The Pommier is accessed by a recess in the Bourbonnais Mountains where Hermin has found refuge in an old ruin, Pommier Chenin, to compose his Homage to Schubert. The mountains are caught in the full of winter, crystalline, starkly contrasted, snowed-in. Indeed what lingers, the book closed and contemplated, is an atmosphere of wintriness, of a sort of huis clos, in which Hermin and Lenny are confined and really unable to leave, although Lenny will try. Words that jump out from a page at random (15): “garret”, “semidarkness”, “Rimbaud”, “aimless conversation,” wrap each scene in Brontë-esque romanticism. Léon’s prose is at its most lustrous in staging Wanderer’s winterland: “Hermin could see the tops of the larches writhing wildly, their branches furiously whipping the glass panes. The twilight still wrested the occasional gleam from the table, the mirror over the fireplace, the candlesticks” (99).