It had been his dream (hat the downstairs should remain the private domain of the Surins, husband and wife, where Maria-Barbara might be willing to forget for a while that she was a mother and become a wife again. But those attics, all warm and untidy and privately ordered to suit the personality of each of their inhabitants and the mesh of his relationships with the rest, had an irresistible fascination for her. As her children grew up and escaped her, she would find them all again in this friendly muddle and lose herself in all their different stages of play or sleep. Edouard would have to send Méline to look for her before she would come down to him again.

On the other side of the road, St. Brigitte’s, a home for handicapped children, shared with the textile factory the buildings of the old Charterhouse of the Guildo, dissolved in 1796. The children had the domestic offices—the old dormitories, refectories, workrooms, infirmary, and administrative offices—as well, of course, as having the use of the gardens which sloped gently downhill toward La Cassine. The factory workshops, for their part, occupied the abbot’s palace, the cloister and surrounding officers’ quarters, the farm, the stables and the church, whose spire, covered with golden lichen, is visible from Matignon to Ploubalay.

The Charterhouse of the Guildo had its finest hour during the disastrous uprising of the Whites in 1795. The landing of a royalist army at Carnac on the twenty-seventh of June had been preceded by a diversionary action in the Bay of Arguenon in which a party of armed men landed in advance, inflicted heavy losses on the republican forces and then retreated into the abbey, where the chapter was on their side. But Hoche’s victory over Cadoudal and his allies sealed the fate of the Chouans in the Guildo, prevented by low tide from re-embarking in time. The abbey was taken by storm on the eve of the fourteenth of July and the fifty-seven White prisoners shot and buried in a mass grave in the cloister. The dissolution order issued in the following year only made official a closure of the Charterhouse which had been a fact ever since the departure of the monks.

The factory had put its offices in the chapter rooms. The cloister had been lightly roofed over to make a storeroom for bales of cloth and bobbin cases, while the recently installed mattress shop had been relegated to the old stables, which had been roughly restored. The heart of the factory dwelt in the nave of the church, where twenty-seven looms purred away, operated by a swarm of girls in gray overalls, their hair bound up in colored scarves.

Thus the factory, St. Brigitte’s, and, lower down, on the other side of the lane leading down to the beach at Quatre Vaux, La Cassine, the home of the great tribe of Surins, together made up the Pierres Sonnantes, a rather disparate collection which only the force of habit and everyday living bound together into an organic whole. The Surin children were quite at home in the workrooms and at St Brigitte’s, and people had grown used to seeing the St. Brigitte’s children roaming about the factory and mingling with the household at La Cassine.

One of these, Franz, was for a time the twins’ inseparable companion. But it was Maria-Barbara who was fondest of the retarded children. She fought with what strength she could muster against the formidably powerful appeal this sickly, helpless flock, with its animal simplicity, had for her. Time and again in the house or the garden, she would feel lips pressed to her straying hand. Then, moving gently, she would stroke a head or a neck, not looking at the frog-like face lifted worshipfully to hers. She had to fight against it, hold herself back, because she knew the insidious, irresistible, implacable force that the hill of the innocents could exert. She knew it by the example of a handful of women who had come, sometimes by chance, for a short while, for a term, out of curiosity or a teacher’s professional interest to gain an insight into the methods being used with handicapped children. There would be an initial period of familiarization, during which the newcomer would have to struggle to overcome the repugnance which, in spite of herself, the ugliness, clumsiness and sometimes the sheer dirtiness of the children inspired in her, and which was all the more depressing because, however abnormal, they were not ill, the majority being actually healthier than most normal children, as though nature had tried them hard enough and was exempting them from ordinary ailments. Nevertheless, the poison was acting unconsciously and pity, dangerous, many-armed, and tyrannical, was enveloping its victim’s heart and mind. Some left, desperately wrenching free while there might still be time to tear themselves away from the deadly hold and in the future have nothing but well-balanced relationships with normal, healthy, self-possessed men and women. But the innocents’ formidable weakness would overcome this last spasmodic attempt and they would return, defeated, obedient to St. Brigitte’s mute yet imperious summons, knowing themselves captives for life from that time on, yet still making the excuse of further training, additional research, projected studies that deceived no one.

         

By marrying Maria-Barbara, Edouard had become the managing director and principal shareholder of the textile works of the Pierres Sonnantes, since his father-in-law promptly laid down the burden of it. Yet it would have come as a great surprise to him had anyone told him he was marrying for money, so much was he in the habit of taking it for granted that his interests and inclinations should coincide. Moreover, the business very quickly turned out something of a severe disappointment. In fact, the factory’s twenty-seven looms were of an out-of-date type and the only hope of rescuing the business lay in investing a fortune in new machinery.