Sèvres is presented as a place of burial and remembrance rather than as an extensively described landscape. Its decisive significance lies in the fact that Boris Yvain, whose death follows Geneviève’s death and the destruction of his petrification research, is buried there; afterward, Alec and Jack Scott travel to the cemetery together, making Sèvres the first physical site at which they confront the consequences of the loss.

Definition and Setting

Sèvres appears in the narrative as the location of a little cemetery. The text gives no extended account of the town or of the cemetery’s architecture, but the modest description is important: Boris is not placed in a grand public monument, but in a small burial ground whose quietness contrasts with the extraordinary violence and secrecy surrounding his death. The cemetery therefore functions less as a fully mapped setting than as a concentrated memorial space.

The place is connected to Boris’s wider world through the nearby house and artistic estate whose future is determined after his death. His will assigns Geneviève the property, and, should she die childless, gives Alec control of the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile while Jack Scott is to manage the property at Ept. Boris’s sculptured marbles are left to Alec. Sèvres thus stands at the point where a life ends and an artistic legacy is redistributed among the survivors.

Boris Yvain’s Burial

Boris is buried at Sèvres after the events in which Geneviève is found dead at the bottom of the pool and Boris shoots himself through the heart. Jack Scott describes how he removes the dangerous solution, destroys Boris’s papers and notebooks, burns the laboratory records, smashes the empty bottles, and helps conceal the circumstances from the public. The doctor supplies a certificate of heart disease and asks no questions. Against this elaborate erasure, the burial at Sèvres is the remaining concrete acknowledgment that Boris has died.

The cemetery consequently carries a double meaning. It is a place of mourning, but it is also the endpoint of an effort to suppress evidence. Boris’s body is interred there while the formula that might have enabled further petrification is destroyed, his documents are burned, and the servants are sent away with a false account of his and Geneviève’s supposed travels. Sèvres preserves the fact of death even as the living attempt to obscure its cause.

The Return of Alec and Jack Scott

After Alec learns of the catastrophe, he telegraphs Jack Scott and meets him again. They remain together in Paris for a week and then spend another week at Ept, but their first act is to go to Sèvres, where Boris lies buried. The order matters: before dealing with the house, the property, or the practical consequences of the will, the two men visit the grave. Their return makes the cemetery a site of shared witness and establishes their renewed companionship in the aftermath of disaster.

At the grave, Jack Scott asks whether the Fates should be placed in the little grove above Boris. The suggestion links Boris’s burial directly to his sculpture and to the marble group that bears the title of the Fates. Alec answers that only the Madonna should watch over Boris’s grave. The exchange contrasts pagan or mythic fatality with Christian guardianship, while also revealing that the surviving men are still negotiating how Boris’s art should be interpreted and preserved.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

The visit to Sèvres does not resolve the trauma. Jack continues to suffer dreams that he cannot retain even in a definite outline, accompanied by a suffocating sense of breathless expectancy. Alec concludes that his presence does Jack harm rather than good and advises a change, leading Jack to depart alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands. The cemetery therefore marks not a completed farewell but the beginning of an unsettled aftermath in which memory returns indirectly through dreams, dread, and avoidance.

Alec’s later relationship to Boris’s house intensifies this pattern. He moves into the property after returning to Paris and finds that he can paint there tranquilly, yet he cannot bring himself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lies. Although he longs to look upon her face and kneel beside her, the room remains inaccessible. Sèvres and the unopened marble room form complementary spaces: the cemetery is the place where Boris can be approached through ritual remembrance, while the house preserves a more immediate and unbearable presence of the dead.

As a location, Sèvres therefore organizes the novel’s movement from catastrophe toward inheritance. It gathers Boris’s death, Jack’s guilty concealment, Alec’s return, the question of the Fates, and the continuing burden of memory into one restrained setting. Its silence is part of its force: the cemetery offers no explanation, but its existence prevents the erased history from disappearing entirely.