Climates by André Maurois Page B

reasoning explained their behavior to me. “It’s precisely because they are seeing each other freely behind my back,” I thought, “and don’t have much left to say to each other in the evening, that they now avoid each other and make a show of hardly speaking to each other.”
    I now habitually analyzed what Odile said with frightening clairvoyance, and I found François hiding in her every sentence. Thanks to Doctor Pozzi, François was now a friend of Anatole France, and he went to the Villa Saïd every Sunday morning. I knew this. Now, in the last few weeks, Odile had taken to telling the most interesting and private stories about France. One evening when we dined withthe Thianges, Odile, who was usually so quiet and modest, astonished our friends by commenting with some verve on France’s political ideas.
    “You were dazzling, my darling!” I told her afterward. “You’ve never talked to me about all that. How did you know about it?”
    “Me?” she asked, both pleased and worried. “Was I dazzling? I didn’t notice.”
    “It’s not a crime, Odile, don’t be defensive. Everyone thought you were very intelligent … Who taught you all that?”
    “I don’t really know. It was the other day, taking tea somewhere, someone who knew Anatole France.”
    “But who?”
    “Oh, I can’t remember … I can’t see that it matters.”
    Poor Odile! She did make such blunders. She wanted to keep to her usual tone of voice, not to say anything that might give her away, but still her new love was just beneath the surface of her every utterance. It reminded me of flooded meadows that still look intact at a glance, the grass seems to standtall and vigorous, but every step you take reveals the treacherous layer of water already seeping into the soil. Though attentive to direct indicators such as naming François de Crozant, she did not see the indirect indicators that flashed over and above her own words and paraded his name for all to see like great illuminated signs. For me who knew Odile’s tastes, ideas, and beliefs so well, it was at once easy, interesting, and painful to watch them swiftly altering. Without being very pious, she had always been a believer; she went to mass every Sunday. She now said, “Oh, I’m like the Greeks in the fourth century B.C . I’m a pagan,” words I could attribute to François as surely as if he had signed them. She would say, “What
is
life? Forty paltry years spent on a lump of mud. And you expect us to waste a single minute being bored for no gain?” And I thought, “François’s philosophy, and a rather vulgar philosophy to boot.” Sometimes I needed a moment’s thought to spot the link between some newfound interest of hers that struck me as out of the ordinary and the true object of her thoughts. For example, she who never read a newspaper spotted the headline, “Forest Fires in the South,” and snatched the page from my hand.
    “Are you interested in forest fires, Odile?”
    “No,” she said, rejecting the newspaper and handing it back to me. “I just wanted to see where it was.”
    I then remembered the little house surrounded by pine forests that François owned near Beauvallon.
    Like a child playing hunt-the-thimble who puts the trinket he wants to hide in the middle of the room, on the carpet, right under everyone’s nose, making them all smile indulgently, Odile was almost touching with her endless naïve precautions. When she relayed a fact she had learned from one of her friends or one of our relations, she always named her informer. When this was François, though, she would say: “Someone … Someone told me … I’ve heard that …” She sometimes displayed an incredible knowledge of naval facts. She knew we were to have a new faster cruiser or a new type of submarine or that the English fleet would be coming to Toulon. People were amazed.
    “That’s not in the papers …” they said.
    Terrified and realizing that she had said too