This proved a problem only on their wedding night. Dusk was falling when they arrived at their new apartment; they climbed the stairs, hung their coats behind the door, and Frédéric led the way down the corridor to the bedroom. Before he had even turned on the lamp, Ariane moved past the bed and stood in the far corner. One section of her face was blue with moonlight, the rest in darkness. Neither of them spoke. Then, Frédéric took a step forward.
“Don’t be scared, Ariane.”
Ariane said nothing.
“I will sleep out there, if you prefer.”
Her blue lips made the shape of “no,” but no sound came out.
Minutes passed. Frédéric took the plunge, looked at the ground and began to undress. To make it less of a performance he tried to stand side-on, but when on a reflex he reached for the wardrobe to hang up his suit he accidentally exposed himself, and hesitated midgesture, extending his arm and retracting it again. A laugh caught in his chest. By the time he was under the covers he felt he had run a long distance. Ariane remained in the corner. He turned over and she began to weep. Gently, slowly, he heard the flicking sound of buttons, followed by the soft rasp of cotton, and then he saw the white cloud of her petticoat as she slipped into the bed. He felt her wet face on his shoulder. The weight of her head, her warm small body curled up like a creature’s. He caressed her hair until the jagged breath became calm, and then deep, and then fitful and heavy with sleep.
It did become easier. The following morning Ariane smiled at him as they packed their things for the journey south. On the road between Lyon and Grenoble, she said: “I think this man needs a haircut.”
She was pointing at a calèche in front of them. Long sheaves of hay stuck out from the rear of the vehicle. Frédéric laughed, and Ariane gazed at him, then joined in laughing, drawing breath and laughing again.
Ariane even laughed when they first made love, in the rented guest room near the water. Her body was soft but her limbs were strong, and her legs gripped him from behind. At the moment of entry she gazed up at him with her transparent eyes, and Frédéric let out a strangled moan. For a week they slept late and made love on waking, then bathed and walked along the shore to drink coffee by the pier where the sea smacked against the wall.
After they returned to Paris, Frédéric took on the teaching of two more undergraduate anthropology courses, while he worked to make his dissertation worthy of publishing. His manuscript was particularly ambitious in trying to combine two lines of contemporary thought under a single thesis: one being the recent theories of cranial development and criminality, and the other the program of physical anthropology that was emerging at the time from scholarship in the African colonies. On their return from the south, however, Frédéric discovered to his dismay that during the very week of his honeymoon an old doctoral colleague named Émile had published his own manuscript, a work on the anthropology of crime based on firsthand knowledge from the Central Prison Infirmary. The news was a blow to Frédéric’s confidence. Émile’s work was fairly pedestrian but it was undeniably thorough, and its flaws paled before the simple fact that he had published before Frédéric had—and at that Émile was three years younger than him. The whole thing cast a shadow over Frédéric’s manuscript, which had been proficient at the time of defence but now seemed unwieldy and even in places a little thin. If his first publication did not meet with the esteem of his peers, if it failed to win him prestige, Frédéric feared humiliation and an irreversibly minor status in the development of the discipline.
Ariane was his relief. She was like a crocus, her blades just starting to part. Her cheeks shone with new colour as she set about decorating the apartment. All by herself she bargained over a salon set from Saglio on Rue de Vaugirard, and marshalled the neighbours to hoist a bowlegged commode up the stairs. The misery of his days at the university was soothed when Ariane met him at the door and showed him the walls almost finished in a sprigged paper, or a new lacquer on the skirting board. Over dinner she offered him simple but sound wisdom; she said better to take longer than to rush and regret, and Frédéric was delighted at least as much by her confidence in providing solace as by the actual solace provided, and said yes, you are right, thank you my darling. After a year, he had still not published. But after thirteen months, Ariane was showing the first signs of pregnancy.
The baby was born earlier than expected. Her limbs were meagre and she cried through the night. They hired a Swiss nurse named Ingrid to help, and when Jeannette turned four, Ingrid left and was replaced by a nursery governess named Eva. When Jeannette turned eight, Eva left and was replaced by Lorena. It was during the epoch of Lorena that Ariane’s health began to suffer most noticeably. She spent more and more time in bed with various ailments, cheerfully resigned to the slow progress of recovery. No sooner would she be physically well again than she would plummet into a state of despair and confine herself once more to the bedroom. This behaviour was inexplicable to Frédéric. Ariane expressed extreme feelings of guilt over minor mishaps, often as trivial as misspeaking, or picking up the wrong glass in company. When he returned from the university in the evening, she would report the anguish of her day, how she entered a room wanting to do one thing and did another, and it was not right, it was not right, and Frédéric, bewildered, tried to soothe her as she had once managed to soothe him. The pattern of his days had reversed. His fears of ignominy had been unfounded, and he had secured a good position in the department following his publication. It was when he came home that the terror began.
How much did the neighbours know? Too much. The walls of those Montparnasse apartments were thin, and sometimes Ariane even went onto the balcony to wail. Though she said her pain was compounded by the dread of what other people knew and thought about her, even that did not stop her. Fearing their censure Frédéric did not confide in the Passants, nor did he want to send Ariane to a psychiatric hospital. For nine years she had been healthy! If it was an endemic neurological condition, he was anthropologically certain that she would have exhibited symptoms before now. Instead he took her to see a psychiatrist associated with the university, and employed a doctor to visit the house.
The child Jeannette suffered. All things circled around her mother, whom she could not reach. Ariane was the void in the whirlpool. The family moved to the edge of the Fourteenth Arrondissement and the new, thick-walled house was filled again with nightly wailing, and whispers and fingers on lips, as Lorena the governess pulled Jeannette from her mother’s door, dangling toys. Sometimes, during a particularly bad flare, the governess would simply join Jeannette by the door and cover the child’s ears as she peered through the crack.
When her mother lapsed, Jeannette became frantic and tormented the governess with crying, and her resentment persisted throughout her school years. But when her mother died, and her father confessed the details of this foregoing account, Jeannette’s anger was overlaid with other emotions. Some of what she felt was guilt. Some of it was the same curiosity that made her governess put an ear to the door. For the next four years she examined and rearranged the fragments of the narrative, like her tarot deck spread over the carpet, until the moment had arrived when the hold of the past became unbearable, and for a while she could not think about it anymore.