As agreed, the peasant paid them nothing. In the autumn, when they were preparing to go back to the town, he showed them a cart with a load covered in a newly homespun cloth.

"He'll drive you," he said, glancing at the old peasant perched on the driver's seat.

Albertine and Charlotte thanked him and hauled themselves up on the edge of the cart, which was laden with crates, sacks, and packages.

"Are you sending all this to market?" asked Charlotte, to fill the awkward silence of these last few minutes.

"No. That's what you've earned."

They had no time to reply. The driver tugged on the reins, the cart pitched and began to move off in the hot dust of the farm track… Beneath the cover Charlotte and her mother discovered three sacks of potatoes, two sacks of corn, a keg of honey, four enormous pumpkins, and several crates of vegetables, beans, and apples. In one corner they caught sight of half a dozen hens with their legs tied; and a cock in their midst, flashing belligerent and angry glances.

"I'm going to dry some bunches of herbs all the same," said Albertine, when she finally succeeded in tearing her eyes from all this treasure. "You never know…"

She died two years later. It was an August evening, calm and transparent. Charlotte was returning from the library, where she had been employed to sort through the mountains of books collected from demolished aristocratic homes… Her mother was seated on a little bench fixed to the wall of the izba, her head leaning against the smooth wood of the logs. Her eyes were closed. She must have dozed off and died in her sleep. A light breeze coming from the taiga stirred the pages of the book open on her knees. It was the same little French volume with gilt edges.

They were married in the spring of the following year. He came from a village on the White Sea coast, ten thousand leagues from this Siberian town the civil war had brought him to.