[I read this 1957 novel in three sections. As I finished reading each of these I wrote about it before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
27 January 2024
Chapters 1-9 (of 27)
This feels very post-war English middle-class. Is that a criticism? I suppose I mean that despite its wow-factor what-if? premise—shy, unfulfilled academic is tricked into exchanging identities with his far more charismatic French doppelganger—it’s all a little cosy and safe. Yes, I know that this is exactly the familiar world that du Maurier is going to overturn for her hapless narrator… but it doesn’t stop the pace being slow and over-described, while the scenes from French provincial life feeling like run-of-the-mill travel writing. Our man’s 24 hours of becoming ever more inextricably identified as an entitled, aristocratic rogue ought to be vertiginous. So why is it rather plodding?
Maybe I’ll come back to that. But I ought to mention first du Maurier’s focus on her man’s interior life. He’s suffering from an almost terminal sense of anomie—he feels his life is pointless, he seems to have no friends, he doesn’t believe in the value of any of his work as a writer and lecturer on French history. But who on earth would be satisfied with it? Du Maurier has scrupulously avoided giving him anything like a back story. He has no family, no social life that we know of, little in his life at all outside a dull round of chilly cultural pursuits. This is all well and good, marginally adding to the plausibility of his not scurrying back to the life he’s left behind in England. But, once he’s almost accidentally slipped into letting everybody believe he’s the other man—he just goes with the flow of their expectations—plausibility counts for very little. This bookish mouse of a man is remarkably resourceful, finds himself saying just the right things, often accidentally, and ends up fooling every single member of the family, and anybody else he meets. Only the dogs can tell he’s no ‘Comte de Gué,’ but an impostor.
It’s clear that du Maurier is making a point here. John—Doe, or whatever his surname might be, which we’ve never found out—finds himself able to slip into a world in which almost whatever he says is accepted. He is terribly hung-over from brandy and some ‘sleeping draught,’ and says this to Gaston, the factotum who arrives at his no-questions-asked seedy hotel room. Fine. This is just the sort of lame excuse the real Comte would come out with. People are used to accepting whatever the privileged man he is impersonating says, not because they believe it but because he’s always been allowed to get away with it. It’s as though he’s never had to live by the same rules as everyone else—a recognisable trait, as du Maurier knows, in many members of his class. Gender, a lifetime of privilege and the easy charm of those who take their entitlement for granted makes their passage through life very easy. If it might be hard to justify your actions, don’t even bother to try.
This, of course, is highly useful for du Maurier. She has set herself a task that seems impossible: to make up a preposterous ‘what if?’ McGuffin and get her readers to believe that, well, it might happen. So she’s taken us through the incremental steps our man finds himself taking, stumbling at first, and done her best to make them seem feasible. We’re not in a court of law, but a fantasy—and by the point I’ve reached, the question is less about how plausible it all is, and more about what du Maurier is going to get her man to do about the seemingly terminal mess de Gué has made of his rakish, self-indulgent life.
Like so much else, the facts reach John, and the reader, incrementally. When they meet, the Comte had been on his way back from Paris and is avoiding going home. We guess he’s been unsuccessful in some business meeting—we later discover it had been a last-chance bid to save the family business. Over several chapters, we piece together how his expensive lifestyle and carelessness over the glass-foundry the family owns have led to a crisis. Like John, de Gué had been at a crossroads in his life when they met. Or, rather, the edge of an abyss—things can’t go on like this. De Gué had dropped dark hints to John about his family responsibilities and other pressures, telling him how lucky he was to have none of that in his life. John, meanwhile, has been very open about his sense of failure. Since the start of the novel, he has been thinking about visiting the monastery of la Grande Trappe, and tells de Gué why. ‘I thought if I went,’ I said, ‘and stayed there before returning to England, I might find the courage to go on living.’
Whatever. It’s another reason to go along with de Gué’s deception. Once he realises he has no proof of his real identity—and every proof that he is the Comte—it’s a tiny step to just go with the flow. Older readers might remember a fantasy TV science fiction series, Quantum Leap. The viewer sees the lead actor plunged into different situations, whereas the characters around him see the person whose identity he has temporarily taken over. He has to use his wits to solve some crisis being faced by his alter-ego, while those around him suspect nothing. Over time, instead of treating the family and servants as almost chimeras, with no meaning for him, John finds himself becoming involved. How has de Gué reduced his wife to a shy, self-doubting shadow of her young self? (He finds a photo album showing her as a young beauty.) Why is his sister a bitter, God-obsessed spinster (his word)? Why does his younger brother, who is the de facto manager of the foundry, hate him so much?
We come to know why. His lifestyle and lack of interest has run the foundry into ruin. His wife rightly suspects his affairs, including one with his brother’s wife, Renée. In fact, John accidentally confirms the latter by publicly distributing presents bought by de Gué—and Renée’s is a slinky negligee she opens at the dining-table. His mother, once a beauty but now a grotesquely fat, chairbound morphine addict, indulges him to the point of publicly rejoicing in his worst habits. His ten-year-old daughter Marie-Noel, lively and bright and clearly besotted by him, is being pushed by Blanche, the God-fearer, into considering entering a convent. It seems de Gué has done nothing to prevent this, having bought her a book based on the life of her current favourite saint.
This is on his second day, and he almost didn’t make it that far. The night before, he can’t imagine keeping the deception going, and had decided to leave. He’s on the drive outside the chateau—he’s on his way, he tells himself—when chestnuts thrown from a high window reveal this daughter to him for the first time. He is charmed by her, indulges her affection as it comes to him that he has never known anything like it before. Hmm. And then comes the confirmation that this man really is going to do his best to turn things around. Paul, his brother, almost forces him to come to the foundry with him to tell them all about the Paris meeting. Going with the flow, as ever, he pretends it went well, that they can operate for the six months Paul has hoped for. The smiles and celebrations of the workers, the coffee she can’t afford given to him by Julie, the salt-of-the-earth mother of a worker rendered permanently unfit for work by molten glass…. He finds he cares for their plight, and wants to do something to save them. But, as he knew it would, the letter he has avoided reading from the Paris company confirms all deals are off.
What would a timid mouse like him do? Telephone the number on the letter from the big company and tell them he wants to renegotiate? Unlikely. But that’s what he does—and immediately agrees to send the products to Paris for the low price he had rejected before. He’s no idea how the loss might be covered, if at all, but he goes for it anyway…. Meanwhile somebody, he realises, has been listening on the extension. Who? The faded wife? The daughter? The bitter sister? The mistress made even more bitter by John’s horrified response to her attempts to arouse him? (Is he a virgin? Not at all unlikely.)
It’s time to read on.
Chapters 10-18.
Is this a good place to stop? Who knows? Du Maurier’s leisurely pace picks up for a chapter or two, after poor John is forced to realise that whatever kindly god is charge of his fate—du Maurier herself, up to now—has decided she’s had enough of letting him get away with everything. But it slows down again….
After the overheard phone call to Paris—nine chapters later, he still doesn’t know who was listening in, although the bitter sister has a phone in her room—there are some business hoops du Maurier considers it necessary for her man to jump through. He needs to blag his way into the bank, finding, luckily—he’s lucky for a while yet—that on his key-ring he has the key to the deposit box he knew nothing of. There are papers, but nothing he can make any sense of, and he hurriedly replaces them when the clerk drops a big hint about missing his lunch-break. Luckily—yes, I know—a letter, clearly only recently stuffed in with the papers, falls to the floor. He picks it up surreptitiously and puts it in his pocket.
I don’t know why I’m going into boring details. I suppose it’s because du Maurier does. There’s a lot of slack while she makes sure she’s accounted for everything her man goes through in these first few days of his adventure. How to make his way to the bank? The address is easy to find, and he gets directions from his daughter, along for the ride and happy to play the ‘what’s the best-route?’ game he suggests. And du Maurier has got someone to mention somewhere along the line that the bank manager is away, which he knows will make things easier. I wish she’d get on with it. In the hundred or more pages I’ve read since I last wrote, not a huge amount has happened. A few big discoveries to move things along, but dozens of trivial little things slowing it all down. Are we nearly there yet?
No, we aren’t… and I realise what the problem is for me. Du Maurier has set up what ought to be a fascinating thought experiment, and she’s got lost in the logistics of trying to make it seem plausible. It’s a fool’s errand, because there’s no plausibility in a situation in which the impostor isn’t discovered within seconds. Even twins aren’t truly identical, so what chance would a shy foreigner have of fooling anybody who knows the real man intimately? None at all.
So… if this can’t be taken for reality, what is it? A meditation on the selves we present to the world? Certainly, and du Maurier has her man muse on that idea more than once. On a different life we might have lived? Maybe—but, essentially, John is a decent, unassuming chap, while his womanising alter ego is different in more ways than just the choices he has made. There can be no fork in life’s road if they’ve never, ever been on the same road. What we have had for 200-odd pages is a shy nobody standing in for a near-Heathcliff figure, a slave to his own appetites, who has ruined the lives of everyone around him. And we’re to believe that it’s taken three or four days for the deception to start to become difficult. It isn’t because they are chalk and cheese, but because du Maurier sets off little historical time-bombs for her nerdy little mouse of a man, until he suspects de Gué really is a monster. If she’d gone for a faster-paced narrative, I would have been enjoying it.
What is it that he finds out? The glass-foundry, the verrerie, had been managed by one Maurice Duval, dead now, whose name has been mentioned a few times. His death had been a wartime retribution atrocity, his body having been cut to pieces and dropped into the well. Nobody will talk about the circumstances, but de Gué was clearly involved in some way. What isn’t clear is exactly what his involvement was, as a supposed resistance leader. We do know that most of the men who attend a shoot at the chateau on the Sunday had been collaborators, and that an ill-advised joke of John’s to the assembled company that nobody would have been safe that day if he’d come anywhere near a gun falls very flat indeed. True, he’d injured his hand, and was only speaking the literal truth anyway, but…. But what? De Gué is sincerely liked by the foundry workers, so maybe John has stumbled into a mess of unresolved wartime allegiances and enmities. (Now, in the 21st Century, films and novels based on the allegations of collaboration and the settling of old scores still regularly appear. For instance, Anthony Doerr’s 2014 All the Light We Cannot See, filmed as a streaming TV series last year.)
De Gué clearly enjoys the popularity his support for the foundry brings him—and it’s a bonus that Paul and the current manager do all the real work. But why has Duval’s house been left unused since his death? John’s attempts to find out are met with embarrassment. Why on earth does he suddenly want to go over that old ground? And why, while we’re on the subject, is he venturing into so much other embarrassing territory with different people? The factory manager isn’t the only one wondering what’s got into him. The reader is only finding things out alongside John, of course, so we get it—and we get the tension of his having to feign knowledge he doesn’t have….
This is the sense of jeopardy that should be giving the narrative an edgy, inexorable drive. The Comte, and the whole family, is laden with some terrible baggage, and a more perceptive guinea-pig than John might have been half-expecting some chickens would be coming home to roost. Why else would a man like de Gué, after dropping some dark hints, have pulled such a stunt as an identity-swap? For a mid-50s Ford Consul and an academic salary? John never properly thinks about de Gué’s motives, or what he might have been setting up before the identity-swap that he doesn’t want to take the rap for. The sad state of the foundry’s books is only the start of it, as du Maurier is slowly having him come to realise.
She does it with those little time-bombs, which lead to more questions and rarely any answers. What’s the story with Duval? The highly informative photo album (thanks, Daphne) shows Jean and Blanche to have been inseparable growing up—so what enormous betrayal must it have been to cause her to refuse to speak to him for fifteen years? Something must have happened during the war… and might it have anything to do with Duval? And on another matter—Francoise is pregnant, and has a history of miscarrying. Perhaps because of the upset caused by John’s implausible decision to distribute the presents publicly, she feels dreadful and lets him know. The doctor tells her she needs to stay in bed for the rest of her term, and John, however out of character it might be for the real Comte, tactfully agrees that he’ll sleep in the dressing-room.
We might have been wondering about why Francoise’s health is of so little interest to his monstrous mother. It’s perhaps accounted for when, at the bank, John reads his father-in-law’s will. If there is a male heir—are you taking notes?—the sizeable dowry is to be split between the boy and the Comte. If there is no male heir by the time Francoise reaches 50, or if she dies before that, the fortune is, wait for it, shared between the Comte and any surviving daughters. It’s no wonder he hasn’t been discouraging poor Marie-Noel’s sense of religious vocation. Unless, of course, it’s a red herring. This is a thriller after all, submerged under the rest of it.
I’m not making this up. But du Maurier is and, of course, it also gives de Gué a motive for not looking after Francoise’s health. Throughout her pregnancy she has had to take it easy, and in these middle chapters, seven months into the pregnancy, things have suddenly become critical. And don’t you just hate it when everything happens at once? Poor John. But at least he can now guess why the old dowager comtesse doesn’t care about Francoise. If she dies, they can all be in clover again. Is this why the almost geriatric Dr Lebrun is still left in charge? And if de Gué is comfortable with it, why has he had an expensive locket made for her, his own portrait miniature inside it? The one commissioned from an artistic mistress he finds out about—and sleeps with, behind doors that du Maurier keeps very firmly closed from us—on his visit to the town to visit the bank. You can imagine how the near-virginal John goes through some soul-searching to reconcile his deep pleasure in the experience with the fact that she thinks he’s somebody else. It seems this part of the thought experiment has an easy answer. He’s fine with it. I wonder whether his now not so kindly (female) author will let him get away with that?
And just when you thought that three or four days have brought on enough surprises… he discovers why everybody’s been mentioning ‘la chasse’, and that the highlight of the Comte’s social calendar is happening the next day, Sunday. He wonders how could he have missed the hints everybody’s been dropping. And so does the reader. What to do? It’s time to bring on the more pacy chapter or two I mentioned, as it dawns on John that he has no way of getting through this. He reaches an almost dreamlike state of panic, and finds himself wandering on the estate, stalling the meetings he needs with the gamekeepers and other staff. What to do? What to do…? Nothing comes. His watchstrap breaks, like a metaphor. Except… it gives him a half-baked idea. He goes into the old dovecote where a bonfire is burning, drops the watch in it, then plunges his hand in to retrieve it. The pain is instantaneous, and almost unbearable. But it does the job. Up to a point. There’ll be no shooting for him tomorrow… but will it be enough to get him off the hook?
No. The rest of the day is awful, the day of the shoot is worse, as his big lolloping dog ignores his commands, gets into fights and races for the birds shot by other men. He chases after the dog, catches it, blunders away with it as far away as he can—into the covert where the nesting birds, all unknowing, are lying low. Disturbed by the dog, they fly up, and John stumbles out to be met by the bemused and annoyed faces of the others. It’s drizzling, the Guésts are exasperated and angry—it’s been a disaster. The ever-faithful Gaston has the wits to offer to him home, out of harm’s way. Except the day isn’t over yet. The speech he is persuaded to give afterwards, bland enough if his shooting joke hadn’t had another meaning for everybody present, tops off an unforgettably awful day. He decides, for the first time since Marie-Noel stopped him on the first night, to make a getaway.
He can’t, obviously, and it’s Marie-Noel who stops him again. He’s become far more open with her since she has told him she saw him burn himself deliberately, and she is deeply interested in whatever strange and uncharacteristic self-questioning he’s going through. She asks him where he would possibly go, and forces a promise from him that he won’t leave. But after two terrible days he’s a wreck. Gaston comes to the rescue again and, like a faithful horse, takes him unbidden to where he needs to go. It’s to the lover’s house, for his second visit—where the narrative picks up again next morning. Gaston drives him home early, as agreed, so nobody will know he hasn’t been in the spare bed. Perfect. Except it seems Marie-Noel, finding his door locked, must have assumed he had reneged on their deal. She never went to bed, and has disappeared.
Be still, my beating heart.
Chapters 19-27—to the end
There’s a really interesting novel hiding in here somewhere, but du Maurier has made it hard to find. It’s a pity that she, or a good editor, hadn’t halved the word-count up to Marie-Noel’s disappearance, and tweaked the chapters of this final third. Readers were never going to suspend their disbelief to the extent of accepting this nonsense as any version of reality, so she should have gone with the development of the thought experiment. She comes back to it right at the end, so that the reader—this reader, anyway—begins to think about the implications of what her John Doe has been through. He’s a sadder man, but is he wiser? Du Maurier wants us to hope that he is. But I’ll come back to that.
A lot of stuff happens after Marie-Noel’s disappearance, helped along by du Maurier’s decision to revert to kindly author mode. Sure, it’s at the expense of a character we have nothing against. What we don’t know is that Francoise, left in the chateau while the others go searching, is offered a skewed version of what has led up to the crisis. She misinterprets it—as the speaker had hoped—and commits suicide. But poor old Francoise, along with the baby, have served their purpose. It’s far easier for things to be tidied up once the stupid will has become irrelevant. The Comte is a rich man again, and John can take charge of walking boldly towards the difficult issues of the past and sorting them out to everybody’s satisfaction. I’m not kidding.
It starts with the finding of Marie-Noel. She had left John a note that she wanted to take on his penance, by atoning for his war crime—yes, de Gué had shot Maurice Duval, in cold blood, as an alleged collaborator. Marie-Noel had made her way to the verrerie, climbed down into the well, and stayed there all night. She had been found only as the search was starting by the super-dependable Julie, who has put her to bed. By coincidence—neither the first nor the last—John arrives shortly after, and begins to piece together the truth about the past. Now, and over the next hours, he finds out that Blanche was about to marry Duval—the deserted house is full of the things they had already bought in preparation for their life together—and, the story goes, this made de Gué furious. Everybody, including the old Comte, liked Duval whereas, as John is eventually told, the younger de Gué chose to consider him a cynical social climber. Marriage into the family was the icing on the cake, and de Gué took a deputation of resistance gunmen and put an end to his plans for good. Ah. It’s a bit extreme, and perhaps John ought to have filed away for later the thought that his alter-ego is not above sorting out problems with a gun. (He doesn’t file it away, in fact. Just you wait.)
The girl is safe—so why does John return to cries of a tragedy? We know why. Francoise is dead, having been seen dropping from her high window. John is as mystified as everyone else—he’d been doing well to make up for the dreadful faux pas of the presents—and a moment of giddiness is blamed. But why was she dressed? She had known she needed to be in bed, and as calm as possible…. We find out later, but other stuff happens first. Over a day or two, the correct protocols for mourning and preparations for the funeral are gone through. And meanwhile, John decides he needs to sort out the lives of these people that de Gué has messed up so much. His mother can stop all that morphine nonsense for a start. A night of vigil, holding her hand, seems to be transformative. She pretends she’s had the idea he feeds her that she needs to sort out the funeral arrangements, and next day she’s almost her old self. That is, controlling, peremptory, sure of everyone’s deference. But that’s fine, if it lasts.
Next. The police and the family lawyer have had a meeting with them all there, which is where the giddiness explanation is accepted. But something else comes out. It had been the old comtesse’s cold, unsmiling servant Charlotte who had overheard that phone conversation a few days back, and she had told her mistress all about it. She, Charlotte, is feeling vulnerable about having not discouraged Francoise from getting dressed, and lets it slip that she knew about John’s lossmaking deal with the Paris firm. Impetuously, she pretends he must have been banking on a quick inheritance, which is why he had, she alleges, put a lot of extra pressure on Francoise not to fail. There was only a 50-50 chance of a son, whereas….
For a moment, I wondered whether this was going in an entirely new direction. Would John be falsely accused of encouraging the suicide? I had visions of him being interrogated, forced into trying to cobble together a plausible case…. But no. Charlotte’s allegations are dismissed, and John is safe. Except… Paul is furious about the lie about the contract, the meddling, everything. He’s going to give up—until John decides it’s time to sort out family member No. 2. He carefully pitches a scenario to Paul in which he is no longer the day-to-day manager, but something entrepreneurial. How about being in charge of national and international development of their products and clients? He would get to travel to Paris, London, New York….
It works as well as his recalibration of the comtesse, and Paul has a new look in his eye. Meanwhile, John has decided on just saying what he thinks each one should do, without any spin. When he sees Renée she’s a pushover. No, he ‘probably’ never loved her, and besides, doesn’t she need to find something to suit her talents? How about going abroad with Paul in his new role? Just think of the opportunities, the people, the dresses…. Yep, she’s on board. Next. Ah, Blanche. How to get through fifteen years of embittered hatred? Easy. She needs to be creative again, as she used to be. He’s picked up along the way that she tried her hand at glassware design before the shooting ended everything for her. She could manage the foundry, live in that house, fill the role she’s missed out on all these years. Yep.
That’s four down, with only Marie-Noel to reassure himself about. It’s easy. She’s still to be found dutifully at her prie-dieu, but the ‘visions’ seem really to be here way of interpreting her own intuitions. Like, she’s found the locket that wasn’t found with Francoise, and you can believe it if you like that the Blessed Virgin told her where it would be. And he promises, to her and to everyone else who asks, that he’s not going to be gallivanting around any more. From now on, he’s the going to be what a head of family ought to be. With the help of the comtesse, of course. And Julie, who would be far more useful in the house with all her background understanding of the family. And and and.
He’s astonished how it’s all fitting into place—thank you Daphne—and decides that to all intents and purposes the other Comte is the impostor. He, the newly-minted Jean de Gué, is the man who knows how to show respect, understanding and—dare he think it? I’m not sure he does—love. The old de Gué never had a clue, and must have known it. But what’s that? There’s somebody on the telephone? Who could that be? Oh no, it can’t be. Meet at the house at the verrerie that Blanche is already beginning to sort out? Tonight at 7.00? Really?
This is the final chapter or two, and du Maurier isn’t going to let poor John go for any easy get-outs. He decides to use the wartime revolver he’s discovered in the desk to shoot his rival. First, there’s some business to sort out (I can’t remember what), but the evening comes around at last. And yes, he really is going to do it. What a pity he hadn’t done that bit of filing earlier. He’s forgotten that compared to the real de Gué, he’s a rookie in the ruthless killing game. The tiresome old curé —we’ve seen him a lot with Blanche and the comtesse—is at the door, and blandly takes John’s gun from him. He talks as though he’s saving his life, reassuring him that going on living is always the best thing to do. The old man leaves, having taken out the bullets, believing he has done a good deed.
He has, for the Comte. He had been waiting outside, and had told the curé the Comte was about to shoot himself. He was making sure there would only be one loaded gun in the place, and that it wouldn’t be John’s. He goes in and shoots him right between the eyes.
Only joking. He does what villains do in novels, he has a chat with his victim-to-be. He has been living in London for a few days, having a relaxed time at John’s flat. Then, bored, he had tidied things up there—notably, resigning from the university on John’s behalf, because he finds forgery and impersonation as easy as John does—and ending the lease on the flat. Oh, and emptying his bank account—sorry, but he hadn’t realised he was about to come into all that money. In other words, he’s as cool and cynical as John has always taken him to be. He listens to John’s account of all the things he’s been sorting out, sneeringly amused both by his unexpected audacity and naivety in believing that any of the family will really be able to make anything of their lives. He is so good at undermining everything John thought he’d achieved that all John’s old doubts come flooding back. Now, realising that he can no longer go back to live even his old, unsatisfactory life, he tells the Comte to get on with it and shoot him.
But the Comte has changed his mind. He’s a great believer in the easy option—he didn’t actually shoot Duval himself, but got his men to do it—so why doesn’t he just send John on his way? They’ve already exchanged clothes, he can show him where his car is, and he can even give him enough francs to tide him over for a while. Regrettably not the travellers’ cheques, but there it is. And if John ever fancies another few days playing-acting while de Gué relaxes somewhere warm, why not? Well, what other choice has he got? He gets into the car, and…
…and there’s a whole chapter left yet. Not a long one, but long enough. What is du Maurier going to pull out of the bag? John doesn’t know. ‘What I did was automatic. I don’t remember thinking anything.’ That’s how the chapter begins, and where does his inner autopilot guide him? Can you guess? He heads towards the town along a road that is familiar now, to park in a familiar street…. ‘I walked in through the open window. The room was empty, but she was there,’ the lovely lover. She thinks he’s there to pick up the replacements for some of Francoise’s ornaments that Marie-Noel had broken in an act of boisterousness brought on by her father’s unusual new mood. But she soon realises that’s not it—and John realises something too. Of course she knows he isn’t the real Comte, how could a lover not? (Let’s gloss over the others, because we have to.) For her, the real Comte is ‘the other one.’ She has no regrets about either lover, but likes John’s ‘tendresse.’
They talk about her future. John tells her she figures in the real de Gué’s future plans, possibly as a mistress in some foreign place. Sounds nice, she says, but knows the Comte would never commit to anything long-term. I had the idea John might ask her how she would feel about him as a long-term possibility, but he doesn’t go for that. He doesn’t like the idea of false pretences any more—OK, he could live with it, but not long-term. In fact, one of them wonders aloud if the other one might be on his way to see her now. After all—it’s just occurred to me—John’s burnt his boats with Renée, so there’s no fun to be had at the chateau. They’re right, he’s awaiting a signal from her that she’s alone. John will leave—but where to go now? He needs to sort out his life, sort out who he is. And, already, she has helped him make a start.
‘You learnt what to do with failure at St Gilles.’ ‘I didn’t learn what to do with it,’ I said, ‘it merely became transformed. It turned into love for St Gilles. So the problem remains the same. What do I do with love?’ ‘You give it away,’ she said, ‘but the trouble is, it stays with you just the same. Like water in a well. The spring remains, under the dried depths…. And you know where you’re going?’ ‘I know where I’m going.’ ‘Will you be there long?’ ‘I’ve no idea.’ ‘This place, is it far away?’ ‘Oddly enough, no. Only about fifty kilometres.’ ‘If they could have shown you there what to do with failure, can they also show you what to do with love?’ ‘I believe so. I believe they’ll give me the answer you’ve given me now.’
He kisses her, and goes out into the street. Aww. Sadder and wiser? If you like. But don’t look to this half-baked fantasy for answers to any of life’s real questions.
We can read it for you wholesale 