No, their cars have already driven off a moment ago, edging their way rapidly into the hissing stream of the freeway. It is only as he drives along, musing, that the man goes over in his mind the scene that never took place. He walks up to her, smiles: "You know, this is the first time I've come here and…" Lost amid the hurtling thrusts of the headlights, on routes that diverge farther and farther, each of them recalls the account that brought them to such a remote spot, on this freezing day: "You'll see, it's a real garden, well, more like virgin forest, there are so many trees, plants, and flowers. And each cross has a kind of tiny window with a night-light in it." They are telling themselves they should have come in summer or autumn to see the garden; now is too late. Should I go back there one day? the man ponders. Next Sunday? Take another look at those deserted avenues, those dark branches against the evening sky, that woman who… He shakes himself. Too late. The city swallows him into its dark, shifting complexity, streaked with red and yellow. Before racking his brains for a pretext to justify his escapade in the eyes of his loved ones, he thinks about the woman who, at this very moment, is herself somewhere being sucked down into the mighty flood of streets and lights. "To see her again would be as impossible as resurrecting the dead invoked by that old madman," he tells himself, summoning a grain of melancholy cynicism so as to regain a firm foothold in reality…

The old man accompanies them with his stare as far as the gate, then looks down at the name shown on the tombstone where the engraved letters stand out in the almost horizontal rays of sunlight. In the distance the sound of an engine dwindles and fades, like the trickle of sand in an hourglass.

Apart from the keeper only a tall figure remains; he seems to be vainly searching for a way out of the maze of intersecting paths and avenues. He is the very last of the visitors, quite a young man who has been coming here daily for the past three or four days. Despite the cold he is wearing a simple corduroy jacket which, with its narrow, elongated cut, recalls the dress of students in the old days. A white muffler, coarsely knitted, forms a kind of frilly ruff on his chest. He has the pale face of someone who, though chilled to the marrow, no longer feels any pain, his body having become as cold as the icy air.

He was the one just now, as he watched the visitors, who imagined their feelings, pictured their lives. First, the gawking group, then the two solitary ones who were on the brink of talking to one another and now will never meet again. He spends his own life guessing at other people's lives… A moment ago he noticed that this birch tree with two trunks had been split by yesterday's storm just at the point of the fork and that there was a risk that at any minute now the wind might enlarge the deep gash and bring down the twin trunk in a rending crash of timber. He tells himself that all the silence of the day hangs upon that mute cry. Taking a notebook out of a big satchel like a postman's, he writes in it: "The silence whose depths are plumbed by this suspended crash."

The man in the student's jacket is one of those invisible Russian exiles, increasingly isolated and shy with advancing years, who pursue a fantasy of writing and end their days in attics piled high with books, almost buried beneath the pyramids of pages that no one will have the courage to decipher. He has known several like this but tells himself that such a fate only befalls other people. In his own pyramids there will be the story of the reckless count who sold his childhood home, and that of the dancer who, as he died, called out the name of his lover, his murderer…

The old keeper lights the little night-light in the cross surmounting the grave where his evening round always concludes. It is the grave of the condemned man who wrenched himself free of "the hydra of counterrevolution." The man in the corduroy jacket heard this story yesterday, alone face to face with the old man. One detail intrigued him: the name marked on the tombstone is that of a woman. He has not dared to ask for an explanation… Now he sees a match flame shielded in the hollow of the keeper's hands, lighting them up from inside, then flaring on the wick of the night-light at the heart of the cross. The tiny glazed door closes, the sinuous flame flickers, steadies itself. The light and the sheltered warmth remind the young man so much of a long remembered room that he shivers. He is only a few steps away from the old man.

"Could you tell me about this woman?"

The old man's gaze seems to travel across long stretches of darkness, nocturnal towns long since peopled by ghosts. He is clearly trying to size up who he is dealing with: one of the inquisitive ones who come to collect two or three anecdotes? A fugitive who has escaped a family lunch and taken refuge here to gain a breathing space? Or perhaps the one whose coming he had given up hoping for?

He begins talking as he makes his way slowly toward the entrance gate that should have been locked at least an hour ago. His words are permeated by great weariness.

"Everyone would have it they were lovers. And that the death of that dubious character was murder."

It is the usual style of his stories: blunt, clear-cut, flat. All the man in the student's jacket expects is just one more anecdote. He is longing to get away, to drink a glass of warm wine, to go to bed… Suddenly the old man, as if he had sensed this desire to escape, cries out in urgent tones that can be heard almost as a plea and an apology for not knowing how to tell stories in any other way, "You're the first person I have ever told about her!"

Everyone in Villiers-la-Forêt (the men perhaps more openly than the women) wanted it to be a murder. This theory corresponded to some inescapable cliché of the imagination on the part of people who had very little, to the classic scenario of a crime of passion. Or, much more simply, to a desire to picture two naked bodies, first of all joined in love and then separated by the violence of a brief struggle and death.

Fascinated, abnormally perceptive, the townspeople held forth about the crime, invented new theories about it, and were critical of the inquiry that was making no headway. But it was really the bodies that fascinated them. For all at once their appearance amid the sleepy rural calm of Villiers-la-Forêt had to be accepted; and their nakedness, whether erotic or criminal, had to be written into the record of those idle July days that smelled of dust baked in the sun and the warm mud of the river. For such was the soft, slow landscape they burst in on: the man, his clothes drenched, stretched out on the bank, his skull smashed in. And the woman with disordered, streaming hair, her breasts bare, a woman seated beside the dying man, as still as carved stone.

It was thus that the scene had been reported by a breathless witness-the man with a stammer whom the people of Villiers called "Loo-loo," on account of his everlasting "loo-loo-look," the introductory phrase that enabled him to embark on a conversation. This rime he was so overwhelmed that his stuttering lasted longer than usual. The men on the little terrace of the Café Royal eyed him with indulgent smiles, the younger men began to parody him. His efforts and their mockery brought tears to his eyes. The combination of this frailty and his defective speech caused him to be taken for a simpleton. He managed to overcome the strangulation of his "loo-loos" sufficiently to alert the men to the presence of the two bodies beside the river. It was his tortured expression that convinced them. They got up and followed him, as you follow the barking of a dog that despairs of conveying the urgency of its summons.

For several minutes on the bank they were blinded. Everything around them was so radiant on this fine summer's afternoon. A heat haze enveloped the willow thickets in a soft, milky light. The water with flat glittering patches rippled under the tiny promontories of plants that overhung its flow here and there. The soft and dreamy sound of it made you want to stretch out in the grass and listen distractedly to the sparse notes of the birds, to the distant crowing of the cocks that carried all the way to this spot, as if better to measure its whole summery expanse. A hundred yards away a fisherman was casting his line. Even farther away along the bank you could see the old brewery building, all garlanded in strands of hops. And more distant still, toward the horizon, the first houses of the lower town clustered together; then, climbing above them, the familiar roofs of the upper town-with the dark point of the steeple, the green mass of plane trees above the station and the place where the road turned off to Paris.