She begins a new letter. After a moment her pen stops moving, and she listens to the still house. Again there is a creaking sound, but it is in the walls, not in the passage outside her door. The pen moves on again, like a machine. Mme Viénot is waiting for Sabine to come and say good night. The poor child must be disheartened at losing her job with La Femme Elégante, and it is indeed a pity, but such things happen, and she is prepared to offer comfort, reassurance, the indisputable truth that what seems like misfortune is often a blessing in disguise. She glances impatiently at her wrist watch, and sees that it is quarter of one. She writes two more letters, even so. Her acquaintance, now that she no longer lives in Paris, shows a tendency to forget her unless prodded regularly with letters and small attentions. Paying guests, when they leave, cannot be counted on to remember indefinitely what an agreeable time they have had, and so may fail to return or fail to send other clients. A note, covering one page and part of the next, serves to remind them, if it is a question of someone’s searching out a pleasant, well-situated, wholly proper establishment, that they know just the place—a handsome country house about two hundred kilometers from Paris and not far from Blois.
Mme Viénot takes off the red dressing gown and puts it over the back of a chair, gets into bed, and opens the book on her bedside table. She reads a few lines and then turns out the light. It is time that Sabine learned to be more thoughtful of others.
Stretched out flat, she discovers how tired she is, and for a moment or two she passes directly into that stage of conscious dreaming that precedes sleep. Between dreams, she reflects that the younger generation has very little affection for Beaumesnil. It is important only to Eugène.
The telephone rings, and when Mme Viénot answers it, she hears the voice of Mme Carrère. Monsieur has had a slight relapse—nothing serious, but the doctors think it would be advisable for him to be in the country, where there is absolute quiet, in a place that did him so much good before. They arrive that afternoon by car, and find their old rooms waiting for them. “You will want to rest after your long drive,” Mme Viénot says. “Thérèse will bring you a can of hot water immediately. Then you need not be disturbed until dinnertime.” And closing the door behind her, she passes happily over the border into sleep, but the ratching, scratching sound draws her back into consciousness. The sound continues at irregular intervals. A squirrel or a fieldmouse, she tells herself. Or a rat.
After half an hour she sits up in bed, turns on the light, props the pillows behind her back. With a sigh at not being able to go to sleep when she so much needs a good night’s rest, she reaches for the book. It is the memoirs of Father Robert, an early nineteenth-century Jesuit missionary, who lived among the Chinese, and was close to God. Mme Viénot puts what happened to him, his harsh but beautifully dedicated life, between her and all silences, all creaking noises, all failures, all searching for answers that cannot be found.