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apartment door with the key he had kept on him like a talisman ever since call-up.
    It was a small two-room dwelling in a modern building; that’s to say, put up around 1920. What was nice about it (Lachaume used to wax lyrical about this in years gone by) was that it did not have any other building immediately opposite, so it had a view over the tops of trees and a few low structures to the far horizon. Light poured in, and even pale sunshine made the colored glass spheres that Françoise had hung up in the bedroom (and which, as a reader of Elle , she called the lounge) twinkle merrily. Nothing had changed, or almost nothing: the glass spheres were where they used to be, but dustier, as if Françoise paid less attention to them now, and the bed, though it was made, wasn’t covered with the bedspread that Françoise used to insist on from start of day. On the other hand, Lachaume’s pillow was in its place, in the flower-printed slipcase that turned it into a cushion during the daytime.
    He was struck by these details involuntarily as he sat near the window in the big wicker armchair where Françoise used to like to take the sun with her skirt raised over her beautiful thighs.
    In the second room, called the office, where he had his bookshelves, he didn’t notice any significant difference either, except the arbitrary tidiness of the place, which made it feel boring. It was here, in this room, which was his own room, that he first felt like an intruder, among all those books that had nonetheless been his long before he had met Françoise. He cast a cold eye over them, formed a friendly thought for them just as coolly, and then began to look for the civilian clothes he had been dreaming of for twenty-one months.
    There used to be shelving inside the wardrobe where his shirts were piled high; a small drawer where you could dip in your hand and pull out a pair of socks; one side of the hanging space was where his trousers and jackets hung, and beneath them there was room for his shoes. Lachaume went from one of these spots to the other and found nothing. It was the same in the bathroom. Under the shower, blind from soap in his eyes, he stretched out toward the shelf with a gesture resurrected from the past and his hand fell only on objects he didn’t recognize.
    It was perfectly plausible that Françoise, who hadn’t had prior warning of his return, had simply failed to get Lachaume’s clothes out of the trunk where he found them in the end, in mothballs; and you could also believe that shifting toiletries was of no significance at all. You can believe what you like, Lachaume thought to himself, but it’s a weird feeling all the same to be back home and to feel that you aren’t.
    He put on a pair of trousers that were now loose on him and a white shirt, and sat down again by the window with a small volume of Shakespeare. But scarcely had he read a couple of speeches than he could see himself reading Shakespeare in a white shirt in a wicker armchair, and the vision intensified the anger that would not let go of him. Cut it out! he thought as he closed the book. I am not Lawrence of Arabia!… And his anger turned against that artificially sunny sky, against the illusion of spring in midwinter.
    Whenever the sun came out, Françoise usually came home at lunchtime and sat in her wicker chair nibbling cheese and fruit; her office job didn’t require her presence at regular hours. Reckoning she would be back today, since it was sunny, Lachaume got lunch ready.
    The hardest thing was to face the local shopkeepers, especially the butcher, who used to do him a favor or two. “Your lady is going to be pleased … She’s been kind of queer recently…” He clutched the supplies he’d snatched from the enemy and ran back up the stairs four by four. And then time passed, and the fat on the food cooled into a coating of grease.
    When Lachaume woke, night was