She does not want to. She refuses to count them, just as she has refused for years to comprehend the increasing reproach, the veiled threat in the faces of those around her. Sterilized. The birth of the twins necessitated a brief period of anesthesia. Had they taken advantage of it to commit the horrible act upon her? Had Edouard lent himself to the conspiracy? It is a fact that she has had no more children since. Her maternal vocation seems to have worn itself out with that double birth. Normally she begins to grow restless as soon as her latest-born is weaned. She is one of those women who are never really happy unless they are pregnant or breast-feeding. But her twins might be said to have given her ultimate fulfillment. Perhaps there are natural mothers of twins, each of whose children is only half complete until matched by an identical brother …

A chorus of barking and laughter. Edouard has arrived. His trip to Paris must have been shorter than usual. Could he be losing his taste for jaunts to the capital as he gets older? He has gone up to La Cassine to change. Then he will come and greet Maria-Barbara. He’ll come loping up behind her deck chair. He’ll lower his face to hers and they’ll look at one another upside down. He’ll kiss her on the forehead and come and stand in front of her, tall, slim, elegant, good-looking, with a tender, ironical smile to which he seems to be pointing, stroking, his clipped moustache with the tip of one forefinger as though to draw her attention to it

Edouard is Maria-Barbara’s second husband. The first she scarcely knew. What did he the of exactly? It was at sea, certainly, because he was a second officer in the merchant marine. But by accident or disease? She can hardly remember. Perhaps he simply faded away because his wife was so absorbed in her first pregnancy that she forgot the fleeting author of it.

Her first pregnancy … It was the day the young wife knew she was expecting a child that her life really began. Before that was adolescence, parents, the waiting with the flat hungry belly. Afterward the pregnancies did not so much follow one another as merge into a single one, they became a normal, happy condition, scarcely interrupted by brief, distressing vacations. The husband, the sower of the seed, the donor of the slight flick that set the creative process in motion, mattered hardly at all.

The twins stir and moan and Maria-Barbara bends over them, moved yet again by the strange transformation that awakening works in their faces. Asleep, reverted to their most private selves, reduced to what is deepest and most unchanging in them— reduced to their common denominator—they are indistinguishable. It is the same body entwined with its double, the same visage with the same lowered eyelids presenting at once its full face and its right profile, the one chubby and tranquil, the other pure and clear-cut, and both entrenched in a mutual rejection of everything outside the other. And it is like this that Maria-Barbara feels them closest to her. Their flawless similitude is the image of the matrical limbo whence they came. Sleep gives them back the original innocence in which they are as one. The truth is that everything which divides them from each other divides them from their mother.

The wind has touched them and a single shiver runs through them.