“Marianne!”
Marianne didn’t hear Alain’s call. She was seeing herself as she had never seen herself before. Her heart had been beating wildly and she had felt shy as she walked through the city to the art gallery in the red dress with its plunging neckline. It was knee-length, silk and a warm shade of red. She’d found it at a dressmaker’s that did alterations, where it had ended up in the dusty shop window after its owner had forgotten to pick it up for two years. She had thanked the stranger for not being brave enough to face this dress, leaving it instead for her to discover.
Nicolas, the receptionist at Pension Babette, had not only dug up the Galerie Rohan’s address, but had also gone out into the street to get a better view of Marianne in the light of the dying sun. “Breathtaking,” he had said.
And now here she was, standing in front of these pictures that revealed to her a Marianne she would never have recognized in herself at first sight. Marianne holding her face to the setting sun. Marianne sleeping. One portrait of her just after a kiss, a smile on her lips, lost in reverie. A woman playing the accordion by the sea. A nude Marianne.
She saw herself through the eyes of a man who loved her, and she discovered that she was beautiful: she had the particular beauty of women who are loved. Her soul had been transformed. She saw that she had many faces: grief and indulgence, tenderness and pride, dreams and music. And there was one picture where she knew what she had been contemplating—a dead-end road. There was boundless desolation in her expression, her eyes lifeless, her mouth despondent, the lines on her face deep and coarse.
Without her noticing, the other visitors made room for her, and as she went from picture to picture, some of them gazed after her. “Isn’t that…?” “Looks just like…” “Do you think they’re a couple?”
Finally she stood in front of L’Amour de Marianne. This face showed how she looked when she was in love. It told her all about her force and her strength, everything about her desires and her willpower: it was the essence of her being. There was a sense of freedom about it, a wild sensuality, an aura. Her love was like a blazing sea.
Yann stepped up behind her. She sensed his presence without needing to turn around. Neither did she need to ask whether he would have held her back: the power of the paintings had made this question superfluous.
“Is this how you see me?” she asked quietly.
“This is how you are,” he said.
This is how you are. Your soul is a kaleidoscope of colors.
Marianne turned to face him.
“You have a new face. What should I call it?” he asked.
She looked at him, and she felt with fierce intensity that she could do a great deal with this man in the days she had left, and also that she would never again allow herself to be deprived of this feeling.
Of all the host of possibilities that were spread before her, choosing Yann was one of the easiest. Of course she could go out into the world and love other men—taller, smaller, with different laughter lines and different eyes that glittered like stars or mountain lakes or melted chocolate. She could travel to another end of the earth, with different friends, where there were different rivers and rooms in which she and her tile would sleep alone, and there would doubtless be a cat to visit them.
But that wasn’t necessary. She chose the man standing before her. She could not do without him. They could deal with the details later.
“Marianne is alive,” she answered. “That’s the name of this face.”
Happiness is loving what we need, and needing what we love—and obtaining it, thought Yann.
“Will you come back with us to Kerdruc?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Marianne. Kerdruc had everything she expected from life.
Then, as if they could no longer bear to gaze at each other without feeling each other, they embraced with such force that their teeth collided as they kissed. They laughed, kissed a second time, more gently, but their laughter grew, and they stood there, intertwined, until it filled the entire room.
It is nothing but a legend, they say. La nuit de samhain: the end of summer, the beginning of the dark months. It is the night in which the ancestors and the living gather, in which time and space are superimposed and for twelve nameless hours the past, the present and the future become indistinguishable. The other world emerges from the mists to return our dead to us for one night. We bid them to question the gods, demons and fairies in the hereafter about our fates.
Yet when the human meets the elements, and the heroes the haters, each should stick to his own in the light, for very few souls survive the battle between the merging worlds. Anyone who loses his way on dark roads or by the watery gates to the other world will encounter spirits that only druids or priestesses can defeat. Anyone who ventures outside is sucked into the realm of the dead and must spend a year with them. If they do return, nobody will be able to see them anymore.
Marianne nevertheless walked through this night to the sea to meet her dead. She had left the feast in honor of the deceased on her own. It was not only the dead that were celebrated at this festival, for she and Geneviève had turned it into a festival of women too, just as the forgotten Celtic and Breton myths had once required: women’s love dissolved all borders, stretching beyond the reach of death and time.
The women of this world and the other were thanked with an offering of burning sheaves of grain, which were covered and extinguished after a minute’s silence. This was the sign that the summer was over, and a new cycle began when the next sheaves were set alight. At each table there was an extra place setting and a chair was left empty for those who were bidden to come from the other world. All lights were put out for a minute so that the dead could climb unseen into their boats and set out for this world, guided by candles in the windows.
It was the duty of every reveler to justify his or her forbidden acts or forgive others theirs, and it behoved everyone to draw up a list of the things they would like to have experienced by samhain the following year. This life list was also Marianne’s idea.