AS FOR CONSTANCE . . . well, things weren’t too bad for her either. Who would have thought she would get used to this reclusive existence to the point where she no longer thought of it that way? It’s true that she was very well treated: she was looked after as well as she would have been at a luxury spa, vacation resort, artists’ residence, or nursing home.
That particular late morning, as they always did when the weather allowed—which it did more and more often with the approach of summer—Jean-Pierre and Christian had arranged a sun lounger for her under the lime tree, with some light reading arranged on a coffee table: women’s magazines, movie magazines, magazines full of puzzles and brainteasers, with some randomly bought bestsellers that might distract her from the Quillet. They went all the way to Bénévent-l’Abbaye to fetch them, as there was no newspaper store in Châtelus-le-Marcheix. Since Victor had given strict instructions that Constance must not be allowed to read any publication—be it daily, weekly, or monthly—featuring news, particularly crime stories, it was up to Jean-Pierre to read and censor anything in Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Grazia that might contravene these rules, before passing the magazines on to Constance. Over time, in these magazines, she would read articles on summer fashion and advice on tanning, makeup, and looking elegant on the beach, before awaiting the fall trends in August and September. At this time of day, the coffee table was also loaded with pre-lunch snacks—cold drinks and bowls containing pistachios, almonds, and peanuts—prepared by Christian. No, she couldn’t complain about the way she was being treated.
Christian and Jean-Pierre were the ones she saw most of the time. Lessertisseur dropped by occasionally, sometimes with Lucile, sometimes not, to ensure that the logistics were taken care of. As for Victor, who seemed to be a sort of technical adviser, he appeared much more rarely, to Constance’s disappointment. So it’s true that there were not many distractions—no radio or television, and obviously no Internet connection—but, as her life before this had mostly been spent in a city, she found it quite pleasant to discover a more rural area, with its flora and fauna, about which she knew nothing at all. Just as she still knew nothing about where exactly she was.
A few major clues did exist in this regard, but they were contradictory. Over the fireplace hung a colorful relief map of the Mayenne département, suggesting that this was where they were, but near the dresser was a wall thermometer advertising a butcher’s store located in the center of a neighboring village with a name unknown to Constance. These clues were the work of the sophisticated Lessertisseur, intended to further disorientate his hostage—the village of Saint-Affrique, site of the aforementioned butcher’s, was a good four hundred miles from the département of Mayenne—but they had no effect on Constance, whose grasp of geography was hardly any better than her knowledge of natural history.
Anyway, wherever they were, the farm must have been occupied just before being taken over by her kidnappers. Various floral and faunistic clues attested to this. In terms of flora, other than the distant views of grassy fields and trees, where Constance couldn’t venture, her study was confined to a nearby patch of well-known flowers—zinnias, cosmos, anemones, all of them now untended—whose blossoming she followed with interest, looking after them and discovering other species that she couldn’t name or even differentiate, as her knowledge of flowers up to this point had generally been restricted to conical clusters wrapped in transparent plastic.
In terms of fauna, out by the barn a condescending rooster ruled over six twitchy hens, not far from three rabbits, which lived, more relaxed than the chickens, in the skeleton of an old piano. You sometimes find pianos where you least expect them. This one—a worm-eaten upright, its varnish eroded, without a manufacturer’s name, standing in the entrance of the barn—was used primarily as shelving for various empty recipients that had once contained agricultural products. Constance, having lifted its lid—with a sticky noise like a dry mouth opening—found a keyboard with almost all its teeth remaining, albeit very yellowed, the sharps and flats decayed. There was no way to get a sound out of it: the cords must have been recycled for gardening, its soundboard used for kindling, and wire fencing wrapped around its metal frame and its feet to transform it into a hutch.
As for the less domesticated animals, at least one of them showed a bit of life. As the sun grew low, after an afternoon of reading and gardening, Constance would return to her sun lounger under the lime tree and an evening bird would regularly serenade her. To judge from the sound, it might have been an improved prototype of a merle. Whatever bird it was, it sat at the top of this tree in all weathers, singing its heart out, repeating ad libitum a melody that seemed more human than avian: tonal and composed of fourteen clearly articulated, well-balanced notes, it could have been the chorus of a pop song that—with the addition of a few appropriate, easy-to-write couplets—would have enabled the pseudo-merle to make a fortune. Maybe it repeated itself like this because it hoped to catch the ear of a passing impresario, agent, or producer who, sensing a hit, would climb straight up the lime tree and grab a feather from the bird’s back to make it sign a contract in its own blood.
But after initially admiring the bird for its melodic invention, Constance ended up finding the constant reiteration of this same tune boring, annoying, and finally exasperating. Soon she was cursing the song’s composer, devaluing his work, and regarding him merely as an inept disciple of the minimalist school, a poor man’s La Monte Young or Charlemagne Palestine. This bird apart, Constance could also inspect the comings and goings of polychromatic butterflies, sometimes fluttering around on their own but more often in couples. There were a prodigious number of butterflies in the area that summer, far more than usual, despite the fact that you never saw a single elephant.
This last line might seem incongruous to you: after all, why should you see elephants in Creuse? Well, you’re right. The only reason we mention it is because, according to the work of Dr. L. Elizabeth L. Rasmussen, the females of Elephas maximus use—as all animal species do—a certain combination of molecules when rutting becomes conceivable or even desirable. Such a chemical signal allows the female elephants to inform the male elephants that they are at their sexual peak, madly in love, wildly horny, and ready to mate whenever they like. In her studies, L. Elizabeth L. Rasmussen successfully proved that this molecular gathering—this pheromone, in other words, technically designated as (Z)-7-dodecen-1-yl acetate—is exactly the same in an elephant as it is in more than a hundred species of butterflies.
We thought it would be good if this little-known zoological phenomenon were brought to the attention of the wider public. Naturally, said public has the right to object that such a piece of information seems purely digressive, a mere didactic amusement, permitting us to bring the chapter to a smooth ending without any connection to our actual story. To this objection, which is of course admissible, we would like to respond as we did earlier: for the moment.