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ceiling when he raised her legs to penetrate her. He spent almost an hour using her at will, and the thought did not even cross her mind to try and escape his embrace, so convinced was she that he had a perfect right to do what he was doing, and the only comfort she derived from the state of anxiety into which Sir Stephen’s sudden departure had plunged her was the total silence which accompanied the young man’s endeavors as he took her again and again, a silence broken only by a brief spasmodic moan at the moment of pleasure, until he had exhausted his forces.
    He was perhaps twenty-five, with a thin, harsh yet sensitive face, in which two black eyes were set like somber jewels. He had, on two occasions, wiped O’s tear-stained cheek with one finger, but at no time had he brought his mouth close to hers. It was obvious that he did not dare, although he did not have the slightest compunction about thrusting a sex so thick and so long in its state of erection that each time he rammed it home a fresh cascade of tears poured down her cheeks. When at last he had finished, O pulled down her skirt, rebuttoned first her sweater then her suit jacket, which she had opened so that he could have free access to her breasts: she had time; while he disappeared somewhere into the underbrush, to run a comb through her dishevelled hair, powder her face, and freshen the lipstick on her lips. The rain had stopped, the trunks of the beech trees shone brightly in the gray light. Almost touching the left side of the car, crowning a getitle slope, a red mass of foxgloves lay within arm’s reach, so close that O could literally have reached out and picked them through the lowered window of the car. The driver returned, got into the car and closed the door which he had left open when he had disappeared, and started the motor. Once they had rejoined the main highway it was no more than fifteen minutes before they reached a little village that O did not recognize; but when the Citro=EBn slowed down, after having skirted the length of some endless wall enclosing a vast park, and stopped before an ivy-covered house, O finally realized that it must indeed be the back entrance to Roissy. She got out of the car; the driver began busying himself with her baggage. The heavy wooden door, which was painted a dark green then varnished, opened even before she had a chance to knock or ring: they had seen her from inside. She crossed the threshold; the tiled vestibule, with its red and white muslin drapes, was empty. Directly opposite her, a mirror that covered the entire wall reflected her full-length portrait, thin and erect in her gray suit, her top coat over her arm, her suitcases piled around her feet, the door closing behind her, and this sprig of heather she was holding in her hand, a sprig she had automatically accepted when the driver had handed it to her, a childish and ridiculous keepsake, which she did not dare throw onto the brightly waxed tile floor and which, for some reason she did not understand, embarrassed her. But yes, she did know. Who was it who had told her that heather picked in the woods near Paris brought bad luck? She would have been better off to have picked the foxgloves that her grandmother had forbidden her to touch as a child, because they are poisonous. She put the sprig of heather down on the windowsill of the only window in the vestibule. Just as she did, Anne-Marie, followed by a man dressed in a gardener’s blue denim work clothes, came in. The gardener took O’s suitcases.
    “Don’t tell me you finally made it,” said Anne-Marie. “Sir Stephen called me almost two hours ago saying you were on your way. The car was supposed to bring you here directly. What happened?”
    “It was the driver,” said O. thought that . .
    Anne-Marie burst out laughing. “I get the picture,” she said. “He raped you, and you let him do whatever he liked? No, that was not in the plans; he had no right to do what he did. But it