taken place in the mairie and the church at Mouans-Sartoux. Many of the local inhabitants came to it, more with an air of being there out of curiosity than of taking part in the ceremony.
Though Emile had been virtually adopted by the locality, the others, including Berthe, remained strangers.
For business reasons, there had been no honeymoon. Quite simply, after the feast which went on quite late into the night, Emile and Berthe had gone upstairs into the bedroom once occupied by Big Louis and his wife.
'For my last two nights here I will have your room,' Madame Harnaud had said to her daughter.
It was as striking as a transfer of power. They were henceforth to occupy the room of the grown-ups, the parents, with the walnut bed, the cupboard with the looking-glass, the chest-of-drawers.
Emile, who had drunk too much—everybody had drunk too much, except Berthe—had tried, as he was undressing, to make a short speech to his wife. Wouldn't it be useful to settle their respective positions once and for all?
With the help of the wine and the liqueurs, he had imagined, during the evening, a kind of preliminary declaration.
'You've got what you wanted. Here we are married. From tonight onwards . . .'
He had thought up whole sentences, which appeared magnificent to him at the time, but which he had already forgotten.
There remained one thing he wanted to tell her, a declaration which he did not have the courage to make.
'Since we are married, I shall make love to you. But I had better admit to you right away that. . .'
One cannot say that to one's wife, not even to a girl one meets casually. It was nonetheless true. He felt no desire for her. He was obliged to make an effort. Was it his fault if, even though there was no resemblance between the two women, she made him think of his mother ?
Fortunately the day had exhausted Berthe. She was strained, worn out. It was she who had murmured:
'Not tonight . . .'
This was a sign too: it was going to be for her to decide which nights he would make love to her and which nights they would go to bed without doing anything.
He was not unhappy. The proof is that next morning when he came downstairs ahead of everybody else and opened the kitchen shutters, he felt the same joy as on other days at looking at the countryside, the pale green of the two olive trees and the darker green of the pines in the sun, the golden shimmer of the water in the roadstead of La Napoule and the two pigeons cooing near the door.
They were not the same pigeons as they had now. The couples had succeeded one another, generation after generation. From time to time, instead of eating the young ones, they ate the old. The idea was for there always to be a couple to coo around the house, for it pleased the guests to see them caressing one another with their beaks and swelling their crops.
Madame Harnaud had decided to come and spend a month on the Riviera every year, in winter for preference, when there were no guests and when, too, the weather at Luçon was at its most disagreeable. It was written into the agreement they had accepted, and if she had not thought of this precaution herself, Palud had taken it on her behalf.
Her first inspection, in November, had been of her daughter's belly. A short while later, alone with her, she had murmured, not without an unexpressed reproach:
'I was hoping to find you in an interesting condition.'
This was to become an old refrain, an obsession. In all her letters there was a similar sentence:
'. . . Above all, don't fail to write as soon as you have hopes in that direction . . .'
The second winter there had been something like suspicion in the gaze she allowed to fall, no longer on her daughter, but on her son-in-law. And, towards the end of her stay, she had no longer been able to contain herself.
They were in the middle of a meal. It was still old Paola who was serving them. War had already been declared between her and Berthe, a veiled warfare, without