change from courtship to engagement had utterly changed his face. Soon he was invading her dreams. She recalled them in the mornings and felt the old flutter in the chest, and the strange sickness in the nose, like being in a tanner’s shop and inhaling leather fumes.
This proved a problem only on their wedding night. Dusk was falling when they arrived at their new apartment; they climbed the stairs, hung their coats behind the door, and Frédéric led the way down the corridor to the bedroom. Before he had even turned on the lamp, Ariane moved past the bed and stood in the far corner. One section of her face was blue with moonlight, the rest in darkness. Neither of them spoke. Then, Frédéric took a step forward.
“Don’t be scared, Ariane.”
Ariane said nothing.
“I will sleep out there, if you prefer.”
Her blue lips made the shape of “no,” but no sound came out.
Minutes passed. Frédéric took the plunge, looked at the ground and began to undress. To make it less of a performance he tried to stand side-on, but when on a reflex he reached for the wardrobe to hang up his suit he accidentally exposed himself, and hesitated midgesture, extending his arm and retracting it again. A laugh caught in his chest. By the time he was under the covers he felt he had run a long distance. Ariane remained in the corner. He turned over and she began to weep. Gently, slowly, he heard the flicking sound of buttons, followed by the soft rasp of cotton, and then he saw the white cloud of her petticoat as she slipped into the bed. He felt her wet face on his shoulder. The weight of her head, her warm small body curled up like a creature’s. He caressed her hair until the jagged breath became calm, and then deep, and then fitful and heavy with sleep.
It did become easier. The following morning Ariane smiled at him as they packed their things for the journey south. On the road between Lyon and Grenoble, she said: “I think this man needs a haircut.”
She was pointing at a calèche in front of them. Long sheaves of hay stuck out from the rear of the vehicle. Frédéric laughed, and Ariane gazed at him, then joined in laughing, drawing breath and laughing again.
Ariane even laughed when they first made love, in the rented guest room near the water. Her body was soft but her limbs were strong, and her legs gripped him from behind. At the moment of entry she gazed up at him with her transparent eyes, and Frédéric let out a strangled moan. For a week they slept late and made love on waking, then bathed and walked along the shore to drink coffee by the pier where the sea smacked against the wall.
After they returned to Paris, Frédéric took on the teaching of two more undergraduate anthropology courses, while he worked to make his dissertation worthy of publishing. His manuscript was particularly ambitious in trying to combine two lines of contemporary thought under a single thesis: one being the recent theories of cranial development and criminality, and the other the program of physical anthropology that was emerging at the time from scholarship in the African colonies. On their return from the south, however, Frédéric discovered to his dismay that during the very week of his honeymoon an old doctoral colleague named Émile had published his own manuscript, a work on the anthropology of crime based on firsthand knowledge from the Central Prison Infirmary. The news was a blow to Frédéric’s confidence. Émile’s work was fairly pedestrian but it was undeniably thorough, and its flaws paled before the simple fact that he had published before Frédéric had—and at that Émile was three years younger than him. The whole thing cast a shadow over Frédéric’s manuscript, which had been proficient at the time of defence but now seemed unwieldy and even in places a little thin. If his first publication did not meet with the esteem of his peers, if it failed to win him prestige, Frédéric feared humiliation and an irreversibly minor status in the development of the discipline.
Ariane was his relief. She was like a crocus, her blades just starting to part. Her cheeks shone with new colour as she set about decorating the apartment. All by herself she bargained over a salon set from Saglio on Rue de Vaugirard, and marshalled the neighbours to hoist a bowlegged commode up the stairs. The