For a Night of Love Read Online Free

time, Julien had watched the ancient house, trying to fathom the mysteries of the all-powerful fortune it concealed. But in all the hours he spent there in absorbed contemplation, he never saw anything but the grey façade and the black clump of the chestnut trees. Never once did he see a soul go up the loose, wobbly steps, never once did the front door, green with moss, open. The Marsannes had blocked it up, the entrance was through an iron gate on the rue Sainte-Anne; in addition, at the far end of a narrow street, near the ramparts, there was a little gate onto the garden, which Julien couldn’t see. For him, the house remained dead, like one of those palaces in fairy tales, peopled with invisible inhabitants. Every morning and every evening, all he ever saw were the arms of the servant pushing open orclosing the shutters. Then, the house would reassume its intensely melancholy feel of some abandoned tomb in the stillness of a cemetery. The foliage of the chestnut trees was so thick that their branches concealed the garden paths. And this hermetically sealed existence, haughty and silent, made the young man’s heart beat twice as fast. So this was wealth, was it? – this gloomy tranquillity, in which he recognised the same religious shudder that befalls anyone gazing up at the vaulting of churches.
    How often, before going to bed, had he blown out his candle and stood for an hour at his window, trying to pierce the secrets of the Marsanne family house! At night, it stood out in a dark mass against the sky, and the chestnut trees spread out in a pool of inky darkness. The people inside must have drawn the curtains tightly closed, since not a gleam of light escaped between the slats of the shutters. The house didn’t even have that lived-in atmosphere of a place where you can sense people breathing in their sleep. It vanished into nothing in the darkness. It was at such times that Julien plucked up courage and picked up his flute. He could play with impunity; his rippling little notes echoed back from the empty house; some of his slower phrases melted into the garden shadows where not even the flapping of a bird’s wings could be heard. The old yellow-wood flute seemed to be playing its ancient tunes outside the castle of the Sleeping Beauty.
    One Sunday, on the Place de l’Eglise, one of the postal workers abruptly pointed out to Julien a tall old man and an elderly lady, and told him their names. It was the Marquis and Marquise de Marsanne. They went out so rarely that he had never seen them before. He was overwhelmed at the sight of their pinched, solemn frames, walking along at a measured pace, greeted by deep bows and replying with the merest nod.Then, Julien’s friend informed him in rapid succession that they had a daughter still at convent school, Mlle Thérèse de Marsanne, and that young Colombel, the clerk of M. Savournin the lawyer, had been suckled by the same wet-nurse . And indeed, as the two elderly people were turning into the rue Sainte-Anne, young Colombel, who was just passing, went up, and the Marquis proffered him his hand, an honour he had shown no one else. Julien was jealous at this handshake , for this Colombel, a youth of twenty, bright-eyed and mean-mouthed, had been his enemy for a long time. He teased Julien for his timidity, and set all the washerwomen of the rue Beau-Soleil against him – with the result that one day, on the ramparts, they had challenged each other to a fist-fight, from which the lawyer’s clerk had emerged with two black eyes. And the evening he found out these new details, Julien played his flute even more softly.
    Yet he did not allow his obsession with the Marsanne house to disturb his habits, still as regular as clockwork. He continued to go to his office, to have lunch and dinner, to go for his usual walk by the Chanteclair. The house itself, with its vast peacefulness, finally became one more part of his life’s even tenor. Two years went by. He was so used to