they’d know she’d spent the morning in the woods because her dresses would be torn by twigs and pinecones and completely ruined by sap from the trunks. When she grew up, her parents got worried: Mademoiselle Michaud saw doctors and the odd apprentice psychoanalyst, because it was incomprehensible to people that a nineteen-year-old girl would spend the whole day by herself instead of seeing her friends. No one understood why she could never be found in the same room of the spacious house; no one understood why she would squander her summers wandering around the three hectares like a cat marking her territory. The war broke out, and Mademoiselle Michaud gained sudden importance in the functioning of Les Houx: during the nightly bombing raids, when the whole country’s electricity was cut so the planes could not locate their targets, she was the only one who could find things lost in the darkness, or cross the property from one end to the other if the horses needed feeding or a message needed to be taken to the steward. All this determined that, in 1949, when the girls’ father died, their mother, who until then had taken little interest in such matters, entrusted the administration of the estate to the only person who could obtain satisfactory results; and Mademoiselle Michaud had the perfect excuse to forget or overlook the eagerness for marriage of the young men of Ferrières or Liège or even Louvain. In that state, which for her approached paradise, she was able to remain for several years. The house had never known—nor would it know—such splendor.
In 1958, Sara received a visit from Jan, a young man from Flanders whose surname no one could quite remember: neither her mother, due to lack of effort, nor her sister, due to self-absorption and indifference. Every Tuesday and every Saturday for two years he was seen arriving in a rosewood-colored Studebaker—which he parked in front of the house, where their father had parked since he bought his first car—and leaving as soon as night began to fall. He rarely crossed paths with Mademoiselle Michaud in the house: as soon as she saw his car come through the gate, she disappeared. She found the man unpleasant from the first moment, and frankly repulsive from the summer Saturday when he arrived, not in the afternoon but before midday, with a crew of assistants carrying measuring sticks. Mademoiselle Michaud, from various corners of the property, watched them taking inventory, measuring the side that bordered the road, the area of the woods and the fields on which nobody had built anything, or ever thought of building anything. The following Saturday, further measurements were taken, following the same routine; and when she came inside, that night, Mademoiselle Michaud sat down facing her mother, who was calmly reading
The Red and the Black
. That trivial detail would stay with Mademoiselle Michaud forever, because at no point in the conversation did her mother close the book or even rest it in her lap to talk. With the book open in front of her, the leather spine facing the anxious daughter, her mother explained that Jan (and she made an attempt at pronouncing his surname) had asked for Sara’s hand: she had found no reasons to turn him down and more than one to accept. Their father being dead, the decision fell to her and was not up for discussion. They would be married early the following spring. The first week of April seemed to everyone an excellent moment.
Mademoiselle Michaud began a slow study, which she herself perhaps did not even notice and whose object was Sara’s future husband. This might be called intuition, but also mistrust: the mistrust of a woman (because by then, Mademoiselle Michaud was a woman) who had never had much to do with human beings; whose friendly connections, in essence, had always been with the objects of the house, the beams of a ceiling and the carpets, the whitewash on the walls and the gravel of the courtyard or the wood of the
In 1958, Sara received a visit from Jan, a young man from Flanders whose surname no one could quite remember: neither her mother, due to lack of effort, nor her sister, due to self-absorption and indifference. Every Tuesday and every Saturday for two years he was seen arriving in a rosewood-colored Studebaker—which he parked in front of the house, where their father had parked since he bought his first car—and leaving as soon as night began to fall. He rarely crossed paths with Mademoiselle Michaud in the house: as soon as she saw his car come through the gate, she disappeared. She found the man unpleasant from the first moment, and frankly repulsive from the summer Saturday when he arrived, not in the afternoon but before midday, with a crew of assistants carrying measuring sticks. Mademoiselle Michaud, from various corners of the property, watched them taking inventory, measuring the side that bordered the road, the area of the woods and the fields on which nobody had built anything, or ever thought of building anything. The following Saturday, further measurements were taken, following the same routine; and when she came inside, that night, Mademoiselle Michaud sat down facing her mother, who was calmly reading
The Red and the Black
. That trivial detail would stay with Mademoiselle Michaud forever, because at no point in the conversation did her mother close the book or even rest it in her lap to talk. With the book open in front of her, the leather spine facing the anxious daughter, her mother explained that Jan (and she made an attempt at pronouncing his surname) had asked for Sara’s hand: she had found no reasons to turn him down and more than one to accept. Their father being dead, the decision fell to her and was not up for discussion. They would be married early the following spring. The first week of April seemed to everyone an excellent moment.
Mademoiselle Michaud began a slow study, which she herself perhaps did not even notice and whose object was Sara’s future husband. This might be called intuition, but also mistrust: the mistrust of a woman (because by then, Mademoiselle Michaud was a woman) who had never had much to do with human beings; whose friendly connections, in essence, had always been with the objects of the house, the beams of a ceiling and the carpets, the whitewash on the walls and the gravel of the courtyard or the wood of the
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