They bow to you as though you were a queen, and your good friend M. de Mussy is all but blowing you kisses.”

Indeed, a man on horseback had been making signs in her direction. Maxime had spoken in a tone of hypocritical sarcasm. But Renée barely turned and shrugged her shoulders. This time the young man responded with a gesture of despair. “So, then, it’s as bad as that, is it? . . . But good God, you have everything, what more do you want?”

Renée raised her head. Her eyes were aglow with unslaked curiosity. “I want something different,” she muttered.

“But since you have everything,” Maxime laughed, “something different is nothing. . . . What do you mean, something different?”

“What do I mean?” she repeated.

But her voice trailed off. She had turned all the way round and was contemplating the strange tableau fading from view to her rear. Dusk came slowly, like a shower of fine ash. The lake, when viewed steadily in the pale light still lingering on the water, seemed to grow rounder, so that it resembled a huge slab of pewter. The trees lining both shores—evergreens whose straight, thin trunks seemed to surge up from the slumbering surface of the lake—at this hour took on the appearance of purplish colonnades whose regular architecture limned the studied curves of the water’s edge. Masses of foliage loomed in the distance, obscuring the horizon with broad dark patches. From behind those patches emanated a glow of embers, the light from a dying sun that set only a portion of the gray immensity aflame. Above the still lake and squat trees and singularly unrelieved vista stretched the hollow of the sky, the infinite emptiness, wider and deeper than what lay below. There was something thrilling, something vaguely sad, about such a huge expanse of sky hanging over such a tiny patch of nature. The fading heights, slumbering sadly in mellow darkness, gave off such an autumnal melancholy that the Bois, gradually enveloped in a shroud of shadow and magnified by the potent magic dwelling in the wood, shed its worldly graces. As the vivid colors of the equipages were swallowed up by darkness, the sound of hooves could be heard more distinctly, like the whisper of distant leaves or the hiss of a faraway stream. Everything was receding and dying away. Amid this universal obliteration, the lateen sail of the big excursion boat stood out clearly and vigorously against the sunset’s amber. This sail, this inordinately enlarged triangle of yellow canvas, was all that could still be seen.

Renée, for all her jadedness, experienced a singular sensation of unavowable desire at the sight of this landscape, which she no longer recognized, this tastefully fashionable piece of nature turned by the dark chill of night into a sacred wood, into one of those mythical glades in which the ancient gods hid their outsized loves, their divine adulteries and incests. As the calèche drove on, it struck her that the twilight behind her had wrapped the land of her dreams in its shimmering veils and was making off with it, snatching away the bower of illicit but superhuman love in which she might at last have assuaged her ailing heart, her weary flesh.

When the lake and the little woods, vanished into darkness, were reduced to no more than a black streak on the face of heaven, the young woman turned abruptly and in a voice marked by tears of spite took up where she had left off. “What do I mean? I mean something different, for heaven’s sake.