The chambermaid returned his letter in shreds. “Madame protests that she will not be the recipient of such immodest remarks.”

“She did not even read it?”

“No.”

“Then how does she know the remarks are immodest?”

Stern wrote her another letter, which also came back in shreds. On the back of one scrap were the words: “LET THE LAW DECIDE!”

The preliminary examination of the Marquise took place in one of the bathhouses of Nîmes. The conclusion of the medical experts was unanimous that the Marquise had “without a shadow of doubt been deprived of her virginity.” Richard Stern was jubilant. His jubilation was, however, short-lived. The Marquise de Stern claimed that what the doctors of medicine had observed was merely the “result of a rapprochement by her husband that was vulgar and incompetent and not in the manner deemed appropriate.” The taverns of Francaroutier rang that night with the latest news: “The Magyar can only dig with his digit!”

The congress had the couple summoned to that same bathhouse. On the advice of Academician Carmillac, Richard Stern submitted a particular request: “Ensure that my wife is bathed thoroughly. It may not be beneath her to employ one of those cramping tools employed by the women of the streets.”

Wonder of wonders, the Marquise consented to bathe before the witnesses, fully covered from top to toe, but remarked to her husband: “Monsieur appears to be rather well informed regarding the habits of street women!”

Richard Stern downed the yolks of four new-laid eggs before turning to the Marquise on the bed, whose curtains the court bailiffs had discreetly drawn. “I will make her a boy, the first of the six,” he swore, clenching his fists. Sweat poured off his body, but down below there was no sign of movement. “Impossible! I’m going to have six male offspring! Six boys! Six boys!” he said, in his mother tongue, panicking.

“Your summons here was not for prayer!” hissed the Marquise.

Time went on. One of the shriveled little midwives peeked behind the curtains from time to time and reported to the assembly: “Nothing, not a thing.”

“I’m lost!… I’ve been bewitched!” he croaked bronchially, adding a few choice curses for good measure in the Hungarian that neither the committee nor his eminently pious wife would understand.

The citizens of Nîmes, and those who had gathered here from Francaroutier, had laid substantial bets, some on the husband, some on the wife. Those who had voted for Richard Stern lost their stake when the committee’s decision was made public. The marriage was speedily annulled, the Marquise reverted to being known as des Reaux, her ex-husband was forbidden to set foot on the estate, and his belongings were carted over to the parish curé’s, where he found temporary lodging for a second time.

“Accept the dispensation of providence,” said the reverend.

“I would appreciate it if you kept at least God out of this!”

He spent three days in Paris, saying his farewells to his friends and teachers. As he recounted the details to Academician Carmillac, the latter shook his head in disbelief. This time Richard Stern added the story of how he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this was indeed the woman he was destined to marry.

“Perhaps you were mistaken, and she is not, after all, the one.”

Richard Stern shrugged his shoulders and again listed the attributes, like lines of a poem: “Foreign tongue, honey-colored skin, hair as black as night, a triangular birthmark above the breastbone.”

As he packed his bags in Francaroutier he saw that he had acquired almost nothing apart from books. He bought a cart with four reliable horses, so that he would not have to depend on the nags of the post-houses on the way. Before he finally turned his back on his life in France, it happened that he ran into the Marquise des Reaux in the marketplace. The woman was on the arm of a gentleman with auburn whiskers and a tall top hat and was tripping among the stalls with a lack of inhibition that made one doubt that it was truly she. An even more striking change was that her hair had become a light chestnut color, the one the French call brunette. Richard Stern cried out: “Marquise!”

The woman did not look up. Coolly she continued on her way. The same day Richard Stern discovered from one of the coachmen on the estate (in return for a ten-franc note) that as a result of scarlet fever in her childhood the Marquise was to all intents completely bald and had worn a perruque ever since. “I am surprised that this is news to Monsieur Störn… in Francaroutier it is common knowledge!”

To Richard Stern the passage of his time in prison seemed like the progress of a rotting boat floating or, rather, just drifting with infinitesimal slowness, somewhere in the outside world. He pondered the mysterious nature of time, as he hung in his cell window, clinging to the bars, made slippery and slightly warm by his sweat. He tried to grip them at a point as high as possible, but sooner or later his fingers began to slither downwards and he landed on the rough stone ledge, gashing his lower arms, which bore traces similar to the raw wounds left by the rubbing of the leg-irons.

Sometimes it seemed that even a quarter of an hour would not pass, and writing about the endlessness of his days seemed even harder than living through them. Nonetheless, somehow, the seemingly unending, snail’s-pace crawl of the mornings, afternoons, and evenings began to add up to weeks and months, and when the prisoner least expected it, the first year had passed. In The Book of Fathers he regularly and carefully marked with little strokes the calendar of his days of imprisonment. It was as if the boat, having been stuck fast on a reef, at last pushed off and gathered speed, only to become stranded on a sandbank, with no movement again until who knows when. Somehow, lo and behold, the second year, too, was gone, with a sudden impetus at its end like the lightning swoop of an eagle on its prey, after what seems like an eternity of stillness with its wings spread wide.

Richard Stern was still in Spielberg Castle prison when time’s eagle captured its most succulent prey: the century itself. The midnight tolling of the church bells found him kneeling by his bed; in the absence of a table this was also the position in which he wrote in The Book of Fathers. Will anything out of the ordinary happen? After all, it is not every day that the calendar turns the page to a new century.

Nothing.

Well, at least the century is over, he thought. He spent the night awake, first exercising his mind through prayer, then by counting. He stopped when he reached nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine: some unnameable fear gripped him and would not let him utter the figure with four zeroes.

In the early hours of New Century’s Day one of the prisoners began to sing in a low, dark voice: The way before me weeps, the trail before me grieves… Richard Stern broke down in tears. It was the end of the century in which he was born and the one just beginning was likely to hold in store nothing more than damp cell walls. In Spielberg the window was so high that he was not able to look out at all.

Still, something did happen. For the first time since the Marquise had tossed him aside, his loins had stirred. He thought that was something to which he had long since bidden farewell. The erectness was palpable. For some time he did not take the trouble to grasp his manhood and would have had it decline. In vain. He was constrained to take it firmly in hand and enjoy it until it yielded relief.

Borbála had taught him that whatever one does on the first day of the New Year, one will be doing all year long. Ah, if this was true for the first hours of the century… then I shall have no end of trouble. And from that day few were the mornings that he did not bedew. Because of this he was racked by guilt. In his childhood, in the years in the turret, the reverend priest would visit them to celebrate mass and to teach the children. At his bidding, Richard Stern duly reported how he played with himself. The reverend priest shook his head and hissed: “You must not practice self-abuse! It is the work of the Devil! It will rot your brain!”