"Maman, don't forget to look and see if there is still a nest of mice there. Beside the stove, remember?" she called to her mother as she stood at the lowered window of the railway carriage.
It was July 1914. Charlotte was eleven.
Her own life did not experience any interruption. It was simply that, as time went by, her last words ("Don't forget the mice!") seemed to her more and more stupid and childish. She ought to have kept silent and scrutinized the face at the carriage window, feasted her eyes on its features. Months, years, passed, and that last remark still carried the same resonance of a foolish happiness. Now the only time in Charlotte 's life was waiting time.
That time ("in wartime," the newspapers wrote) was like a gray afternoon, a Sunday in the deserted streets of a provincial town: suddenly a gust of wind appears at the corner of a house, raising a whirlwind of dust; a shutter swings silently; a man melts easily into this colorless air, disappears without reason.
Thus it was that Charlotte 's uncle disappeared – "fallen on the field of honor," "dead for France," according to the newspaper's formula. And this form of words made his absence all the more disconcerting – like the pencil sharpener on his desk, with a pencil inserted in the hole and several fine parings undisturbed since his departure. Thus it was that the house at Neuilly gradually emptied – women and men would bend down to kiss Charlotte and, with a very serious air, tell her to be a good girl.
That strange time had its capricious moments.