Mixed in with this cruelty was a slight affectation that was a product of his youth as well as a certain leaning towards sadism. For example, although he was harsh towards people, he displayed the greatest solicitude towards animals. It was at his instigation that the Headquarters at Calais had issued an order several months earlier. Bonnet had noticed that, on market days, the farmers carried their chickens feet tied and head down. "As a gesture of humanity" it was forthwith forbidden to continue this practice. The farmers paid no attention, which only increased Bonnet's loathing of the "barbaric and thoughtless" French, while the French were outraged to read such a decree beneath another announcing that eight men had been executed as a reprisal for an act of sabotage. In the northern city where he'd been billeted, Bonnet had only been friendly with the woman whose house he lived in because one day, when he'd been suffering from flu, she'd taken the trouble to bring him breakfast in bed. Bonnet had immediately thought of his mother, his childhood years and, tears in his eyes, thanked Lili-a former Madam in a house of prostitution. From that moment on he did everything he could for her, granting her passes of all kinds, coupons for petrol, etc.; he spent the evenings with the old hag because, he would say, she was old and alone and bored; though he wasn't a rich man, he brought her expensive trinkets every time he returned from missions to Paris.

These acts of kindness were sometimes the result of musical, literary or, as on this spring morning when he walked into the Sabaries' farmhouse, artistic impressions: Bonnet was a cultured man, gifted at all the arts. The Sabaries' farm, with its slightly damp, sombre atmosphere created by the rainy day, its faded pink floor tiles, its empty little niche from which he imagined a statue of the Virgin Mary had been removed during the last revolution, its little palm branch above the cradle and the sparkling copper warming pan half in shadow, had something about it, thought Bonnet, that reminded him of a "domestic scene" of the Flemish School. This young woman sitting on a low chair, her child in her arms, her delightful breast lustrous in the shadow, her ravishing face with its rosy complexion, her pure white chin and forehead, was herself worthy of a portrait. As he admired her, he was almost transported to a museum in Munich or Dresden, alone in front of one of those paintings that aroused within him that intellectual and sensual intoxication he preferred above all else. This woman could treat him coldly, even with hostility, it wouldn't matter; he wouldn't even notice. He would only ask of her, as he asked of everyone around him, to provide him with purely artistic acts of kindness: to retain the lighting of a masterpiece, with luminous flesh set against a background of velvety shadows.

At that very moment a large clock struck midday. Bonnet laughed, almost with pleasure. It was just such a deep, low, slightly cracked sound he had imagined coming from the antique clock with the painted casing in some Dutch Old Master, along with the smell of fresh herring prepared by the housewife and the sounds from the street beyond the window with its tarnished panes of glass; in such paintings there was always a clock like this one hanging on the wall.

He wanted to make Madeleine speak; he wanted to hear her voice again, her young, slightly lilting voice.

"Do you live here alone? Your husband must be a prisoner?"

"Oh, no," she said quickly.

At the thought of Benoît, a German prisoner who had escaped, she was afraid again; it struck her that the German would guess and arrest him. "I'm so stupid," she thought, and instinctively softened: she had to be nice to the conqueror.

"Will you be here long?" she asked in a frank, humble voice. "Everyone's saying three months."

"We don't know ourselves," Bonnet explained. "That's military life for you: in war, it all depends on orders, a general's whim or chance. We were on our way to Yugoslavia, but it's all finished over there."

"Oh? Is it?"

"It will be in a few days. In any case, it would be all over by the time we got there. And I think they'll keep us here all summer, unless they send us to Africa or England."

"And… do you like it?" said Madeleine, intentionally feigning innocence, but with a little shudder of disgust she couldn't hide, as if she were asking a cannibal. "Is it true you eat human flesh?"

"Man is made to be a warrior, just as woman is made to please the warrior," Bonnet replied, and he smiled because he found it comical to quote Nietzsche to this pretty French farm girl. "Your husband must think the same way, if he's young."

Madeleine didn't reply. Actually, she had very little idea what Benoît thought, even though they'd been brought up together. Benoît was taciturn and cloaked in a triple armour of decency: masculine, provincial and French. She didn't know what he hated or what he liked, just that he was capable of both love and hatred.

"My God," she said to herself, "I hope he doesn't take against this German."

She continued to listen but said little, straining all the while to hear any sounds on the road. Carts passed by, the church bells chimed for evening prayers. You could hear the bells ring out one after the other across the countryside; first the light silvery note of the little chapel on the Montmort estate, then the deep sound from the village, then the hurried little peal from Sainte-Marie that you could only hear in bad weather, when the wind blew in from the tops of the hills.

"The family will be home soon," murmured Madeleine.

She placed a creamy earthenware jug of forget-me-nots on the table.

"You won't be eating here, will you?" she suddenly asked.

He reassured her. "No, no, I've paid to have my meals in town. I'll only have some coffee in the morning."

"Well, that's easy enough, Monsieur."

It was an expression they used a lot around Bussy. She said it in an affectionate sort of way, with a smile. It didn't mean a thing, though; it was a mere politeness and didn't actually mean you would get anything. A mere politeness and, if the promise wasn't kept, there was another expression ready and waiting, this time spoken with a tinge of regret and apology: "Ah, well, you can't always do what you want."

But the German was delighted. "How kind everyone is here," he said naively.

"You think you so, Monsieur?"

"And I hope you'll bring me my coffee in bed?"

"We only do that for sick people," said Madeleine ironically.

He wanted to take her hands; she quickly pulled away.

"Here's my husband."

He wasn't there yet, but he would be soon; she recognised the sound of the mare's hooves on the road. She went out into the courtyard; it was raining. Through the gates came the old horse and trap, unused since the other war but now a replacement for the broken-down car. Benoît held the reins. The women were sitting under wet umbrellas.

Madeleine ran towards her husband and put her arm round his neck. "There's a Boche," she whispered in his ear.

"Is he going to be living with us?"

"Yes."

"Damn!"

"So what?" said Cécile. "They're not so bad if you know how to handle them, and they pay well."

Benoît unharnessed the mare and took her to the stable. Cécile, intimidated by the German but conscious of having an advantage because she was wearing her best Sunday dress, a hat and silk stockings, proudly walked into the room.