And there he would remain, in the midst of this great calm, held in its charm and reflecting vaguely that the Chanteclair must be as happy as he was, gliding continually over the same waterweeds, in such a pleasant silence. When the stars came out, he would go home to bed, his lungs filled with freshness.

These weren’t by any means the only pleasures Julien indulged in. On his days off, he would set out on foot by himself, happily walking for miles and coming back exhausted. He had also made friends with a mute wood-carver: arm in arm they would stroll up and down the riverside walk for entire afternoons, without even exchanging a sign. At other times, ensconced in the back of the Café des Voyageurs, he and the mute would get stuck into interminable games of draughts, punctuated by long periods of immobility while they planned their moves. He had once had a dog that had got run over by a carriage, and he remembered him with such religious devotion that he didn’t want any more pets. At the post office, they teased him about a kid girl, a ten-year-old, barefooted ragamuffin who sold boxes of matches: he would give her a big handful of coins without buying any of her wares; but he was cross at being noticed and made sure no one was watching when he slipped her the money. He was never seen out, of an evening, with some piece of skirt on the ramparts. The working girls of P***, streetwise lasses with nothing to learn about life, had themselves ended up leaving him alone, seeing him choked with shyness in their presence, convinced as he was that their friendly come-hitherish laughter was really mockery. Some of the townspeople said he was stupid, others maintained that you had to watch boys like that, the quiet ones, the loners.

Julien’s paradise, the place where he could breathe easily, was his room. Only there did he feel safe from the world. There he could stand tall, laugh to himself; and, when he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, he couldn’t get over his surprise at how young he looked. The room was huge; he had furnished it with a big settee, and a round table with two upright chairs and an armchair. But this still left room for him to walk about: the bed was set well back in the recesses of a deep alcove; a small walnut chest of drawers, between the two windows, seemed no bigger than a child’s toy. He would pace up and down, stretching his legs, never tiring of his own company. He never wrote, outside his office hours, and reading tired him. As the old woman who kept the guest house where he ate insisted on trying to educate him by lending him novels, he would bring them back to her, unable to say what was in them: such complicated stories were in his view entirely lacking in common sense. He drew a little, always the same head, a woman in profile, severe of aspect, with broad headbands and a string of pearls in her chignon. His sole passion was music. For entire evenings, he would play the flute, and this, more than anything, was his main way of relaxing.

Julien had taught himself the flute. For a long time, an old flute in yellow wood that he saw in a junk shop on the Place du Marché had been the object of some of his most intense longings. He had the money: it was just that he didn’t dare go in and buy it, for fear of looking ridiculous. Finally, one evening, he had plucked up enough courage to run off with the flute hidden under his jacket, hugged tight to his chest. Then, having closed his doors and windows, very softly so no one would hear, he had spent two years fingering his way through an old flute manual he came across in a little bookshop. Only in the last six months had he risked playing it with his windows open. He knew only old, slow, simple tunes, eighteenth-century romances, that were filled with infinite tenderness when he stuttered them out with the faltering breath of an over-emotional pupil. On warm evenings, when everyone in the neighbourhood was asleep, and this delicate melody wafted out from the big room lit by one candle, it sounded like the voice of someone in love, tremulous and low, confiding to solitude and night what it would never have dared say to the light of day.

Often, indeed, as he knew the tunes by heart, Julien would blow out the candle, to save expenses. In any case, he liked the shadows. Then, sitting at the window, looking out at the sky, he would play in the dark. People going by would look up to see where this music was coming from, so frail and so beautiful, like the distant trills of a nightingale.