The disquiet provoked in the people of Villiers by the excessive radiance of the day that had greeted the tragedy on the riverbank faded away with the first stages of the inquiry. Now they all turned to reconstructing the facts, but setting off in the opposite direction from that chosen by the investigating magistrate. He was seeking to discover if there had been a crime or not. For them, the murder was not in doubt. Thus all they had to do was to yoke together as a pair of lovers the man and woman they had come upon one Sunday in July thanks to Loo-loo. And it was the challenge of this emotional and physical pairing that set all their brains in a ferment at Villiers-la-Forêt. For, as with those married couples who provoke the question: "What on earth brought them together?" it was impossible to imagine a conjunction between two more dissimilar natures.

Even their faces, their complexions, the expressions in their eyes, were opposed, like fragments of a mosaic that do not fit and, if forced together, disrupt the whole picture. A woman of forty-six, tall and beautiful, her abundant hair tinged slightly with gray, with features whose regularity, cool and detached, matched those of cameo portraits. A man of sixty-four with a broad face, animated by complacent joviality, a bald pate, sunburned and glistening, and a look full of self-assurance: a stocky man, with short, broad forearms and square yellow fingernails.

But what is more, you had to picture them together (this was a fact the inquiry would subsequently establish) in a rowboat out on the sunlit river. You had to bring them together on this improbable amorous excursion, see them land and settle in the grass behind the willow thickets. See the man set down on the ground a large bottle of wine he had been shading from the heat under the seat of the boat in the water stagnating on the old timbers.