As I was washing up after they left, I reflected on how Doctor Gros’s insistence that I remain in Salies had been vindicated, for the lad had been rushed into the clinic a little after four o’clock, when I might have been taking a cup of tea on the terrace of Etcheverria. It also occurred to me that, for the first time since I looked up from under my straw boater and saw Katya approaching across the park green, I had passed an hour without the image of her on my inner eye. It was my first experience of the emotional anodyne to be found in working at a calling, rather than a profession—that daily narcotic that was to numb the slow passage of the years following the summer of Katya.

After the clinic closed for the night, the hours dragged by ponderously while, before I had met Katya, I had easily filled my time with scribbling verses, reading novels, and daydreaming about the excitements and challenges of my future. To relieve the monotony, I left my boardinghouse and crossed the square to one of the cafйs. But the conversation at the tables and up and down the zinc bar centered on the impending war with Germany: warnings from Paris; threats from Berlin; saber-rattling from beleaguered, confused Austria; scabbard-rattling from vast, hollow Russia. Some of the older men remembered the wounded gloire of the 1870 War, and spoke of humiliating Germany, of recovering Alsace, of “France to the Rhine!” I found this martial frenzy and drunken jingoism disgusting… and frightening. So I returned to the solitude of my room.

I have before me the notes I scribbled in my journal that night, and the parenthetical comments on those notes added several years later, after the war was over and I was established as the village doctor of Alos. I share them with you uncorrected, revealing the youthful pedantry of Greek-letter rubrics and my romantic pseudo-philosophic assumptions, and also sharing with you the bitter postwar disenchantment of the parenthetical notes.

Alpha: This horrid war will never materialize! (It did.)

Beta: If war does come, it will be brief because human flesh and emotions cannot withstand modern machines of death and mutilation. (It was not brief. The flesh did withstand the death and mutilation. The emotions did not.)

Gamma: If I am called to the colors, I shall flee to Switzerland in protest against this madness. (I did not. I no longer cared.)

Delta: Even in the brutality of war, a man of poetry, a man of inner resources, should be able to fight without becoming an animal, to rise above the slaughter and maintain his spiritual dignity. (Bullshit.)

After an uneventful morning, I was taking the plat du jour luncheon at my usual cafй under the arcade, insensitive to the sparkling beauty of the weather, my thoughts concentrated on Katya and Etcheverria.

“Are you receiving guests?”

“What?” I was startled out of my reverie. “I beg your– Katya? What a surprise. Oh… and Paul.”

“I take it you recommend this restaurant?” Paul asked, looking around with distaste.

I rose and gestured them to join me, which Katya did with a warm smile. But Paul remained standing. “I have a few errands to attend to. But when I return I should be delighted to accept… oh, anything that can’t be ruined by the chef. A glass of water, perhaps? We’ve been trudging along that dusty road for hours… perhaps for weeks. I no longer recall. The torture of it has blurred my memory.”

“Yes,” Katya said, “I convinced Paul to walk with me. It’s a gorgeous day, and the fresh air and exercise are good for him.”

“I wonder why everything that is good for one is either dull or painful? Why is everything that is repulsive to the flesh assumed to be good for the character?”

“Oh, rubbish! It was good for you. For my part, I am ravenous. That looks good, Jean-Marc. Will you order some for me?”

“With pleasure.” I signaled the waiter.

“I should warn you,” Paul said, “that she has the gastronomic indiscretion of a Pygmy. I wonder we have any furniture left in the house.”

“Oh, really, Paul!”

“Don’t ‘oh, really’ me. I’ve seen you glance covetously at the ottoman when you’re feeling peckish. Don’t try to deny it. Do you know what she did on the way here, Jean-Marc? With total disregard of my social embarrassment, she pushed her way through a hedge and snatched an apple from a tree—a vulgar apple from a living tree! And she ate it. Fell upon the wretched vegetable and manducated it. Chomp, grind, munch, gnash… and all that was left was a disgusting core.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “she has an appetite for life that ought not to be denied expression.” A slight movement of his eyebrows told me that he had read my meaning.

“It was delicious, actually,” Katya said. “A little green and tart, but delicious.”

“Then what did she do?” Paul asked, all mock outrage. “In emulation of perfidious Eve, she offered to fetch one for me. For me! Can you picture Paul Etienne Jean-Marie de Treville trudging along the road, pushing pome fruits into his mouth? Then for the next two or three hundred kilometers she babbled on about the glories of nature, cooing over garish weeds that choked the roadside—”

“Wildflowers,” Katya clarified.

“—and pretending that the damned things had names (both Latin and vulgar) and that there was some unstipulated virtue in my learning them. As though I intended ever again to submit my body to the tortures of an overland trek! Now, I will concede that some of the names had a kind of ironic rightness… goatsbreath, frogsbane, stenchpoppy—”

“He’s making those up.”

“—but others were as stickily saccharine as her gushing enthusiasm. Sweetheart’s joy, love’s sigh, passion’s heart, lust’s elbow—”

“Didn’t you promise us that you had to run off to perform errands?” Katya asked.

“And indeed I have. I must haggle with the local merchants about the storage and shipment of our impedimenta. You two will have to suffer along without my company for a quarter of an hour. But I warn you, Montjean. Feed her quickly, or be prepared to stand guard over treasured family knickknacks, porcelain vases, umbrella racks, that sort of thing. Anyone who would eat an apple in its raw state, with the stench of tree all over it, would eat anything.” And with a wave of his hand he departed down the arcade.

Katya smiled after him.

“Your brother seems chipper enough,” I said, after the waiter had brought her plat du jour and departed.

“Hm-m. We had a delightful walk. He knows how it makes me laugh when he plays at being shocked and horrified by everything pertaining to nature.”

“Katya, I am so sorry that things came up to interfere with our plans. I know I’ve ruined your father’s hopes to attend the fкte d’Alos. You did get my message, I hope?”

“Yes, we did. And your Dr. Gros… what a charming man.”

“You found him charming?”

“Hm-m. Don’t you?”

“If I were asked to list a thousand words describing him, ‘charming’ would appear nowhere.”

“Why is that?”

“Because his philandering has cost me two days with you. Two precious days, when we have so few that—”

“—Don’t let’s talk about the time we shall not have together. It’s pointless and saddening. Let’s talk about the time we shall have. Our trip to the fкte d’Alos is not ruined. We’ve simply decided to delay it until tomorrow. And I’ve heard that the last day of a fкte is the most exciting anyway.”

“Well… it’s the least inhibited. It’s quite common for birth dates in Basque villages to fall nine months after the last day of the fкte, with hasty marriages sandwiched in between.”

“Speaking of sandwiches, I’ve planned out the picnic we’ll have on our way. We’ll eat out in the fields—perhaps in an orchard.”