THE STORY IS TOO LONG, Mother interrupts. All those dinners, those corridors. And where is M. Jouy? I fixed him something special to eat.
Beatrice's face, her hands, collapse: But I haven't finished.
I already know what is going to happen, Mother says. Claude told us at the beginning.
Do you understand how difficult it is, to slice someone open with a carving knife? His intestines—his liver—his marbled heart—
This is why I use the butcher, Mother says. Where is M. Jouy?
Don't you wonder if she found Griselda?
I made him sausages!
Mother and Beatrice stare at each other, white-lipped, ill-matched in their obduracy.
The daughter relents. But this is the best part, she says mournfully.
And seeking encouragement, she finds none, for Mimi has been exiled for coughing, Jean-Luc for looking bored, and the only audience remaining is her unimaginative mother.
Blood everywhere, she murmurs as her audience stalks off, in search of an idiot.
And when the curdling cries rise up from the shed, when the cart is found empty and the bridegroom missing, Beatrice watches in regret the woman backing from their gate, whose tragic story, it must be admitted, she somewhat mismanaged. If only her brothers and sisters were not capable of such sabotage! She had gotten rid of a useless thing, put a beautiful thing in its place, and yet they were, all of them, intent upon finding fault and thwarting her.
Her sense of injustice is so strong that she stamps her foot against the ground and then, with the other foot, kicks her mother's precious, pointless chest.