People were arriving, alerted who knows how, greeting one another with furtive little nods; and the whole crowd, composed of neighbors, acquaintances, and relations, froze before this inconceivable sight: a man lying there with a broad brown mark on his bald head, his mouth open, his eyes glassy; and a woman seated on a great worm-eaten tree stump, washed up by the river, a woman whose beauty and lack of modesty hurt your eyes.

And this was the sensation experienced by everyone on that bank. An ocular discomfiture, as if an eyelash had slipped under your eyelid and blurred your vision. This dead man whom no one dared to touch before the police arrived, this woman with her breasts scarcely hidden by a few shreds of cloth-two extraterrestrials landed on this day in the summer of 1947, the summer which all the newspapers had proclaimed to be that of "the first real vacation of peacetime."

Amid this uneasy stasis a movement was finally made that broke the spell. An old lady bent forward and removed a long, fine strand of waterweed that clung to the dead man's brow. Releasing all its pent-up energy, the crowd erupted into an angry hissing: nothing must move before the police got there! And at last it became clear to them that the whole scene really was happening. In a book, as several people remarked, everything would have been resolved much more quickly. But in the reality of that banal July day there was this long wait, extending absurdly beyond any acceptable limit. There was the strand of weed and the shirt that finally dried on the victim's body. Groups formed; words even more pointless than usual were uttered; "Loo-loo" wept; the men directed increasingly bold stares at the half naked breasts of the unmoving woman. And when they managed to tear their eyes away from the drowned man, with his face covered in duckweed, to which they were attracted, as if magnetically, it was the figure of the postman on his bike that could be seen in the distance. Such was the nauseating equanimity of real life, that has no concern with plot development and often actually ruins it with its glutinous slowness.

This ponderousness of reality also extended as far as the identification of the couple. "But that woman," many were to murmur. "I've seen her hundreds of times! You know, she works in the library at that Russian old folks' home… That's it. She's the one who came to Villiers later than the others, just before the war…"

As for the man, they recognized him as the elderly Russian who could sometimes be seen bent over a little vegetable garden that sloped down to the river. A man of few words who lived unobtrusively His mouth, currently wide open, seemed like life's last joke at the expense of his taciturn character.

A few Russians among the crowd were also eager to contribute to the identification of the two individuals. So it was that in the whispering that passed from one group to another, the name of Olga Arbyelina came to be disclosed. Then that of Sergei Golets. With these titles: Princess Arbyelina; Golets, former officer in the White Army. For the French townspeople such minutiae had the old-fashioned ring of titles like "Marquis" and "Vicomtesse" in a forgotten play of the romantic era. They paid much more attention to the young fisherman. He came running up holding a shoe that was missing from Golets's left foot. Nobody knew what to do with the shoe… As before, they could hear the rippling of the warm water, the distant crowing of cocks. And, without knowing how to formulate it, some of them were struck by this disconcerting thought: So, if it were me stretched out on the ground there, with my mouth open, instead of this poor Russian, yes, if like him I had just died, it would have had no effect on the sunshine, the grass, the lives of all these people, their Sunday-afternoon walk. This warm, sunny posthumous world, smelling of reeds and waterweed, seemed more terrifying than any hell. But there were very few to pursue this line of thought to its logical conclusion. In any case, the police were arriving at last.

The disquiet provoked in the people of Villiers by the excessive radiance of the day that had greeted the tragedy on the riverbank faded away with the first stages of the inquiry. Now they all turned to reconstructing the facts, but setting off in the opposite direction from that chosen by the investigating magistrate. He was seeking to discover if there had been a crime or not. For them, the murder was not in doubt. Thus all they had to do was to yoke together as a pair of lovers the man and woman they had come upon one Sunday in July thanks to Loo-loo. And it was the challenge of this emotional and physical pairing that set all their brains in a ferment at Villiers-la-Forêt. For, as with those married couples who provoke the question: "What on earth brought them together?" it was impossible to imagine a conjunction between two more dissimilar natures.

Even their faces, their complexions, the expressions in their eyes, were opposed, like fragments of a mosaic that do not fit and, if forced together, disrupt the whole picture. A woman of forty-six, tall and beautiful, her abundant hair tinged slightly with gray, with features whose regularity, cool and detached, matched those of cameo portraits. A man of sixty-four with a broad face, animated by complacent joviality, a bald pate, sunburned and glistening, and a look full of self-assurance: a stocky man, with short, broad forearms and square yellow fingernails.

But what is more, you had to picture them together (this was a fact the inquiry would subsequently establish) in a rowboat out on the sunlit river. You had to bring them together on this improbable amorous excursion, see them land and settle in the grass behind the willow thickets. See the man set down on the ground a large bottle of wine he had been shading from the heat under the seat of the boat in the water stagnating on the old timbers. An hour later they had climbed back into the boat and, with the oars abandoned, were drifting toward the fateful spot, level with the ruined bridge, where the tragedy was to occur: the spot where the woman, according to her own muddled confession, had caused the death of her companion; or where the latter, according to the theory favored by the inquiry, had drowned, the victim of his own clumsiness, the drink, and an unfortunate collision with a pillar.

For uninvolved spectators every crime of passion acquires a covertly theatrical interest. The townspeople of Villiers-la-Forêt, once the shock of the first minutes had passed, discovered this diverting aspect, although its attractions had to be concealed behind a grave exterior. They applied themselves to the game with a will. The tedium of their daily lives encouraged this but so did the progress of the inquiry itself. Examinations of witnesses, confrontations, searches, seizures- the mere use of these terms in breathless discussions offered each of them a new and unexpected role, uprooting them from their stations in life as baker, schoolteacher, or pharmacist. Indeed the pharmacist (who had remained idle since his pharmacy was destroyed by mistake in an Allied bombing raid) no longer spoke anything but this language, halfway between case law and a detective novel, as if it satisfied his taste for Latin terminology.

The fact of having to take the oath before giving evidence also had considerable importance. To the point where the youth who had been fishing at the moment of the tragedy emphatically insisted on repeating before the investigating magistrate the formula "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," although his age exempted him from this.

The drowning of Golets, through accident or foul play, had quickly become an inexhaustible subject of conversation for the people of Villiers, since the progress of the inquiry always kept it fresh. In particular, it was a topic for all occasions, one that abolished the invisible frontier between upper town and lower town, between groups that hitherto had no contact with one another, and worked wonders in bringing strangers together. This whole verbal ferment was, in truth, based on few material facts. Thanks to the "no secrets" of small towns it was learned that the search of Golets's home had only brought to light a pistol with a single cartridge in the magazine, a collection of bow ties (some people mistakenly reported this as a collection of bows and arrows), and brief notes written on scraps of paper recording someone's visits to Paris. As for the Princess Ar-byelina, no one had ever seen her in the company of this man. One witness, it is true, had seen them going together into the long shooting gallery, a kind of fairground booth in the big park in the upper town. But this visit, objected others, had only taken place shortly before the boat trip. Suddenly, within the space of a few hours, their adventure had become possible. What action, what word (coming from the man? from the woman?) had made it so?