I heard her voice. It was not singing

" ... I heard her voice. It was not singing, but rather a slow recitation, a melodious murmur, interrupted by pauses, which kept time with the flow of her silent thoughts. Yes, a French song, half hummed, half spoken. In the overheated torpor of the evening her notes gave an impression of freshness, like the thin resonance of a harpsichord. I listened to the words and for several seconds I had the feeling of listening to an unknown foreign language - a language that meant nothing to me. After a minute I recognised it as French ... Charlotte was crooning very slowly, sighing from time to time, letting the bottomless silence of the steppe intervene between two verses of her recitation ..."

-Andreï Makine, Le Testament Francais