Gabriel attack the meat with his knife. “It is always complicated,” he says.

There are farmers from the market at the tables, traders, shop-workers, clerks, and the butcher in whites. The chef stands at the kitchen door and surveys the reception of the meat.

“She writes to me each week, piles of letters, begging me. I do not have a choice.” Gabriel steers the meat about his plate. There are old scars on his arms. “This meat is not good,” he says.

Harry thinks about the scars that the war has left on Edie’s hands. Would she have accepted him if he’d come home and said that he meant to take Francis’s place? Was that ever a choice? Could it ever be?

“So you are a stonemason no longer?”

“Not a poor mason, but I am to be a monument sculptor.” Gabriel brightens and then flags. “I am to make the monument—the monument aux morts. I have been asked by the commune. I have to make a statue of a soldier and a plinth where their names can be carved. I have to make something which expresses the village’s loss, something that sums up all the men that I left the village with.” He turns his wineglass. “The statue has to summarize eleven dead men—three brothers, including my own, among them. They are already preparing the ground.”

“That must be an honor,” says Harry, not sure of what else to say.

“Apparently. Though today it feels like a big weight on my back. I do not sleep because when I dream of it the statue always has Marcellin’s face. It can’t have his face.”

Harry imagines a statue with Francis’s face. He does not envy Gabriel this task.