Thus the miracle they had all been looking forward to went no further than the considerable enhancement of the library, of which the princess was now in charge, and the planting of a service tree by the front steps to the strange house where she alone had agreed to reside, the long redbrick annex, built against the "wall of the former brewery in which the émigrés had made their home at the start of the twenties, dividing it up into apartments, a retirement home, a reading room, a canteen… Yes, she had disappointed them cruelly!
However, none of these frustrations could match the latest one: her farcical assignation with this… someone recalled at that moment that Golets had worked as a horse butcher. With this horse butcher, then, who, no doubt so as to make them a laughingstock, had had the stupidity to get drowned!
The hypotheses advanced by the people of Villiers clearly erred on the side of unsubtlety. Where death is involved the seething mass of detail is obliterated and only the broad outline of human appearances is preserved. Thus sometimes Golets became "that dreary old Russian," sometimes "that horse butcher," and occasionally "the ex-officer." Princess Arbyelina's friend (one of his letters was said to have been found, signed "L.M.") was "a well known poet and journalist but afraid of his wife and of the wagging tongues of the émigrés in Paris." And Olga's husband "a hell of a fellow, a hero in spite of himself, a Georgian Don Juan." Death, like a harsh spotlight, picked out these three profiles-simplified but perhaps tolerably accurate, when all's said and done: the husband, the lover, and the suitor, as the apprentice detectives of Villiers-la-Forêt called them.