He begins talking as he makes his way slowly toward the entrance gate that should have been locked at least an hour ago. His words are permeated by great weariness.

"Everyone would have it they were lovers. And that the death of that dubious character was murder."

It is the usual style of his stories: blunt, clear-cut, flat. All the man in the student's jacket expects is just one more anecdote. He is longing to get away, to drink a glass of warm wine, to go to bed… Suddenly the old man, as if he had sensed this desire to escape, cries out in urgent tones that can be heard almost as a plea and an apology for not knowing how to tell stories in any other way, "You're the first person I have ever told about her!"

Everyone in Villiers-la-Forêt (the men perhaps more openly than the women) wanted it to be a murder. This theory corresponded to some inescapable cliché of the imagination on the part of people who had very little, to the classic scenario of a crime of passion. Or, much more simply, to a desire to picture two naked bodies, first of all joined in love and then separated by the violence of a brief struggle and death.

Fascinated, abnormally perceptive, the townspeople held forth about the crime, invented new theories about it, and were critical of the inquiry that was making no headway. But it was really the bodies that fascinated them. For all at once their appearance amid the sleepy rural calm of Villiers-la-Forêt had to be accepted; and their nakedness, whether erotic or criminal, had to be written into the record of those idle July days that smelled of dust baked in the sun and the warm mud of the river. For such was the soft, slow landscape they burst in on: the man, his clothes drenched, stretched out on the bank, his skull smashed in. And the woman with disordered, streaming hair, her breasts bare, a woman seated beside the dying man, as still as carved stone.