Le Regard Libre N° 28 - Sébastien Oreiller
Chapter I: Loss (continued)
Such were his dreams when, for the first time, the loveless morning assailed him. He did what all the others do, at least the strongest ones: he got up and set off in search of his youth, and remembered the love he hadn't yet met. He skirted the walls and left the village. The summer groves were still fresh with dew, like his footsteps. He pushed open the door to the cellar he'd visited three days earlier and saw that they'd left nothing behind; the room was empty, the floor smooth; he doubted he'd even been inside. Only the sepulchral woman who had been watching them, and whom they had mistaken for the dead man's wife, reminded him of the facts, presenting herself to him, still as white as ever, but with a very real, if vaporous, flesh. She asked him who he was. «I am,» he said, «the man who lost his youth. I thought I'd found it here, but it wasn't there. And yet I smelled her scent, the scent of laughing girls and springtime vines. I felt my summer coming, and my summer is burning me.» The smell, she told him, was of the lilacs and millefeuilles her daughters braided with their hair, and that was why he'd misunderstood. She thought it was cool here; she'd come up from the city, from the little town, because it was too hot, and she liked the crisp mountain air, and the mountain forest air. She was Mrs. L*; she'd known him when he was a child and his father came to prune the gardens. It's true, he'd recognized her. He knew she was a great lady of the city, still young but a widow, and that the blood of the great persecutions, those of the last century, when his father was a judge, ran through her veins; she had the air of a lioness wounded in her pride. Yet he recognized her by her voice. He wanted to leave, but she asked him to stay. "You were looking for the dead man, weren't you? There isn't one; there's never been one in this house. No one has ever been born here." She asked him what he was doing. He worked the fields, but he was tired of the sun and the sweat. He wanted the shade. She took him on. Of course, he knew, but he accepted anyway. Perhaps he needed to be loved, perhaps he accepted out of desperation, out of a taste for the abyss that the loveless morning had left him. The scent of his youth still wafted through the garden, and he didn't want to lose it.
She was going to show him the house. It was a large house, not even pleasant to live in, and a nuisance to boot. The cardinal had held his parties there, when he exercised jurisdiction over the country, before it had been the bannerman's home; afterwards, it had remained in the family, his own. He already knew all that. There wasn't much on the first floor. Only a narrow corridor leading to an inner courtyard, where a monumental staircase led to the second floor. Here lay what she called the grand'salle, a vast room with a high paneled ceiling that smacked of the severity of yesteryear, and where a few portraits of ancestors hung, the less beautiful ones. The others she'd taken to town with her, because her husband, who was a new man, didn't have any. Upstairs, there were only the bedrooms.
It was a house where people lived without living. Yet they must have loved it, since they spent almost half the year there. He didn't know they still came here; he thought they always stayed in the city. He saw that she had arranged lilacs in the center, on the solid wood table, as if she'd been waiting for someone. The servants had stayed downstairs; she'd only taken an old chauffeur with her, who was staying in the village; but her son, the first, would arrive the following week from the big city where he was studying. He liked to spend the summer there; she had gone up to wait for him.
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