They disentangle themselves. The world about them is taking possession of their senses again. They stir and the two faces, responding differently to the call of the outside world, become those of two brothers, Paul’s confident, willful, autocratic, Jean’s restless, open, inquisitive.

Jean-Paul sits up and says: “I’m hungry.” It is Paul who speaks but Jean, nestling behind him and like him looking up at Maria-Barbara, accompanies the cry, which thus becomes a joint effort.

Maria-Barbara takes an apple from a wicker basket and gives it to Paul. The child rejects it with a look of surprise. She takes a silver knife and cuts the fruit in two, holding it in her left hand. The blade crunches into the circle of five tiny shriveled petals that lies in the hollow on the underside of the apple. A little white foam froths the edges of the skin where the knife has cut it. The two halves fall apart, still held together by the short, woody stem. The moist, pulpy flesh encloses a horny, heart-shaped chamber with two brown, shiny pips set in it. Maria-Barbara gives a half to each twin. They study their pieces intently and, without a word, exchange them. She does not attempt to understand the meaning of this little ritual, knowing only that it does not spring simply from a childish whim. With their mouths full, the twins embark on one of their long, mysterious confabulations in the secret language known in the family as Aeolian. Waking has divided them for an instant, wrenching them out of the confusion of sleep. Now they are re-creating their geminate intimacy by adjusting the direction of their thoughts and feelings and by this exchange of caressing sounds which can be heard as words, wails, laughter or simply signals, whichever you like.

A red spaniel bounds across the grass and prances joyfully round Maria-Barbara’s “camp.” An upside-down head looms over her and a kiss lands on her forehead.

” Hello, darling.”

Now Edouard is in front of her, tall, slim, elegant, attractive, his face alight with a tender, ironical smile which he seems to be stressing with his forefinger as he strokes his clipped moustache.

“We weren’t expecting you so soon,” she says. “This is a nice surprise. Paris is beginning to pall, it seems.”

“You know I don’t go to Paris just for fun.”

He is lying. She knows it. He knows that she knows. This mirror play is their own private ritual, a reconstruction on a marital level of the great geminate game of which Jean-Paul is patiently laying down the rules, a trivial, superficial repetition, like the ancillary love affairs in plays which provide a comic echo of the sublime loves of the prince and princess.

Fifteen years earlier, Edouard made Maria-Barbara help him choose and decorate a handsome apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis. It was—he said—so that they could get away together— dine out, go to the theater. Had he forgotten—or was he merely pretending to forget—that Maria-Barbara did not enjoy going away, Paris and dining out? Out of good nature, or laziness, she fell in with the game, went, chose, signed, and decorated, but once the last workman had gone she never went near the Ile Saint-Louis again, leaving Edouard a clear field for his business engagements. These multiplied and lengthened rapidly. Edouard would disappear for weeks on end, leaving Maria-Barbara to her children and the weaving sheds of the Pierres Sonnantes—the Sounding Stones—to the foreman, Guy Le Plorec. On the surface at least, she accepted these absences, absorbed in her gardening, keeping an eye on the weather, the big aviary, her host of children, with some of the backward ones from St Brigitte’s always in among them, and most of all the twins, whose radiant presence was enough to satisfy her.

She rises and with Edouard’s help gathers up the familiar things that are a traditional part of her afternoons in the deck chair. Her glasses, folded on top of a novel—the same one for months past—the basket in which she keeps her knitting, pointless now, since she is unlikely to have another child, her shawl, fallen on the grass, which she throws around her shoulders. Then, leaning on Edouard’s arm and leaving the chairs, tables and hammock for Méline to put away, she trudges up the rough zigzag path to La Cassine with the babbling twins racing ahead.

La Cassine is a large, not particularly interesting building, like most of the houses of eastern Brittany, starting as a modest old farmhouse and elevated at the end of the last century by the owners of the Pierres Sonnantes to the status of a gentleman’s residence. It retains from its humble past its cob walls—granite showing only on the corners, in the framework of doors and windows and in the cellar—a steeply pitched roof on which the thatch has been replaced by gray slate and an outside staircase leading up to the loft. This Edouard has converted to house the children and it is lit by four jutting dormer windows. Edouard has consigned all his offspring to these attics where he himself has not ventured three times in twenty years.