For a long time the Count of Grandsailles had been sitting with his head resting on his hand, under the spell of an obsessing reverie. He looked up and let his gaze roam over the plain of Creux de Libreux. This plain meant more to him than anything in the world. There was beauty in its landscape, prosperity in its tilled fields. And of these fields the best was the earth, of this earth the most precious was the humidity, and of this humidity the rarest product was a certain mud…. His notary and most devoted friend, Maître Pierre Girardin, who had a weakness for literary language, liked to say of Grandsailles, ‘The Count is the living incarnation of one of those rare phenomena of the soil that elude the skill and the resources of agronomy – a soil moulded of earth and blood of an untraceable source, a magic clay of which the spirit of our native land is formed.’

When the Count went down toward the sluice-gates with a new visitor on a tour of the property he would invariably stoop to the ground to pick up a muddy clod and as he showed it, modelling it with his aristocratic fingers, he would repeat for the hundredth time in a tone of sudden improvisation, ‘My dear fellow, it is undoubtedly the somewhat rough ductility of our soil that accounts for the miracle of this region, for not only is our wine unique, but also and above all we possess the truffle, the mystery and treasure of this earth, on whose surface glide the largest snails in the whole of France, vying with that other oddity, the crayfish! And all this framed by the most noble and generous vegetation, the cork-oak, which treats us to its own skin!’

And in passing he would tear off a handful of cork-oak leaves from a low branch, squeeze them tightly and roll them in the hollow of his hand, enjoying the sensation against his fine skin of the prickly resistance of their spiny contact whose touch alone sufficed to isolate the Count from the rest of the world. For of all the continents of the globe Grandsailles esteemed only Europe, of all Europe he loved only France, of France he worshipped only Vaucluse, and of Vaucluse the chosen spot of the gods was precisely the one where was located the Château de Lamotte where he was born.

In the Château de Lamotte the best situation was that of his room, and in this room there was a spot from which the view was unique. This spot was exactly limited by four great rectangular lozenges in the black-and-white tiled floor, on whose four outer angles were exactly placed the four slightly contracted paws of a svelte Louis XVI work-desk signed by Jacob, the cabinet-maker. It was at this desk that the Count of Grandsailles was seated, looking through the great Regency balcony at the plain of Creux de Libreux illuminated by the already setting sun.

There was nothing that could so lyrically arouse the fervour of Grandsailles’ patriotic feelings as the unwearying sight constantly offered him by the changing aspect of this fertile plain of Creux de Libreux. Nevertheless one thing egregiously marred for him the perennial harmony of its landscape. This was a section about three hundred metres square where the trees had been cut away, leaving a peeled and earthen baldness which disagreeably broke the melodic and flowing line of a great wood of dark cork-oaks. Up to the time of the death of Grandsailles’ father this wood had remained intact, affording to the vast panorama a homogeneous foreground composed of the dark, undulating and horizontal line of oaks, setting off the luminous distances of the valley, likewise horizontal and gently modulated.

But since the death of the elder Grandsailles the property, burdened with heavy debts and mortgages, had had to be subdivided into three sections. Two of these had fallen into the hands of a great landed proprietor of Breton origin, Rochefort, who immediately became one of the Count’s bitterest political enemies. One of the first things Rochefort did on entering into possession of his new property was to cut down the three hundred square metres of cork-oaks which fell to his title and which had lost their productive value by being separated from the rest of the great wood. They had been replaced by a planting of vines which grew poorly in the exhausted and excessively stony soil. These three hundred square metres of uprooted cork-oaks in the very heart of the family wood of Grandsailles not only bore witness to the dismemberment of the Count’s domains but also this gap had brought completely into view the Moulin des Sources, now inhabited by Rochefort – a place keenly missed, for it was the key to the irrigation and the fertility of the greater part of Grandsailles’ cultivated lands. The Moulin des Sources had formerly been completely hidden by the wood, and only the weather-vanes of the mill tower, emerging between two low oaks, had been visible from the Count’s room.

Next to his devotion to the land, his sense of beauty was certainly one of the most exclusive passions that dominated Grandsailles. He knew himself to have little imagination, but he had a deeply rooted consciousness of his own good taste, and it was thus a fact that the mutilation of his wood was extremely offensive to his aesthetic sense. Indeed since his last electoral defeat five years previously the Count of Grandsailles, with the intransigence that characterized all his decisions, had abandoned politics, to await the moment when events would take a critical turn. This did not imply a disgust with politics. The Count, like every true Frenchman, was a born politician. He was fond of repeating Clausewitz’s maxim, ‘War is only the continuation of politics by other means.’ He was sure that the approaching war with Germany was inevitable and that its coming was mathematically demonstrable. Grandsailles was waiting for this moment to enter into politics again, sincerely wishing that it might come as quickly as possible, for he felt his country day by day growing weaker and more corrupt. What, then, could the anecdotic incidents of the local politics of the plain matter to him?

And while he was impatiently waiting for war to break out, the Count of Grandsailles was thinking of giving a grand ball….

No, it was not only the proximity of his political enemy that oppressed him at the sight of the Moulin des Sources. In the course of these five years, during which the heroic and unswerving devotion of Maître Girardin had succeeded in stabilizing his fortune and in organizing the productivity of his lands, the last wounds that the division of his property had inflicted upon his pride and his interests seemed slowly and definitely to have healed. It should be added that if Grandsailles had been relatively indifferent to the dwindling of his former domains, he had never despaired of buying back the properties that had been taken from him and this idea, dimly nursed in the depths of his plans, helped provisionally to make him feel even more detached from his ancestral estates.

On the other hand he could never become accustomed to the mutilation of his forest, and each new day he suffered more acutely at the sight of that desolate square on which the wind-broken grapevines of a moribund vineyard pitifully wrung their twisted arms at geometrically distributed intervals, an irreparable profanation on the horizon of his first memories – the horizon and stability of his childhood – with its three superimposed fringes, so lovingly blended by the light: the dark forest of the foreground, the illuminated plain and the sky!

Only a detailed study of the very special topography of this region, however, could satisfactorily make clear why these three elements of the landscape, so linked and constant, achieved such a poignant emotional and elegiac effect of luminous contrast in this plain of Libreux. From early afternoon the descending shadows of the mountains behind the Château would begin progressively to invade the wood of cork-oaks, plunging it suddenly into a kind of premature and pre-twilight darkness, and while the very foreground of the landscape lay obscured by a velvet and uniform shadow, the sun, beginning to set in the centre of a deep depression in the terrain, would pour its fire across the plain, its slanting rays giving an increasing objectivity to the tiniest geological details and accidents – an objectivity which was heightened even more paroxysmally by the proverbial limpidity of the atmosphere. It was as though one could have taken the entire plain of Libreux in the hollow of one’s hand, as though one might have distinguished a slumbering lizard in the old wall of a house situated several miles away. It was only at the very end of twilight and almost on the threshold of night that the last residues of the reflections of the setting sun regretfully relaxed their grip on the ultimate empurpled heights, thus seeming to attempt, in defiance of the laws of nature, to perpetuate a chimerical survival of day. When it was almost nightfall the plain of Creux de Libreux still appeared illuminated. And it was perhaps because of this exceptional receptivity to light that, each time the Count of Grandsailles experienced one of his painful lapses of depression, when his soul darkened with the moral shadows of melancholy, he would see the ancestral hope of perennial and fertile life rising from the deep black forest of the spiny cork-oaks of his grief – the plain of Creux...