She is twelve years old when, during the course of one of these balls, she comes upon an unusual couple in the little room that was once the lodging of the old servant, long since dead, whose allotted task was fastening the pillows to the trees. The man disguised as a peasant, the woman in a cloud of muslin, as a bat… The house feels as if it is rocking under waves of music, exploding with firecrackers, ringing with shouts of laughter. It is the first time she has passed unnoticed-her height, she is already tall, plus a simple black mask offer her an invisibility that intoxicates her. She encounters a knight raising the visor of his helmet to down a draft of champagne, a woman dressed as a toreador-Olga guesses that she is a woman from the contours of her body ("I'm grown up if I can guess that" she thinks, proudly)… In a drawing room there is a man stretched out on a divan, his shirt wide open, with a pale face that women are dabbing at with wet towels. In the room next door a table strewn with the ruins of dinner and one solitary guest, who has removed his wig and his mask and is eating, as if to say, "I don't care what anyone says. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I'm eating!" Suddenly a motley group invades the room; there is an explosion of laughter, several hands pour different wines into his glass, pile his plate high with a mixture of foods. He objects, but his growls are stifled in his full mouth. The pranksters vanish, carrying off his wig… This theft makes her jealous; she, too, would like to make a little mischief. Coming upon a young magician asleep, Li, she carries off her magic wand. A few minutes later the wand slips from her grasp and the sound of it falling interrupts the counterfeit peasant and the woman in muslin in their wild and tender wrestling match. The man lying back in the armchair opens his eyes wide, the upper part of his body rears up. The woman straddling his belly twists and turns so as not to topple over… At the end of the corridor, in the hall with the dinner table: a servant takes a furtive swig from the glass of the man whose wig was stolen… On the staircase the grandmother's portrait has been hung upside down, head downwards… the favorite trick of guests at these celebrations. She unhooks the portrait and turns it the right way up. At that moment the counterfeit peasant appears at the other end of the corridor. She rushes toward the din of a piano, hoping to melt into a crowd of dancers. But the pianist is alone. It is an outrageously Moorish, drunken Othello, swamping the room with a flood of bravura music and despair. The white keys are all stained with black… Tiredness, the darkness, and the two glasses of champagne they gave her, without recognizing her face beneath the mask, make the ground in the garden unstable. The pearly foam of the apple trees invades the pathways, confusing her with the scented whiteness of their branches. Suddenly in the depths of these nocturnal thickets the galloping of a horse is heard. It draws closer, turning toward her, invisible, more and more threatening, seems to be pursuing her, ready to burst forth with the crash of broken branches. She presses herself against a tree trunk and at the same moment the horseman appears. It is an officer cadet who has come to the party with no thought of fancy dress; having quickly wearied of the wine-soaked merriment of the others, he has escaped and is now skimming through the garden and the sleeping fields. His black uniform sparkles with white petals. She realizes that he is the one she has been unconsciously searching for through all the rooms…

Among the adults who speak to her next day she senses a slight hint of embarrassment both in their voices and in their eyes, that sometimes avoid her own, sometimes seem to be questioning her. For the first time in her life she enjoys their weakness. She grasps that their world is much less secure than it appears and that one can play on these insecurities. An unknown voice rings out inside her head: a mocking, aggressive voice that from now on takes it upon itself to seek out the shameful hidden corners of every thought, of every action; to stir the thick sediment of people's hearts… When one of her cousins begins to play a melancholy polonaise in the evening this little voice pipes up: "And what if I told her that yesterday, in a room not ten yards from here, a woman dressed as a bat was writhing like one possessed astride the very man my poor cousin is hopelessly in love with…"

So the world is this exciting, cruel game. A game with inexhaustible permutations, with rules that one can change oneself during the course of play.

Three weeks later another celebration begins, as so often, with fireworks. Li officiates in her magician's cape, delighted with the applause and shouts that accompany each salvo. The merriment reaches its peak when a purple rocket fails to take off properly and propels a violent shower of sparks across the lawn, right up to the roots of the apple trees. Li joins in the general jubilation, her voice drowned in the guests' raucous chorus. It takes them several minutes to realize that her laughter is in fact a terrible sob of pain. The white gash that has ripped open her cheek, from chin to temple, is already filling with blood… That night in the house, heavy with the silence of an aborted celebration, Olga ponders once more the uncertain and changing rules of the game they call life. Li is what the others call "a daughter of poor parents." According to all the storybooks, to common sense, and to the noble sentiments their childhood was reared on, Li deserved a wonderful compensation as a reward for her goodness and her modesty. And there she was atrociously wounded for life… So had they been right to turn the grandmother's portrait upside down? No doubt this wound is a nod and a wink addressed to them by life, by this real, complicated, hidden, provocative, pitiless, mocking life, that delights in thumbing its nose at decent sentiments.

Olga thinks she is getting to the heart of this life's logic: "If I hadn't dropped Li's magic wand in the doorway of the room where the peasant and the bat were embracing, the man wouldn't have sneered at her in front of everyone at the fireworks; he wouldn't have said, 'That magician sticks his nose in where he has no business and listens at doors.' Li wouldn't have heard that hurtful and unfair remark. Her hands would not have trembled. And the rocket would have gone up into the sky… So everything depended on the caprice of that little stick of wood rolling on the floor!"

"Li wouldn't have been disfigured if that counterfeit peasant and the bat hadn't been yoked together by desire…" Four years later in the spring of 1916 she says it again. Like the century, she is sixteen. Meanwhile her uncle has committed suicide, the estate has been sold, the old mansion razed to the ground, the garden destroyed. Where the house once stood all that is left is the rectangle of the foundations, covered in weeds. Little red beetles run along the worm-eaten timbers and across the granite flagstones colored with yellow lichen. And above it all in the springtime void of the sky the eye cannot help seeing again, as in a mirage, the vanished house, the windows that look so alive, the four columns of the facade, the wooden walls, blackened with time. Perplexed, she thinks she can recognize the arrangement of the rooms and the direction of the corridors in this transparent house. This great cube of air contains an unimaginable density of lives from long ago, a long sequence of generations: the chamber where her grandmother's coffin rests for three days; the noise of the parties, and that whole avalanche of words that were ephemeral but could inspire happiness or break hearts; all the nights of love; all the births; even that room, lost in the intersection of galleries and corridors-the one where a man in peasant costume gazes blearily at a woman whose panting gasps keep time with the rhythm of pleasure. And the bed on which a young girl lies, from whose face they will shortly remove the dressings already loosened by her impatient hand…