Laurence Plazenet

After his wife died, Monsieur d’Albrecht had refused to relinquish the body she had abandoned.  He had remained kneeling, his wife’s hands in his own.  He ignored both the priests’ prayers and the rebukes of his servants.  He watched Madame d’Albrecht’s closed eyelids.  In spirit, he kissed them; in the twilight of their room, he caressed her bosom.  It was the substitution of one obscurity for another.  Two large candles burning on either side of the bed faintly illumined this final tryst.
     Monsieur d’Albrecht’s son came to speak with him.  The young man felt in no position to utter the reprimands he was to convey.  He stood gracelessly, his eyes riveted on his mother’s corpse.  The widower ignored him.  The boy waited a moment, then withdrew.
     The night passed.
     In the morning, Monsieur d’Albrecht’s daughter was brought to see him.  She was hardly walking.  Her cheeks were pink.  She did not entertain him.  First he rose angrily.  Then he froze and remained immobile before the child.  He was struck by the resemblance she bore to Madame d’Albrecht.  She parted her lips in the same way.  Her lashes blinked at the same speed.  The intense black of the eyes they sheltered was identical.  The little girl had burst into tears.  In one breath, his mouth dry, he had commanded that she be removed from his sight.
     Monsieur d’Albrecht was a man full of hubris, well-educated, taciturn.  He fled his daughter.  He insisted that she reside in quarters far from those he inhabited himself and that she appear nowhere.  He went weeks, sometimes even months, without seeing her.  One summer day ten years later, while walking guests back to the first courtyard of his residence, he heard, on his left and coming from a hanging veranda, a voice whose contours echoed those that still rang in his ears night after night.  A fog descended.  A shiver ran through him.  He shuddered.  He ordered the culprit brought before him.  He towered above her.  He could see the hollow at the top of her coiffure.  He was unable to find words.  The others stared at him.  He pulled himself together.  His fury was incalculable.  He would have liked to strike she whose lips had spilt this sound and revived, nearly to the point of ecstasy, the torment he believed hidden from the world.
     In secret, he pampered her.