Yves could clearly see the outline of her breasts, firm and very shapely; her waist was supple and strong, the kind of figure belonging to young women who had never worn a corset, women who walked a lot and have always danced; she looked both energetic and delicate, and vaguely reminded him of the figure of a Greek woman running, without bending her body, beneath the weight of a large clay jug held high on her shoulder. This was how she carried her beautiful child, and she was both very natural and very beautiful against this natural and beautiful background. Yves pushed himself up on to his elbows with an odd sense of anxiety: he wanted to get a better look at her when she passed him; he wanted to see every detail of her face and finally, he did: it was suntanned and almost as bronzed as her little girl’s, with a round, dimpled chin, moist, red parted lips that must have smelled of salt and sea spray, an open, rather stern expression that you find in children and, sometimes, in very young women. Then he saw her short black hair, dishevelled by the biting sea breeze over a smooth little forehead; those locks – so messy and unruly – resembled the marble curls on Greek statues of young boys. She was really very pretty. She had already disappeared inside a beach tent. He was disappointed, because he hadn’t had a chance to see the colour of her eyes.

A few seconds later he climbed back up the garden of the hotel; the fresh air and sun made him feel rather dizzy and gave him a slight, but persistent, annoying headache. He walked slowly and half closed his eyes but couldn’t manage to blot out the awful light that seemed to filter through his eyelids, making it difficult to see: he was used to the pale colours of the Paris sky. He went into the foyer and there, the first thing he saw was the little girl who had thrown sand at him; she was bouncing up and down, laughing loudly, on the knee of a man dressed all in white. Yves looked at him and thought he recognised him; he asked the bellboy who operated the lift if he knew the man’s name.

‘Monsieur Jessaint,’ the boy replied.

‘I do know him,’ Yves thought.

He didn’t doubt for a moment that the man was the husband of the beautiful creature he had seen on the beach; but instead of being pleased at this bit of fortuitous luck that would allow him to meet her in a quick, simple and convenient way, he grumbled with all the illogical reasoning that comes so naturally to men: ‘Damn! More people from back there … Can’t I even have a few peaceful weeks to myself?’

3

YVES HARTELOUP WAS born in 1890, at the height of the ‘fin de siècle’, that divine, decadent era when there were still men in Paris who had absolutely nothing to do, when people were doggedly perverse and proud of their depravity, a time when, for most people, life flowed by like a narrow and calm little stream whose end could be envisaged from its beginnings, a smooth and even course whose length could more or less be predicted.

Yves’s father was a member of a ‘special club’, as they were called at the time, a pure-bred Parisian who led the leisured yet bustling existence of all his peers; he had two passions, though: women and horses. Both had given him the same heady sensation of wild abandon and danger. Thanks to horses, and thanks to women, he could say, as he lay dying, that he had never left Paris except to go to Nice or Trouville, having never known any world other than the grands boulevards, the horse races and the Bois de Boulogne. Having limited his attention to women’s eyes and his desires to their lips, when dying, he could tell the priest, who was promising him eternal life: ‘What use is that to me? All I want is peace. I’ve experienced everything else.’

Yves was eighteen when his father died. He clearly remembered his soft hands, his tender, slightly mocking smile, the faint, annoying perfume that always followed him, as if the folds of his clothing had retained the sweet smell of all the women he’d made love to. Yves looked like him: he had the same bright, striking eyes and beautiful hands designed to be idle and make love; but his father’s eyes had been so sharp, so passionately alive, while in his son they were sometimes lifeless, so full of world-weariness and apprehension, as dark as deep water …

Yves also remembered his mother extremely well, even though he had lost her when he was very young; every morning his governess took him to see her in her room, while her hair was being done. She wore delicate peignoirs with frills and flounces of lace that made the sound of birds taking flight when she walked. He even recalled the black satin corsets that shaped her pretty, slim figure into the hourglass silhouette demanded by the fashion of the day, and her red hair and rosy complexion.

He’d had the happy childhood of a little rich boy who was healthy and pampered. His parents loved him, worried about him, and since they believed they could foresee the future life he would surely lead – free, wealthy, never needing to work – they made an effort to instil in him, from an early age, a taste for beauty, a way of thinking that dignified life, as well as a thousand subtle nuances of elegance and luxury that enhance that existence and give rise to unsurpassed pleasure. So Yves grew up learning to love beautiful things and how to spend money, how to dress, how to ride a horse, to fence and also – thanks to his father’s discreet example – how to regard women as the only worthwhile worldly possession, how to see sensuality as an art and life as elegant, light-hearted and beautiful, from which the wise man should take only joy.

At the age of eighteen, having finished his studies, Yves found himself an orphan and quite a wealthy one. Forced into relative solitude because he was in mourning, he began to get bored, vaguely thought about starting a university degree, then got the idea to travel, for he was different from his father in that respect, different from his father’s entire generation in that the world was not limited to the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Sentier de la Vertu in the Bois de Boulogne; he had a keen sense of curiosity about foreign lands which his father had mockingly labelled ‘romantic’. So Yves spent several months in England, dreamed of a trip to Japan that never materialised, visited some small dead old German villages, spent a few wonderful, peaceful days in Siena and the spring in Spain, inspired to go there by his happiest childhood memories of Hendaye, on the Spanish border, in an ancient house that belonged to his parents, and where he and his governess used to be sent to spend the summer holidays. He travelled constantly for a little more than two years, finally returning to Paris at the beginning of 1911. He settled there once and for all, arranging to do his military service in Versailles. The next two or three passed years quickly and calmly. He remembered them now as one recalls certain springtimes: brief, full of sunshine and fleeting love affairs, which all seem so empty yet enchanting. And then, abruptly, war exploded right into his existence, like a thunderbolt straight out of a blue sky.

1914: his departure, initial enthusiasm, the horrors of death. 1915: cold, hunger, mud in the trenches, death becoming a familiar companion who walks alongside you and sleeps in your dugout. 1916: more cold, filth, death. 1917: exhaustion, resignation, death … A long, long nightmare … Some of those who had survived, the calm middle-class men, had returned unchanged; they slid back into their former way of life, their former state of mind, as they slid back into their old slippers.