and a few long novels in which, if you looked carefully, you might well come across the drowned woman and the dancer, and the old man himself… After experiencing disorientation in a remote spot amid a drab, chilly landscape, it is an almost physical pleasure for them to find themselves once more in the familiar twisting streets, to recognize this café and that crossroads in their very characteristic Parisian look and with all the lights making it seem like night already… And when, a year later, or perhaps more, depending on the rhythm of their busy lives, a dinner party brings them together again, not one of the four visitors will dare to speak of those few moments of dread beneath the wintry sky. And this fear of admitting to it will greatly enhance the pleasure of their evening.

Their retreat has not deflected the old man from his regular round. You can see him now lifting a long tree trunk uprooted by last night's storm. The cross on one of the tombs has been turned into a kind of prop, bowed under the weight of the toppled tree. This task accomplished, the man remains motionless for a moment. Then nods his head several times and pours out his words once more, to melt in the cold transparency of the evening. The visitor now listening to him remains mesmerized by the power and appearance of the hands thrusting out from the sleeves of the greatcoat and grasping the tree's damp bark. Hands that themselves resemble powerful, knotty roots; marked with scars; lined with violet veins. This spectator would like to have been the only one gathering up the words scattered by the wind. To his annoyance a young woman with an indifferent and willful expression stops on the neighboring pathway, attempting to decipher upside down-or pretending to-the inscription on the tombstone that the old man has just liberated; then she begins listening as well… The dead person, whose name she has just mentally spelled out, a certain Count Khodorsky, was a cheerful adventurer. He arrived in Paris after the revolution and spent a terrible year reduced to begging; painting his toenails with India ink to camouflage the holes in his shoes; and a prey at night to the hallucinations of a starving man.