BUT THE CHILD and her photographer are inconsolable. They cleave to each other as orphans do; they seek comfort in the photographs' melancholy caress. Adrien has laid out all his pictures on the grass.
This image, he tells Madeleine, is literally an emanation of M. Pujol: from his body radiates light, which then inscribes itself on the very surface which in turn your gaze now touches.
They find solace only in the certainty that his body still touches them through the medium of light. But it is a solace that, the photographer knows, will lead slowly and inexorably to madness. The pictures before them serve not only as agonizing reminder of his absence but irrefutable proof that he did in fact exist for them, that his skin did burn upon the man's fingertips, that his flesh did shrink from the girl's stinging touch. This proof is what they cannot bear. He was indeed here, the photographs whisper. But he is no longer.
A decision is reached, in the name of sanity. The widow finds beneath her door another note, much less elegantly penned. Two more of her assistants have decamped.