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built in the depths of a wild gorge. Our house, a small nineteenth-century château like many others in Limousin, looks out over heather-clad heaths. As a young boy I was already proud that I was a Marcenat and our family reigned over the canton. My father took the tiny paper business that had been a mere laboratory for my maternal grandfather and built it into a huge factory. He bought up local smallholdings and transformed Gandumas, which had been all but neglected before his time, into the very model of an estate. Throughout my childhood I watched buildings being constructed and saw the hangar housing paper pulp stretch out along the river.
    My mother’s family was from Limousin. My great-grandfather, a notary, had bought the Château de Gandumas when it was sold off as national property. My father, an engineer from Lorraine, had been in the region only since he married. He summoned one of his brothers, my uncle Pierre, who settled in the neighboring village of Chardeuil. On Sundays, if it was not raining, the two families met by the ponds in Saint-Yrieix. We traveled in carriages, and I would sit facing my parents, on asmall, hard pull-down seat. The horse’s monotonous trot sent me to sleep; I used to like watching its shadow on the walls in villages or on the banks by the side of the road: it contorted and moved forward, overtaking us, and then, as we went around corners, it reappeared behind us. Every now and then the smell of droppings (a smell which, like the sound of bells, will always be associated with Sundays in my mind) would hang over us like a cloud, and great fat flies would land on me. I hated the hills more than anything; the horse slowed to a walk and the carriage climbed unbearably slowly while the old coachman, Thomasson, clicked his tongue and cracked his whip.
    At the inn, we met up with my uncle Pierre, his wife, and my cousin Renée, who was their only child. My mother would give us bread and butter, and my father would say, “Go and play.” Renée and I used to walk under the trees or by the ponds, collecting pinecones and chestnuts. On the way home, Renée climbed into the carriage with us, and the coachman folded down the sides of my seat to give her somewhere to sit. My parents did not speak during the journey.
    Any form of conversation was made difficult by my father’s extraordinary sense of propriety; it seemed to pain him if the least feeling were expressed in public. At mealtimes, if my mother mentioned our education, the factory, our uncles, or our aunt Cora who lived in Paris, my father would gesture anxiously, pointing out to her the servant clearing the plates. She would fall silent. I noticed very early on that if my father and my uncle had some small criticism to direct at each other, they always ensured it was their wives who conveyed this with tremendous tact. I also grasped very early that my father abhorred sincerity. In our house, it was taken for granted that all conventional feelings held true, that parents always loved their children, children their parents, and husbands their wives. The Marcenats liked to see the world as a decent, earthly paradise, and I feel that, in their case, this had more to do with candor than hypocrisy.

. II .
    The sunlit lawn at Gandumas. And, on the plain below, the village of Chardeuil veiled in a shimmering heat haze. A little boy stands waist-deep in a hole he has dug, beside a heap of sand, scouring the vast expanses around him for an invisible enemy. This game was inspired by my favorite book, Driant’s
Fortress War
. I was a soldier, Private Mitour, stationed in that hole for skirmishes to defend Fort de Liouville, under the command of a colonel for whom I would gladly have given my life. I must apologize for writing about these puerile ideas, but in them I see the first expression of a need for passionate devotion that has been a dominantfeature of my character, although it was later applied to quite different subjects.
    If I analyze the