The Four Corners of the Heart: An Unfinished Novel by Françoise Sagan

Author:Françoise Sagan [Sagan, Françoise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2023-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

Ludovic had no appointments that day. “Busy yourself around the house,” his father had muttered to him. Henri had been fearing the arrival of some kind of sad old widow, hardly a symbol of “gay Paris”; all the scenes of that ill-fated wedding haunted him still. He had, then, no help from memory or desire, only a flat mental picture showing Ludovic walking beside a widow, showing her the different views of the terrace and the drawing room while Marie-Laure trailed behind them. However, everything had changed with Fanny’s arrival. Now he was picturing her laughing in the shade of the great driveway while his son chuckled alongside. Perhaps a week from now he would find them just like this, only with Marie-Laure definitively out of the picture: an infuriating vision. Fanny Crawley with his son, in his estate or his drawing room, was a suggestive image, such as desire can provoke and such as jealousy may reinforce, even when there’s not the slightest truth in it.

So it was Henri who provided the soundtrack to those September weeks. Sometimes it is those playing e contrario roles who unleash the most violent passions in their companions, caught despite themselves in uncontrollable contortions. Henri, who was hard-nosed, possessive, and pitiless in a thousand ways, had never been overcome by his own feelings, except with the pain and emptiness of his wife’s death. Now, all of a sudden, he became jealous, subconsciously, and could do nothing to avoid it.

Since Fanny’s arrival, the task of helping her naturally fell to Ludovic. After all, it was the declaration of his mental fitness that occasioned their soirée and his natural absentmindedness that led to their profligate spending on it: petits-fours and principal dishes, large and medium-sized starters, and pyramids of cream-filled profiteroles were on the menu; also, raking all the pathways and trimming all the park’s foliage; not forgetting a provision of temporary staff almost tenfold the usual (thieving and incompetent as they were, by Martin’s report). All this was the product, the price, and, ultimately, the responsibility of Fanny. Ludovic had, then, to show his mother-in-law the true sights: the various salons where she was to receive and so rehabilitate a series of wealthy characters, already thereby disagreeable in Fanny’s eyes. The mission was challenging, but much less of a problem for Ludovic—whose natural ease and perfect indifference to society allowed him to cruise above it, or in any case to let it flow past him—than for Fanny, whose horror at these gatherings and her inability to inject the remotest sense of elegance into her surroundings was growing by the minute. All of this made her task quite as ridiculous as her own objective. What was she doing, without the man she had loved, with a daughter she didn’t love, attempting to prove the recovery of a young stranger, or almost-stranger, whom she was finding better company this year than before but still quite strange? There had been, in her life, one or two periods

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