What If I became riche one day?

I worked hardly

She thought of Aeschylus' verses in Prometheus Chained, when he evokes "the innumerable laughter of the waves of the sea". For the ancient Greeks, the sea was not a bucolic setting, but a fierce power, the mirror of human passions and the merciless arbiter of destinies. It was precisely this tragic dimension that she was trying to restore in the manuscript in progress. Her stay in Biarritz provided her with the raw material, the epic breath essential to nourish the scenes of confrontation between her characters and fate.

"Look, Poupune," she whispered softly, looking down at the little dog who had sat against her leather boot, fascinated by the sight of the foaming waves. "This is where it all begins and ends."

The total financial independence acquired thanks to her publishing successes in Sweden, Germany and throughout Europe took on its full meaning here: money, managed with aloof rigour by her Parisian steward, was only an instrument of entrenchment. It allowed her to live in this way, as a nomadic sovereign, between her private mansion in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, her secluded farmhouse in Chalosse and this imperial balcony open to the abyss. No publisher could dictate a line to her, no critic could intimidate her, no former colleague in the courthouse could cross the barrier of haughty anonymity that she had erected around her name.

After half an hour of walking in the invigorating wind, Victoire and her companion returned to the warmth of the suite. Poupoune, after having carefully dried his paws with a preheated bath towel, immediately found his nest at the foot of the bed.

Victoire sat down again at her desk. Physical fatigue had cleansed her mind of all superfluous tension. She relit the small work lamp with a green shade and resumed reading the last page she had written the day before. She crossed out a useless adverb, tightened an incision, rearranged a period according to the rules of Ciceronian prosody. The tongue had to flow like a river of steel, without slackness or repentance.

The next morning, at dawn, the trunks were packed. The driver deposited the luggage in the trunk of the black sedan. Poupoune, seated in the back seat on her familiar cushion, watched through the window as the palace left.

The carriage took the north-east road, leaving the cliffs of the Ocean to plunge again into the interior hills. The landscape changed as one penetrated inland: the maritime pines and seaside villas gave way to the undulating horizons of the Chalosse, the brick and cob farms, the thick curtains of oaks and the fertile fields bordering the course of the Adour.

When she arrived at her property, Victoire rediscovered with a feeling of plenitude the vegetal silence of her farm. Here, there was no spray or din of the sea, but the sovereign peace of a generous and secret nature. It was in this earthly sanctuary that she was going to spend the next two weeks, locked up with her ancient texts, her cardboard cards and her four-legged companion, to give her work the definitive framework before going to have it printed in Paris.

Getting out of the carriage, she let Poupoune rush across the vast lawn strewn with gold leaves. Victoire breathed deeply the warm air of the damp earth, pressed her copy of Plato against her, and crossed the stone steps with the unshakeable assurance of a woman who owes her salvation only to her own genius and her indefatigable toil.

The stay in Chalosse, usually so rigorously scheduled, was brutally disrupted on the fourth day. While a late summer storm charged the sky with heavy electricity above the slopes of the Adour, the estate experienced a double intrusion that put the impregnable fortress of Victoire to the test.

The morning had begun according to the usual liturgy. Sitting at her large oak table facing the park, Victoire was working on the revision of the central song of her manuscript, annotating the translation of a passage from Sophocles' Electra. Poupoune was happily browsing by the boxwood bushes, busy flushing out the lizards numbed by the heavy heat.

Suddenly, an unusual sound of an engine echoed in the avenue of hundred-year-old plane trees. A gray sedan passed through the gate — which the gardener had left ajar — and stopped unceremoniously in front of the stone porch. Victoire slowly put down her golden pen, her eyebrow furrowed with cold anger. No one, absolutely no one, had permission to disturb her Landes retreat.

Two men in dark suits got out of the vehicle. Through the old panes of the window, Victoire immediately recognized the starched figure of Mr. Darnay, a former partner in her Parisian business firm, accompanied by a young clerk who was visibly intimidated. Darnay, who had never digested his triumphant departure for literature or his sovereign contempt for the worldliness of the bar, had come to try a coup de brilliance: the conflictual liquidation of former shares in civil society of means from which he hoped to draw substantial compensation, convinced that the immense fortune of the novelist would push her to a hasty transaction.

Even before Victoire had made a gesture, a shrill cry resounded at the bottom of the park. It was not the visitor, but Poupoune.

The animal, attracted by a rustling sound under a pile of dead wood near the old well, had recklessly approached an alert Aesculapian snake, before stumbling and slipping into the narrow gap of an ancient stone cistern, covered with dry brambles. The panicked yelps of the little dog, captive under the ground, tore through the silence of the farmhouse.

Instantly forgetting the manuscript, the grudges of the past and the presence of intruders, Victoire jumped out of the library, rushed down the steps and crossed the park without giving a single glance to the two astonished lawyers.

"Poopune!" she called in a firm voice but filled with a terror that no court or literary critic had ever managed to arouse in her.

The dog responded with faint muffled complaints, trapped two meters below behind an unsealed slab and a pile of unstable stones. The danger of a landslide was real: the slightest miscalculated jolt risked burying the fragile mascot under blocks of hundred-year-old limestone.

Darnay and his collaborator, having followed the writer with a hurried step down the aisle, tried to intervene: "Dear colleague, what an unfortunate affair... If we can help you, but first allow me to inform you of the urgency of our request concerning the 2024 accounts..." »

Victoire turned around, her eyes icy, raised to her full height like a tragic figure of antiquity ready to strike down the insolence of mortals. "Shut up, Darnay. Your pettiness of proceedings is not worth a breath of this animal. Take this iron lever near the shed, or leave my land this instant before I call in the gendarmerie for trespassing." »

The tone brooked no reply. Disconcerted by this implacable authority, the clerk complied without question, and ran to fetch the tool. For twenty minutes of extreme tension, Victoire directed the operation with methodical composure. She calculated the points of support, had the upper stone wedged with large oak planks, and pushed aside herself, with her bare hands, the thorny brambles and rubble that encumbered the opening.

Kneeling in the loose earth without worrying about her linen clothes, she slipped her arm to the shoulder in the dark gut. Her fingers finally brushed against the silky, trembling fur. With a soft but assured grip, she brought the little beast to the surface.

Poupoune was unharmed, covered in calcareous dust and shivering with fright. As soon as she felt herself pressed against her mistress's chest, she buried her muzzle under Victoire's cloak, uttering little groans of relief as the first drops of the storm began to hit the leaves of the plane trees.

Victoire stood up, clutching her living treasure to her heart. She faced Darnay, who still held a leather briefcase under his arm with a profoundly ridiculous look under the incipient shower.

"Your summons is null and void in form, Darnay, and has been prescribed for six months," she said with surgical precision, regaining for three seconds the fierce mastery of her former profession. "My manager on Place Vendôme manages waste of this type through a bailiff. Never set foot here again. »