David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) by Irène Némirovsky Page A

Marcus was sitting opposite him, shouting, alive, and now… No one even used his name any more. The body… He breathed in the heavy, sickly smell that filled the room. “Is that him, already,” he thought, horrified, “or these awful flowers? Why did he do it?” he muttered to himself in disgust. “Why kill yourself, at his age, over money like some little nobody…” How many times had he lost everything, and like everyone else just picked himself up and started again? That was how it was. “And as for this Teisk business,” he said out loud, vehemently, as if he were imagining himself in Marcus’s place, “he had a hundred to one chance it would come off, especially with Amrum involved, the fool!”
    All sorts of ideas were buzzing angrily around in his mind. “You never know what’s going to happen in business, you have to go with your instincts, change your tactics, try everything you can, but to choose death … How long are they going to make me wait?” he thought with disgust.
    Marcus’s wife came in. Her thin face, with its large, beaklike nose, had the sallow colour of antler-horn; her round, bright eyes glittered beneath her thin eyebrows, which sat very high on her forehead and looked oddly uneven.
    She walked towards Golder with small hurried steps, took his hand, and seemed to be waiting for him to say something. But Golder had a lump in his throat and said nothing.
    “Yes. You weren’t expecting it…” she murmured with a bizarre little high-pitched squeal that sounded like a nervouslaugh or stifled sob. “This madness, this humiliation, this scandal … I thank the good Lord for not having given us children. Do you know how he died? In a brothel, on the Rue Chabanais, with whores. As if going bankrupt weren’t enough,” she concluded, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief.
    Her sudden movement revealed beneath her black veil an enormous pearl necklace wound three times around her long, wrinkled neck which she jerked about like an old bird of prey.
    “She must be very rich,” thought Golder, “the old crow. It’s always the same story: we kill ourselves working so that ‘the women’ can get richer…” He pictured his own wife quickly hiding her cheque-book whenever he came into the room, as if it were a packet of love letters.
    “Would you like to see him?” she asked.
    An icy wave flooded over Golder; he closed his eyes and replied in a shaky, colourless voice: “Of course, if I …”
    Madame Marcus silently crossed the large drawing room and opened a door, but it led only to another, smaller room, where two women were sewing some black material. Eventually she said, “In here.” Golder could see candles burning dimly. He stood motionless and silent for a moment, then made an effort to speak.
    “Where is he?”
    “Here,” she said, pointing to a bed that was partly hidden beneath a great velvet canopy. “But I had to cover up his face to keep away the flies… The funeral is tomorrow.”
    It was only then that Golder thought he could make out the dead man’s features beneath the sheet. He looked at him for a long time with strange emotion.
    “My God, they’re in such a hurry,” he thought, overwhelmed by a confused feeling of anger and hurt. “Poor Marcus… How helpless we are when we die… It’s disgusting…”
    In the corner of the room stood a large American-style desk with its top open; papers and opened letters were scattered about the floor. “There must be some letters from me in there,” he thought. He spotted a knife lying on the carpet. Its silver blade was all twisted. The drawers had been forced; there were no keys in the locks.
    “He probably wasn’t even dead when she rushed in to see what was left; she couldn’t bear to wait, to try to find the keys…”
    Madame Marcus caught the look on his face, but stared straight at him; all she did was to mutter curtly, “He left nothing.” Then she added more quietly, in a different tone of voice,