Anne need not have felt embarrassed. At that moment in her life, Thérèse felt as aloof from her daughter as from everything else. She saw human beings and inanimate things, her own body and even her mind, like a mirage or vapour suspended outside her. In this void, Bernard alone assumed a dreadful reality: his corpulence, his nasal voice, his peremptory tone, his self-satisfaction. If she could only get away.... But how? And where? Thérèse was overcome by the first heat of summer. She had not the slightest presentiment of what she was about to do. What did happen that year? She could not remember a single incident, a single quarrel: she remembered having loathed her husband more than usual, on the day of Corpus Christi, when she watched the procession through the half-closed shutters. Bernard was almost the only man behind the canopy. The village had become a desert in a few moments, just as if there had been a lion, not a lamb, let loose in the streets.... People went behind doors so as not to be obliged to take their hats off or fall on their knees. Once the danger had passed, the doors began to open one by one. Thérèse observed the Curé, who was walking with his eyes nearly shut, carrying the strange object in both his hands. His lips moved: to whom was he speaking with that dejected air? And immediately behind him walked Bernard, “doing his duty as usual.” * * * * * Weeks followed without a drop of rain. Bernard lived in terror of fires, and his heart was troubling him again. More than twelve hundred acres had been burnt in the Louchat district: “If the wind had been in the north my Balisac pines would have been done for.” Thérèse waited for some blow to fall from that unchanging sky. It would never rain any more.... One day the whole forest round them would burst into crackling flames, and even the town would not escape. How is it that the villages in the Landes country are never burnt down? She thought it unfair that the flames should always fall upon the pines and never on the human population. At home, there were endless discussions on the causes of the disaster: a cigarette-end very likely, or perhaps some one had done it for revenge? Thérèse dreamt that she got up one night, went into the forest where the undergrowth was thickest, threw away her cigarette, and waited until the sky of dawn was darkened with vast clouds of smoke.... But she banished the thought, for love of the pines was in her blood: it was not upon the trees that her hatred lay. * * * * *