I wait slowly, as everybody does.

The houses in the lower town are peopled by absentees.

When you go in they talk to you about the last letter, and always make the same huge and barren reflections on the war.

In my street there are twelve houses where the people no longer await anything and have nothing to say, like Madame Marcassin.

In some others, the one who has disappeared will perhaps come back; and they go about in them in a sort of hope which leans only on emptiness and silence.