One morning Maître Pallud, the Notary of Grey, had a final interview with me with regard to the sale of the property. Emma could not keep still. We fixed that very evening for our departure in the car, intending to sleep at Nanthel, in order to be in Paris the next day.
And the hour came for departing from Fonval for ever. I went over the château, which was empty of furniture, and the park, in which there was no leafage. It looked as if the autumn had stripped them both.
The old perfumes still clung to the abandoned rooms, recalling sad memories. Ah! what charm there sometimes is in musty things! One saw on the walls the indelible outline of pictures or mirrors now taken down, sideboards or chiffoniers that had gone, leaving behind patches that looked new against the faded paper, outlines of things magically given by them to the familiar wall, bright spots destined to grow pale, as time went on, just as the memory of the absent.
Some of the rooms seemed made smaller by being emptied, others larger, without any obvious reason.
I went over the house from garret to basement, by the light of the skylight and the gleams of a grating. I explored from attic to cellar, and I did not grow weary of wandering through this scenery of my youth, like a living being haunting a phantom place. Ah! my youth! It alone dwelt in Fonval. I felt that. In spite of their importance, the recent dramas were pale beside it. The bedrooms were duller than ever, and Donovan’s and Emma’s were no longer anything but my own and my aunt’s.
Was I not right to have put up Fonval to auction?
This double feeling accompanied me in my farewells to the park. The paddock became a lawn, and the summerhouse of the Minotaur only recalled Briareus to me.
I made a circuit to the cliff. The clouds were so low that one would have said it was a ceiling of gray wool, laid over a circular crater.
Under this subdued light, which is that of winter, the statues, now bereft of their green togas, showed their concrete, weather-beaten and rain stained, with their noses knocked off, or their chins broken; some of them were crumbling to bits—one with a Bacchante’s gesture, was stretching out her arm, the hand of which, carrying a mixing-bowl, only stuck to the wrist by its iron bone, which was dreadful to see. They were going to continue their poses in solitude.
Something wild and savage was already beginning to emerge, but no more than was vaguely perceptible. A hawk was sharpening his beak on the weather-cock of the summerhouse. A weasel crossed the paddock with little quiet jumps.