“ . . . All sorts of expeditions?” he repeated, in the hope that she would add something.

The girl knew far more than he did about history and perhaps even about Théo’s motivations.

“It will be easier to understand after we’re in St. Louis,” she said, becoming engrossed in her reading.

“So you’re coming?” he asked.

She did not reply. When something was self-evident she never replied. He lay down on the bed again and started leafing through Brouillette’s book. He wasn’t really in the mood to read, but he turned the pages, stopping at certain passages that attracted his attention.

The book talked a great deal about the voyageurs. The author seemed to think very highly of them. Jack wanted to know if the girl shared that feeling, and he read her the following passage:

“By common consent, the Canadians are best able, in their role of paddlers, to tolerate the rigours of an expedition by canoe. It is rare for others to be used for such demanding work. As voyageurs the Canadians deserve the highest praise.”

And farther on he read:

“I have seen them paddle a canoe for twenty hours straight, travelling at that rate for a fortnight or three weeks without a day to rest or slow down.”

La Grande Sauterelle said that she liked the voyageurs very much and she thought that if they’d been educated and if they had left any writings, their exploits would probably be compared with those of the pioneers of the American West. She also thought that they had behaved acceptably toward the Indians, given the customs of the time. Same thing for the trappers and the coureurs de bois: in general, they had treated the Indians better, in her opinion, than their American counterparts.

The man couldn’t help smiling. He closed the book and crossed his hands behind his head, and the cat came and lay on his stomach and began to purr.

“Do you like the book by Gabrielle Roy?” he asked.

“Very much,” said the girl in a voice that already seemed far away.

He would have liked to tell her that the title of Gabrielle Roy’s took on a special significance when you knew that she was a very beautiful and very vulnerable woman and that her green eyes shone like lights. He would have liked to tell her, too, not to read too quickly, because Gabrielle Roy had a highly individual style and that, for example, it was always interesting to see where she placed the adverbs in her sentences.

But as he didn’t want to interrupt the girl’s reading again, he kept quiet. And so he was sent back to himself and to his own writing.

Jack Waterman was not very pleased with himself as a writer. He didn’t like himself very much in general (he thought he was too thin and too old and too withdrawn), but what he hated about himself more than anything was his way of working. He had always had an image of the ideal writer, and he was utterly unlike that model. He ranked himself with those whom he called “the industrious class”: patient and persistent but bereft of inspiration or even impulses, he went to work at the same time every day and, thanks to methodical and dogged work habits, managed to turn out his daily page.