Cases of Circumstantial Evidence

Eleven

484 Eleven Jean Larcher and his wife made their pilgrimage on Tuesday morning with the parish of St.-Paul. They marched under a cloudless sky, leaving the rue St.-Paul at eleven and returning to the rue des Lions late in the afternoon, exhausted. Paul Damas accompanied Jean, considering himself more a parishioner of the quarter where he worked than of that where he lodged. He had not been to confession at any church since he had come to Paris. On Wednesday, long after sundown, Marianne lay awake. The heat was not excessive; it was not that which kept her from sleeping. Jean slept, snoring a little and sometimes making short, strangled sounds in his throat, so that she prodded him until he turned on his side and slept quietly. But the day-long radiant sky had left the air very warm, and the three days of prayer and chanting and the constant sound of bells had left the city drenched in emotion. In Marianne the pilgrimage of Tuesday, her own effort of prayer below the veiled shrine had intensified a longing which reached back into her girlhood, as well as into the dim, monotonous future. She lay beside Jean, straight and unmoving, and remembered her first imaginings of love, centered on no one, mere stirrings of the awakening blood. She had married, and love had become something no longer mysterious nor overpowering; 485 t h e g h o s t o f m o n s i e u r s c a r r o n a burden, a weight on the breast, and also a shoulder against which to shelter on a cold night. The children had occupied her hands and absorbed her affections. She had worked very hard. The shop, the kitchen, the market, the children again, sickness and death, the midwifery she had practiced, without making a profession of it, had filled her hours. She had not had time to mourn her children properly; she had had no time in which to speculate on the nature of love. She had never asked herself if she was in love with her husband. She had assumed that she was. He had been a good husband; according to the measure of her world, a very good husband. Secure in this belief, and in the consciousness that she had been a good wife, she had seen no reason why she should not take pleasure in Paul’s unspoken devotion . This was a face of love which she had never seen before. The sweetness which it afforded her was extraordinary. She was not so naïve as to assume that the situation could continue indefinitely as it was. Her own position was fixed; it did not even occur to her that it could change. But Paul would change, she knew, and since he could not advance, he must retreat. He had already, in the few days since he had touched his lips to her shoulder, begun his retreat. She had observed the little indications and had felt a sadness. Kneeling below the shrine in the church of the saint, she had tried to pray for the good of France, for a safe return of Nicolas, but it had been difficult to concentrate upon her prayer. Her thoughts had shifted continually to her husband’s young assistant, kneeling beside her husband, some distance from her. And moved by the devotion of all those other men and women who were bowed in prayer with her, as much as by her own religious feeling, she felt rising and mingling with her devotion a fierce desire which she had long ago dismissed as part of the pain of being young. 486 Janet Lewis Since she could not sleep, she sat up in bed, her hands about her knees. Jean did not stir. She left the bed and crossed to the window, which she opened. An arch of starlit sky overhung the neighboring roofs. The whole city seemed deserted. Everything was tranquil. Everything waited for the morrow, and the miracle. She leaned out, her hand upon the scaling paint of the window frame wet with a heavy dew, and, breathing the soft air, noticed a scent, unfamiliar to her, but very sweet, of some night-blooming shrub in one of the walled gardens nearby. In the country, on a night as warm and still as this, a nightingale should be singing. Her...