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All he had to do now was eat up, drink his bottle of white wine, smoke the old man’s pipe, and wait.

The rain was still falling outside, splashing on the leaves and making rings on the canal. Sitting astride the cane-seated chair he stared straight ahead, and words came out, uttered in a low voice.

‘I’ll tell them she asked for it. She did ask for it. From the very first day.’

He had been walking along the main road, in the sun, a tiny shadow at his feet, and he had been taking long strides, going from the shade of one tree to the next, through the parallelograms of sunlight.

He had put out his arm as a car went past, but it hadn’t stopped.

Too bad.

Then along came that big red bus, groaning its way up the hill. And Tati had made eyes at him.

He stood up suddenly. Something had occurred to him. He opened the door to the yard. A pale dawn was breaking. He went out to the incubator, from where he could hear the sound of cheeping. Some chicks had hatched. Others were just emerging from their broken shells, while even more were pecking at their prisons from inside.

Tati would have been pleased.

Was it white wine he had drunk? There were two bottles on the table, both empty. The other one was the brandy bottle.

‘I must go and tell Félicie. Félicie will be the one to …’

He fell over, lost consciousness, and slept.

And at about ten in the morning, when the gendarmes arrived on their bicycles, having been alerted by Françoise, who had raised the alarm when no sound had come from the house except for the cows lowing and kicking the sides of their cowshed, it took them some time to find him stretched out by the bins where he prepared the chicken feed every morning.

He was asleep, a fly on his cheek; his lips, open and swollen like a child’s, or like Félicie’s, breathed out fumes of alcohol.

They woke him by kicking him on the head and legs. He pulled a face, opened his eyes and recognized the gendarmes.

‘Ah, yes,’ he said, making an effort to get up. Then he pleaded with them:

‘Don’t hit me.’

And finally, when he had struggled to his feet and stood swaying:

‘I’m tired. I’m so tired!’