He stood there gaping. It was a clear evening, he could see her distinctly outlined in the window’s shadowy frame.

When she thought she had won him, she glanced down into the small square. And, in a strained voice: ‘Come,’ she said simply.

He came. He went downstairs, walked over to the house. As he was looking up, the front door half opened, that door which had been locked and bolted for perhaps half a century, and whose hinged leaves had been bound together by moss. But he walked along in a stupor, no longer surprised at anything. The moment he went in, the door closed behind him, and he was led along by a small icy hand. He went upstairs, along a corridor, across a first room, and finally found himself in a bedroom that he recognised. It was paradise, the room with the pink silk curtains. The daylight was dwindling away slowly and gently. He was tempted to fall to his knees. But Thérèse was standing bolt upright in front of him, her hands tightly clasped, so full of resolve that she managed to repress the shudders that were running up and down her.

‘Do you love me?’ she asked in a low voice.

‘Oh yes! Oh yes!’ he stammered.

But she signalled him not to waste his breath on useless babble. She resumed, in a haughty tone that seemed to make her words natural and chaste as they came from her girlish lips: ‘If I gave myself to you, you’d do anything, wouldn’t you?’

Unable to reply, he folded his hands together. For a kiss from her, he would sell his soul.

‘Well, I’ve got a favour to ask you.’

As he remained dumb, she broke out into sudden violence, feeling utterly exhausted and sensing that she might soon run out of courage. She cried, ‘Look, we’ve got to swear to it first… I swear to keep my side of the bargain… Go on, you swear too!’

‘Oh, I swear! Oh, whatever you want!’ he said, in a moment of total self-abandonment.

The pure clean smell of the room made his senses swim. The curtains round the alcove were drawn to, and the mere thought of her virginal bed, in the soft shadow of pink silk, threw him into a religious ecstasy. Then, with her suddenly brutal hands, she tore apart the curtains and revealed the alcove, into which the twilight shed a sinister gleam. The bed was in disorder, the sheets trailing down, a pillow that had fallen to the ground seemed dented by tooth marks. And, in the midst of the crumpled lace, lay the body of a man, barefoot, sprawling sideways.

‘There,’ she explained in a choked voice, ‘that man was my lover… I pushed him, he fell over, I just don’t know. Anyway, he’s dead… And you’ve got to take him away. Do you understand?… That’s all, yes, that’s all. That’s what you must do!’

3

While still a little girl, Thérèse de Marsanne took Colombel for her stooge. He was barely six months older than she was, and Françoise, his mother, had ended up bottle-feeding him, so as to give her own milk to Thérèse. Later on, having grown up in the household, he took on a vague position somewhere between servant boy and playmate for the little girl.

Thérèse was an enfant terrible. It wasn’t that she was a noisy tomboy. She maintained, on the contrary, a singular gravity, which led to her being considered a well brought-up young lady by the visitors to whom she would curtsey so charmingly. But she had strange whims: she would suddenly burst out into inarticulate cries, and stamp her feet in a wild tantrum when she was alone; or she would lie on her back in the middle of one of the garden paths, and stay there, stretched out, obstinately refusing to get up, despite the punishments they sometimes decided to mete out to her.

No one could ever tell what she was thinking. Already, in those big childish eyes of hers, she extinguished every spark of life; and, in place of those clear mirrors where the souls of little girls can be seen so clearly, she had two dark holes, deep and black as ink, in which it was impossible to read.

At the age of six, she started to torture Colombel. He was small and puny. So she would lead him to the bottom of the garden, under the chestnut trees, to a place well hidden by the shade of the leaves, and leap on his back, forcing him to carry her. She straddled him for hour-long rides round a wide clump in the middle.