The hostility between the two brothers was made worse by a practical consideration. For old Madame Surin, having her favorite son at her side and in constant attendance on her was a comfort, certainly, and one that no one could think of denying her. But she lived on a monthly allowance made by her two elder sons, and Alexandre, inevitably, reaped the benefit of it. This situation annoyed Gustave exceedingly and he missed no opportunity of making caustic references to it accusing Alexandre of preventing his mother —for his own obvious reasons—from living in Rennes, in the midst of her granddaughters, as would have been only natural.

Edouard took care not to mention these grievances when he met Alexandre in the course of his little ritual visits to his mother, so that he came naturally to take on the role of family go-between. With Alexandre, he shared a zest for life and even for adventure, a love of things and people—although their tastes were different—and an inquiring nature which put a spring in their steps. But whereas Alexandre was forever reviling the establishment and conspiring against society, Edouard shared with Gustave an innate respect for the course of things he regarded as normal and therefore healthy, desirable and sanctified. Indeed, placed side by side, the conformist Gustave and the sanguine Edouard might easily have been confused with one another. But the thing that set the two brothers profoundly apart was the degree of feeling which Edouard brought to everything, his engaging cheerfulness, his good manners, and the innate contentment, radiant and infectious, that drew people to him and kept them there, as though they gained warmth and comfort from being with him.

The partitioned life he led had long seemed to Edouard a masterpiece of happy organization. At the Pierres Sonnantes, he devoted himself entirely to the demands of the factory and to caring for Maria-Barbara and the children. In Paris, he became the leisured, moneyed bachelor again, enjoying his second youth. But over the years even a man so little given to self-analysis was bound to recognize that each of these lives served as a mask for the other, blinding him to the emptiness and incurable melancholy which was the truth about both. Whenever the pangs of it seized him in Paris, when the end of an evening took him back to the loneliness of the big apartment with its tall, narrow windows reflecting all the lights in the Seine, he would turn with a wave of nostalgia to the warm, loving confusion of La Cassine. But at the Pierres Sonnantes, when he had got himself dressed for no purpose except to go to his office at the factory, he would contemplate the day yawning interminably ahead of him and be seized with a fever of impatience, so that he had to force himself not to make a dash for Dinan, where there was still time to catch the Paris express. At first he had felt vaguely flattered when the people at the factory called him “the Parisian,” but the hint of disapproval and of doubts about his seriousness and competence which the nickname implied came home to him more fully year by year. In the same way, although he had long accepted with an amused smile the fact that his friends looked on him—on him, the charmer, so long-practiced in the art of dalliance—as a rich provincial, something of a sucker, ignorant of the big city which in his eyes was decked with imaginary wonders, he was beginning to be irritated by the picture they had of him, as a Breton caught by (he fleshpots of Paris, a kind of country bumpkin in clogs and a sailor hat with ribbons and a bagpipe under his arm. The truth was that if the double life which had more than satisfied him for so long was beginning to look to him like a twofold exile, a twofold uprooting, this disenchantment was a sign of his helplessness in the face of an unforeseen problem, the ominous and unthinkable prospect of growing old.

His relations with Florence mirrored this decline faithfully. He had seen her for the first time in a cabaret where she came on at the end of the evening. She recited some rather esoteric poems and sang gravely, accompanying herself skillfully on the guitar. A Greek by birth and almost certainly Jewish, the put into her words and her music something of the peculiar sadness of the Mediterranean countries, not solitary and individual like Nordic sadness but quite the opposite, a fraternal, even a tribal, family affair. Afterward, she came and sat down at the table where he was swigging champagne with some friends. Florence had amazed him with her caustic, humorous shrewdness, a trait he would have expected in a man more than a woman, and most of all by the look she gave him, sardonic and yet full of understanding. There was, certainly, something of the bumpkin in the image of himself he saw in her dark eyes, but he read in them also that he was a man made for love, his flesh so deeply imbued with heart that his very presence was a comfort and reassurance to a woman.

He and Florence had very quickly agreed to “get together for a bit,” a phrase whose easy cynicism appealed to him even while it shocked him a little. She never tired of getting him to talk about the Pierres Sonnantes, about Maria-Barbara and the children, the Arguenon coast and his own boyhood in Rennes. It was as though she, a nomad and a wanderer, were fascinated by the music of the names that cropped up in his descriptions, names redolent of seashore and moorland, like Plébouille, Rougerais, the Quinteux brook, Kerpont, Grohandais, the Guildo, the Hébihens … It was unlikely she would ever visit these remote country places, nor was such a possibility ever mentioned by either of them. The apartment on the Quai d’Anjou, where she had ventured at the start of their liaison, made her uncomfortable but she put it down to the chilly elegance, the rigid neatness and lifeless beauty of the big, empty rooms with their patterned oak floors reflecting the painted and coffered ceilings. She explained to Edouard that the house corresponded neither with the family in Brittany nor with any aspect of Paris, but was the unsuccessful result, the stillborn child, as it were, of a hopeless blend of the two.

Edouard answered her objection with arguments as contradictory as his own state of mind. The grand houses of the past, he said, were usually empty. Whenever a table, chairs, armchairs, even a commode was needed, servants would appear with the desired object. It was the increasing scarcity of domestic servants that obliged us to live in a clutter which to the contemporaries of Moliere would undoubtedly have suggested one was on the point of moving out, or else had only just moved in. And he would praise the spacious, noble beauty of sparsely furnished, high-ceilinged rooms, whose chief and subtlest glory was in the very way they gave one room to breathe and move about.