“Are you having me on or what?”

“—makes two. Pearls for a Massacre, three.”

“Do you have any earplugs on you?”

“Do you have the missing title?”

“No.”

“Never mind. Buddha in a Glass of Water, four. Assault on Ugliness, five.”

“165. 28. 3925. 424.”

“You’re not about to confuse me. Total Disaster, six. Death and Then Some, seven.”

“Would you like a toffee?”

“No. Poker, Women, and Other People, eight. Gratuitous Rapes Between the Wars, nine.”

“Would you like a Brandy Alexander?”

“Be quiet. Prayer on Breaking and Entering, ten.”

“You’re watching your weight, aren’t you? I was sure of it. Don’t you think you’re thin enough as it is?”

“The Sauna and Other Luxuries, eleven.”

“I expected just such an answer.”

“The Prose of Epilation, twelve.”

“My my, this is crazy, you’re reciting them in exactly the same order as the first time.”

“You see yourself that you have an excellent memory. Dying without Adverbs, thirteen.”

“You mustn’t exaggerate. But why don’t you list them in chronological order?”

“You even remember them in chronological order? Dirty People, fourteen. Crucifixion Made Easy, fifteen.”

“Do me a favor, stop there.”

“On one condition: give me the missing title. Your memory is far too good to have forgotten it.”

“And yet I have. Amnesia tends to be incoherent.”

“The Disorder of the Garter, sixteen.”

“Are you going to go on like this for long?”

“Just long enough to stimulate your memory.”

“My memory? You did say ‘my’ memory?”

“Indeed.”

“Am I to understand that you yourself have not forgotten the novel in question?”

“How could I have forgotten it?”

“But why don’t you just say it, then?”

“I want to hear you say it.”

“But I’m telling you, once again, I don’t remember it.”

“I don’t believe you. You could have forgotten all the others, but not that one.”

“What’s so extraordinary about it, then?”

“You know perfectly well.”

“No. I’m an unwitting genius?”

“Make me laugh.”

“Besides, if that novel was so fabulous, someone would have already mentioned it. And no one ever has. When people talk about my work, they always refer to the same four books.”

“You know very well that that doesn’t prove a thing.”

“Oh, I see. Mademoiselle is a drawing room snob. You’re the type who exclaims, ‘Dear friend, have you read Proust? No, no, not Remembrance of Things Past, don’t be vulgar. I mean the article he published in 1904 in Le Figaro . . .”

“So let’s agree that I’m a snob. The missing title, please.”

“I’m afraid I don’t like it.”

“Which confirms my assumption.”

“Your assumption? Well, I never.”

“Fine. Since you refuse to cooperate, I will have to start my list all over again—I don’t remember where I left off.”

“You don’t need to repeat your litany, you know the missing title.”

“Alas, I fear I’ve forgotten it again. Apology for Dyspepsia, one.”

“One more word and I’ll strangle you, crippled though I may be.”

“Strangle? The choice of the verb is telling.”

“Would you prefer I gave you a rabbit punch?”

“This time, monsieur, you will not succeed in avoiding the subject. So talk to me about strangling.”

“What? I wrote a book with that title?”

“Not exactly.”

“Listen, you’re getting downright exasperating with all your riddles. Tell me the title and let’s get it over with.”

“I’m in no hurry to get it over with. I’m having too much fun.”

“Well, you’re the only one.”

“Which makes the situation all the more pleasant. But let’s not get off the subject. Talk to me about strangling, my good man.”

“I have nothing to say on the matter.”

“Oh, no? Why were you threatening me, then?”

“I just said it, well, the way I would have said, ‘Go fly a kite!’”

“Yes. And yet, what a coincidence: you preferred to threaten me with strangling. How strange.”

“What are you getting at? Maybe you have a thing about Freudian slips? That’s all I need.”

“I didn’t use to believe in Freudian slips. But as of a minute ago, I’ve become a believer.”

“I didn’t use to believe in the efficiency of verbal torture. And now as of these last few minutes I’ve started to believe in it.”

“You flatter me. But let’s put our cards on the table, all right? I have plenty of time, and until you dig that missing title out of your memory, and until you speak to me about strangling, I will not leave you alone.”

“Aren’t you ashamed, hounding a crippled old man who is obese, and destitute, and sick?”

“I don’t know what that is, shame.”

“Yet another virtue that your teachers neglected to inculcate you with.”

“Monsieur Tach, you don’t know what shame is, either.”

“That’s normal. I have no reason to be ashamed.”

“Didn’t you say that your books are harmful?”

“Precisely: I would be ashamed if I had not harmed humankind.”

“As it happens, I’m not interested in humankind.”

“Nor should you be: humankind is not interesting.”

“But individuals are interesting, aren’t they?”

“Indeed, they are so rare.”

“Talk to me about an individual that you have known.”

“Well, there is Céline, for example.”

“Oh, no, not Céline.”

“What? Is he not interesting enough for Mademoiselle?”

“Talk to me about a flesh-and-blood individual that you have known, with whom you have lived, spoken, etc.”

“The nurse?”

“No, not the nurse. Come on, you know who I mean. You know perfectly well.”

“I have no idea, you irritating little bitch.”

“I’m going to tell you a little story, which might help your senile brain to retrieve its memories.”

“Go right ahead. Since I am not going to be allowed to speak for some time, I request permission to go get some toffees. I sorely need them, with all the torment your are subjecting me to.”

“Permission granted.”

The novelist placed a huge square toffee in his mouth.

“My story begins with an astonishing discovery. Journalists are creatures who are completely devoid of scruples, that you know. Therefore, I rummaged around in your past without consulting you, because you would have forbidden it. I can see you smiling and I know what you’re thinking: that you covered all your tracks, that you are the last representative of your family, that you have never had any friends—in short, that I would not be able to dig up any information about your past. You are mistaken, dear sir. You must beware of underhand witnesses. You must beware of the places where you have lived. They speak. I see you are laughing once again. Yes, your childhood château burned down sixty-five years ago. A strange fire, actually, that was never explained.”

“How did you hear about the château?” asked the fat man in a languid voice sticky with toffee.

“Oh, that was very easy. Elementary research in registers and archives—easy stuff for journalists. You see, Monsieur Tach, I didn’t wait until January 10 to become interested in you. I’ve been studying your case for years now.”

“How industrious you are! You must have thought, ‘The old man won’t live much longer, let’s be ready for the day he dies,’ is that it?”

“Stop talking and chewing that toffee at the same time, it’s disgusting. Let me get back to my story. My research was long and hazardous, but not difficult. I eventually found the trace of the last members of the Tach family known to the public: there is the record of the death in 1909 of Casimir and Célestine Tach, who drowned in the tide at Mont Saint-Michel, where the young couple had gone on a trip. They’d been married for two years and they left behind a one-year-old child—I’ll let you guess who that was. On learning of the tragic death of their only son, Casimir Tach’s parents died of sorrow. After that, there was only one Tach left, Prétextat. It was more difficult for me to follow your own trajectory. I had the bright idea of looking up your mother’s maiden name and I learned that, while your father came from a little-known family, Célestine was born the marquise de Planèze de Saint-Sulpice, a branch that has now died out, not to be confused with the de Planèze counts and countesses . . .”

“Do you intend to tell me the history of a family that is not my own?”

“You’re right, I’m getting off the subject. Let’s get back to the Planèze de Saint-Sulpice family: there were not many of them left by 1909, but their background was impeccable and they were well respected. When they learned of their daughter’s death, the marquis and marquise decided to take charge of their orphaned grandson, and that is how you came to live in the château at Saint-Sulpice at one year of age. You were pampered not only by your nurse and your grandparents, but also by your uncle and aunt, Cyprien and Cosima de Planèze, your mother’s brother and sister-in-law.”

“These genealogical details are so interesting they’re taking my breath away.”

“Don’t they indeed? Let’s see what you will have to say about that which is still to come?”

“What? You haven’t finished yet?”

“Certainly not. You’re not even two years old yet, and I want to tell you your life story up to the age of eighteen.”

“Lord help us.”

“If you had told it to me yourself, I wouldn’t be obliged to do it.”

“And what if I didn’t feel like talking about it, huh?”

“Well, that was because you have something to hide.”

“Not necessarily.”

“It’s too early to go into that. Now, you were a baby your family adored, despite your mother’s misalliance. I’ve seen sketches of that château that no longer exists: it was splendid. What a dream of a childhood you must have had!”

“Do you write for that rag Hello! by any chance?”

“When you were two, your aunt and uncle gave birth to their only child, Léopoldine de Planèze de Saint-Sulpice.”

“It makes you foam at the mouth, a name like that, doesn’t it? Not the sort of name you could ever have.”

“Yes, but at least I’m alive.”

“For all the good it does you.”

“May I go on, or do you want me to let you do the talking? Your memory must be resuscitated by now.”

“Go on, please, I’m having a wonderful time.”

“So much the better, because we’re a long way from the end, still. So, as I was saying, they gave you the only thing that was missing: some company your own age. You never had to experience the dreary days of a friendless only child; naturally, even though you didn’t go to school and didn’t have any classmates, you had something much better: an adorable little cousin. You became inseparable. Do you want to know how I came upon these details?”

“With the help of your imagination, I suppose.”

“In part. But an imagination needs fuel, Monsieur Tach, and I owe the fuel to you.”

“Stop continually interrupting yourself and tell me about my childhood, it’s bringing tears to my eyes.”

“Scoff all you like, monsieur. There will be plenty more to bring tears to your eyes. Your childhood was far too beautiful. You had everything anyone can dream of, and then some: a château, a huge estate with lakes and forests, horses, incredible material ease, an adoptive family who cherished you, a tutor who was not at all authoritarian and who was often on sick leave, loving servants, and above all, you had Léopoldine.”

“Tell me the truth: you’re not a journalist. You are looking for material to write a romance novel.”

“A romance novel? We’ll see about that. Back to my story. Of course, in 1914, there was the war, but children find a way to live with war, particularly rich kids. Viewed from your paradise, the conflict seemed insignificant, and it scarcely ruffled the waters of the long, slow flow of your happiness.”

“My dear, you are a peerless storyteller.”

“Not as good as you.”

“Continue.”

“The years hardly went by. Childhood does not move at a very rapid pace. What is a year for an adult? For a child, a year is a century, and for you these centuries were made of gold and silver. The lawyers regularly invoked an unhappy childhood as an attenuating circumstance. But in delving into your past, I realized that too happy a childhood could also serve as an attenuating circumstance.”

“Why are you trying to give me the benefit of attenuating circumstances? I don’t need them at all.”

“We’ll see. You and Léopoldine were inseparable. You could not live without each other.”

“Loving cousins: that’s as old as the world.”

“When two people are as close as you two were, can one even still speak of loving cousins?”

“Brother and sister, if you prefer.”

“Incestuous brother and sister, then.”

“Are you shocked? It happens in the best of families. Which just goes to show.”

“I think it’s up to you to tell me the rest of the story.”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

“Do you really want me to go on?”

“I would be much obliged.”

“I’m not asking you to be obliged, but if I were to go on with my story from the point that I’ve reached, it would be only a pale and mediocre paraphrase of the most beautiful, unusual, and least known of your novels.”

“I adore pale, mediocre paraphrases.”

“Then too bad, you asked for it. Am I right, then?”

“About what?”

“To have classified that novel among your books with two female characters and not three female characters.”

“You are absolutely correct, dear lady.”

“In that case, I have nothing left to fear. The rest is literature, isn’t it?”

“The rest is indeed my work alone. In those days, I had no paper other than my own life, no ink other than my own blood.”

“Or that of others.”

“She was not an ‘other.’”

“Then who was she?”

“That is something I never found out; but she was not an other, that much is certain. I am still waiting for your paraphrase, dear lady.”

“Indeed. The years went by, and they were good years, too good, perhaps. You and Léopoldine had never known any other life, yet you were both aware that it was not usual, and that you were exceedingly lucky. In the depths of your paradise, you began to feel what you call ‘the anxiety of the chosen few,’ which consists of the following: ‘How long can such perfection last?’ This anxiety, like all anxieties, fueled your euphoria to the extreme, while leaving it dangerously fragile—more and more dangerously. A few more years went by. You were fourteen years old, your cousin was twelve. You had reached the culminating point of childhood, the moment that Tournier refers to as the ‘full maturity of childhood.’ You had been shaped by a dream life, and you were dream children. No one had ever told you as much, but you were becoming obscurely aware that a terrible degradation lay in wait, about to attack your perfect bodies and your equally perfect humor, to turn you into pimply, tormented teenagers. I suspect you had arrived at the origin, by then, of the insane plot that followed.”

“Here we go, you’re already trying to exonerate my accomplice.”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t. It was your idea, was it not?”

“Yes, but there was nothing criminal about it.”

“Not to begin with, no, but it became criminal because of the consequences and, above all, because, sooner or later, it would prove totally unworkable.”

“Later, as it happened.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You were fourteen, Léopoldine was twelve. She was devoted to you, and you could make her believe anything.”

“It wasn’t just anything.”

“No, it was worse. You convinced her that puberty was the worst of all evils, but that it was avoidable.”

“It is.”

“You still believe that?”

“I’ve never stopped believing it.”

“So you’ve always been insane.”

“From my point of view, I am the only one who has always been of sound mind.”

“Naturally. At the age of fourteen, you were already so sound of mind that you solemnly swore you would never become an adolescent. Your hold over your cousin was so strong that you made her take an oath identical to your own.”

“Adorable, isn’t it?”

“That depends. For you were already Prétextat Tach, and along with your grandiose preachings there were a number of dispositions that would prove punitive in the event of perjury. To state things more clearly, you swore, and you made Léopoldine swear, that if either of you betrayed the oath and became pubescent, he or she would be killed by the other one, purely and simply.”

“A mere fourteen years of age, and already the soul of a Titan.”

“I suppose that many children have dreamt up ways to remain eternal children, with varying but always precarious degrees of success. But the two of you seemed to have succeeded. It is true that you displayed an uncommon amount of determination. And you, the Titan in the matter, came up with all sorts of pseudoscientific measures designed to make your bodies unsuited for adolescence.”

“Not so pseudoscientific as all that, because they worked.”

“We’ll see about that. I wonder how you survived such treatment.”

“We were happy.”

“At such a cost! Where the devil did your brain go to find such twisted ideas? Well, I suppose you had the excuse that you were only fourteen.”

“If I had to do it all over again, I would.”

“Today, you have the excuse that you’re senile.”

“I suppose that means I’ve always been senile, or puerile, because I have never changed my ideas.”

“That doesn’t surprise me, coming from you. Already in 1922 you were crazy. Ex nihilo you created what you called ‘a hygiene of eternal childhood’—at the time, the word covered every domain of mental and physical health: hygiene was an ideology. The one you devised was so unhealthy that it would better deserve the name anti-hygiene.”

“On the contrary, it was very healthy.”

“You were convinced that puberty did its evil work during sleep, so you decreed that you must not sleep anymore, or at least not more than two hours a day. You thought the ideal way to hang on to childhood would be an aquatic life, so you and Léopoldine spent entire days and nights swimming in the lakes on the estate, sometimes even in winter. You ate a strict minimum. Some foods were forbidden, and others were recommended, by virtue of principles that seem utterly fantastical: any food considered too ‘adult’ was prohibited, such as canard à l’orange or lobster bisque, or any food that was black in color. On the other hand, you recommended mushrooms, not poisonous ones, but some that were not considered fit for consumption, either, such as puffballs, and when they were in season, you stuffed yourselves with them. To keep from sleeping, you got hold of an excessively strong tea from Kenya—you’d heard your grandmother speaking ill of it, and you would brew it black as ink and drink impressive quantities of it, while administering identical doses to your cousin.”

“Who was fully consenting.”

“Let’s just say, rather, that she loved you.”

“And I loved her, too.”

“In your way.”

“Do you find something wrong with my way?”

“That’s an understatement.”

“Maybe you think that other people are better at it? I know of nothing more vile than what they call loving. Do you know what loving is for them? Taking an unfortunate woman and getting her pregnant, and making her into an ugly servant: that is what these alleged human beings of my sex call loving.”

“And now you’re playing the feminist? I’ve never known you to be more unbelievable.”

“You are lamentably stupid, I do declare. Feminism and what I just said are poles apart.”

“Why can’t you just try to be clear for once?”

“But I’m being crystal clear! You’re the one who refuses to admit that my way of loving is the most beautiful.”

“My opinion on the subject is of no interest whatsoever. However, I would like to know what Léopoldine thought about it.”

“Thanks to me, Léopoldine was the happiest.”

“The happiest what? The happiest of women? Of madwomen? Of sick people? Of casualties?”

“You are completely beside the point. Thanks to me, she was the happiest of children.”

“Of children? At the age of fifteen?”

“Absolutely. At an age when women become dreadful—pimply, stinky, hairy, titty, intellectual, spiteful, and stupid, with prominent hips and protruding asses—in short, women. At that sinister age, as I was saying, Léopoldine was the most beautiful, happy, illiterate, wise child—the most childish of children, and totally thanks to me. Thanks to me, the girl that I loved was spared the torture of becoming a woman. I defy you to find a more beautiful love than that.”

“Are you absolutely sure that your cousin did not want to become a woman?”

“How could she have wanted such a thing? She was far too intelligent for that.”

“I’m not asking you to reply with conjectures. I’m asking you whether, yes or no, she gave you her consent, and whether, yes or no, she said to you in no uncertain terms: ‘Prétextat, I would rather die than leave childhood behind.’”

“She didn’t need to tell me in no uncertain terms. It was self-evident.”

“Just as I thought: she never gave you her consent.”

“Allow me to repeat that it was pointless. I knew what she wanted.”

“You knew, above all, what you wanted.”

“She and I wanted the same thing.”

“Naturally.”

“What are you trying to insinuate, you shitty little bitch? Are you claiming to know Léopoldine better than I do?”

“The more I talk to you, the more I believe I do.”

“When I hear such rubbish I almost wish I were deaf. I’m going to tell you something that you surely don’t know, bloody female: no one, do you understand, no one knows a person better than their assassin.”

“Ah-hah. At last. Are you prepared to confess?”

“Confess? I have nothing to confess, because you already knew that I killed her.”

“Well, would you believe that I did have my lingering doubts? It’s hard to convince oneself that a Nobel Prize winner could be an assassin.”

“What? Didn’t you know that assassins are the very people who have the greatest chance of receiving a Nobel Prize? Just look at Kissinger, Gorbachev . . .”

“Yes, but you won the Nobel Prize for literature.”

“Precisely! Nobel Peace Prize winners are often assassins, but the literature winners are always assassins.”

“It’s impossible to have a serious discussion with you.”

“I’ve never been more serious.”

“Maeterlinck, Tagore, Pirandello, Mauriac, Hemingway, Pasternak, Kawabata—all assassins?”

“You didn’t know?”

“No.”

“You’ll have learned a few things from me, then.”

“May I know your source of information?”

“Prétextat Tach doesn’t need sources of information. Sources of information are for ordinary people.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t see a thing. You go digging into my past, you rifle through my archives, and then you are surprised to come upon a murder. What would be astonishing is anything to the contrary. If you had gone to the trouble of combing through the archives of those other Nobel Prize winners with as much diligence, no doubt you would have discovered stacks of murders. Otherwise, no one would have ever given them the Nobel Prize.”

“You accused the previous journalist of reversing causality. But you don’t reverse causality, you merely cut in front of it.”

“I want to give you ample warning that if you try to confront me on my own territory where logic is concerned, you don’t stand a chance.”

“Given what you qualify as logic, I don’t doubt it. But I didn’t come here to debate with you.”

“So why did you come, then?”

“To find out whether you really were the murderer. Thank you for illuminating my last doubts: you fell for my bluff.”

The fat man gave a long, hideous laugh.

“Your bluff! That’s a good one! You think you can bluff me?”

“I have every reason to believe I can, because I already have.”

“Poor, pathetic, pretentious goose. Let me tell you that bluffing is extortion. But you haven’t extorted anything for me, because I’ve told you the truth right from the start. Why should I hide the fact I’m a murderer? I have nothing to fear from the law, I’m going to die in less than two months.”

“And what about your posthumous reputation?”

“This will make it all the more grandiose. I can already see the window displays in the bookstores: ‘Prétextat Tach, Nobel Prize for Murder.’ My books will sell like hot cakes. My publishers will be rubbing their hands together. Believe me, this murder is an excellent affair for everyone concerned.”

“Even for Léopoldine?”

“Above all for Léopoldine.”

“Let’s go back to 1922.”

“Why not 1925?”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself. You mustn’t skip over those three years, they are extremely important.”

“That’s true. They are extremely important, so they cannot be related.”

“And yet you did relate them.”

“No, I wrote them.”

“Let’s not play with words, all right?”

“You are saying this to a writer?”

“I’m not talking to the writer, I’m talking to the assassin.”

“One and the same.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Writer, assassin: two aspects of a same profession, two conjugations of a same verb.”

“Which verb is that?”

“The rarest and most difficult of verbs: the verb ‘to love.’ Isn’t it funny how school grammar books sometimes use it as an example, when it’s the verb with the most incomprehensible meaning? If I were a teacher, I would replace this esoteric verb with a more accessible one.”

“‘To kill’?”

“‘To kill’ is not so easy, either. No, a trivial, ordinary verb like vote, interview, work, create . . .”

“Thank God you are not a teacher. Do you know that it’s extraordinarily difficult to make you answer a question? You have a real talent for dodging the issue, changing the subject, going off in all directions. I’m forever having to call you to order.”

“I’m flattered.”

“This time, you won’t get off: 1922 through 1925, it’s your turn to speak.”

Heavy silence.

“Would you like a toffee?”

“Monsieur Tach, why don’t you trust me?”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you. In all good faith, I do not see what else I could tell you. We were perfectly happy and divinely in love. What more could I tell you other than silly nonsense like that?”

“Let me help you.”

“I fear the worst.”

“Twenty-four years ago, following your literary menopause, you left one novel unfinished. Why?”

“I already explained this to one of your colleagues. Any self-respecting novelist must leave at least one novel unfinished, otherwise he’s not believable.”

“Do you know very many writers who publish unfinished novels during their lifetime?”

“I don’t know of any. Undoubtedly I am cleverer than the others: during my lifetime I have received honors that ordinary writers enjoy only posthumously. From a struggling writer, an unfinished novel merely represents his awkwardness, his still unbridled youth; but on the part of a great, renowned writer, an unfinished novel is as chic as you get. It suggests a ‘genius stopped in his tracks,’ ‘the Titan’s crisis of angst,’ ‘dazzled when faced with the unspeakable,’ ‘the nightmare vision of a novel to come’—in short, it pays.”

“Monsieur Tach, I think you haven’t quite grasped my question. I wasn’t asking you why you left one novel unfinished, but why you left that novel unfinished.”

“Well, as I was writing, I realized that I had not yet produced the unfinished novel I required for my fame, so I looked down at my manuscript and thought, ‘Why not this one?’ I put down my pen and did not add another line.”

“Do not expect me to believe you.”

“Why not?”

“You said, ‘I put down my pen and did not add another line.’ You should have said, ‘I put down my pen and never wrote another line.’ Isn’t it astonishing that after this famous, unfinished novel, you never wanted to write again, although you had been writing every day for thirty-six years?”

“I had to stop someday.”

“But why that particular day?”

“Don’t go looking for hidden meaning in a phenomenon as banal as old age. I was fifty-nine years old, so I retired. What could be more normal?”

“From one day to the next, not another line: you’re saying old age caught up with you in one day?”

“Why not? You don’t get old every day. You can spend ten, twenty years without getting old, and then suddenly, for no specific reason, you can show the weight of those twenty years in the space of two hours. You’ll see, it will happen to you, too. One evening, you’ll look in the mirror and think, ‘My God, I’ve aged ten years since this morning!’”

“For no specific reason, really?”

“For no reason other than time hurrying everything to its doom.”

“It’s easy to blame time, Monsieur Tach. But you gave it a serious helping hand—with both hands, I’d say.”

“The hand is what enables a writer to experience plea­sure.”

“And two hands are what enable a strangler to experience plea­sure.”

“Strangling is a pleasant thing, indeed.”

“For the strangler, or the victim?”

“Alas, I’ve only ever known one of the two situations.”

“Don’t give up hope.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have no idea. You’re confusing me with all your digressions. Talk to me about the book, Monsieur Tach.”

“It’s out of the question, Mademoiselle. It’s up to you to talk about it.”

“Of everything you’ve ever written, this book is the one I prefer.”

“Why? Because there’s a château, and aristocrats, and a love story? Typical woman.”

“I do like love stories, it’s true. I often think that nothing beyond love is of any interest.”

“Heavens above.”

“Be as sarcastic as you like, you cannot deny that you are the one who wrote that book, and that it is a love story.”

“If you say so.”

“It is, moreover, the only love story you ever wrote.”

“I’m relieved to hear it.”

“Let me put my question to you again, sir: why did you leave that novel unfinished?”

“My imagination failed me, I suppose.”

“Imagination? You did not need any imagination to write that book, you were relating the facts.”

“What do you know? You weren’t there to check on things.”

“You did kill Léopoldine, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t prove that the rest is true. The rest is literature, Mademoiselle.”

“Well, I believe that everything in that book is true.”

“If it amuses you.”

“It’s not just amusing, I have good reason to think that the novel is strictly autobiographical.”

“Good reason? Pray explain, so we can have a good laugh.”

“Your descriptions of the château are exact, according to the archives. The characters have the same names in real life, except for you yourself, of course, but Philémon Tractatus is a transparent pseudonym, with the initials to prove it. Finally, the registers confirm that Léopoldine died in 1925.”

“Archives, registers: is that what you call real life?”

“No, but the fact that you respected official facts has led me, perfectly reasonably, to deduce that you also respected a more secret truth.”

“A weak argument.”

“But I have others: the style, for example. An infinitely less abstract style than that of your previous novels.”

“An even weaker argument. This impressionism replaces any critical judgment you might have, and can hardly serve as proof, particularly where style is concerned: slaves of your sort invariably come out with utter nonsense when the issue of a writer’s style is in question.”

“I have one final argument, which is all the more devastating in that it is not an argument.”

“What on earth are you on about now?”

“It’s not an argument, it’s a photograph.”

“A photograph? What of?”

“Do you know why no one has ever suspected that this novel was autobiographical? Because the main character, Philémon Tractatus, was a magnificent, slender boy with an admirable face. You weren’t really lying when you told my colleagues that from the age of eighteen on, you have been ugly and obese. Let’s just say that you were lying by omission, for in all the years prior to that, you were unbelievably handsome.”

“How do you know?”

“I found a photograph.”

“Impossible. I did not have my picture taken until 1948.”

“I’m sorry, but I am forced to find your memory lacking. I discovered a photograph where on the back is written, in pencil, ‘Saint-Sulpice, 1925.’”

“Show me.”

“I’ll show you when I’m certain that you won’t try to destroy it.”

“I see, you’re bluffing.”

“I’m not bluffing. I went on a pilgrimage to Saint-Sulpice. I regret to inform you that on the site of the former château—of which nothing remains—there is an agricultural co-op. Most of the lakes on the estate have been drained, and the valley has been transformed into a public dump. I’m sorry, but you inspire no pity in me. I questioned all the old people I could find in the area. They still remembered the château and the various marquis de Planèze de Saint-Sulpice. They even remembered the little orphan adopted by his grandparents.”

“I wonder how on earth those locals could possibly remember me, I never had any contact with them.”

“There are different ways of having contact. Maybe they never spoke to you, but they saw you.”

“That’s impossible. I never set foot outside the estate.”

“But friends came to visit your grandparents, and your aunt and uncle.”

“They never took any photographs.”

“You’re mistaken. Listen, I don’t know under what circumstances the photograph was taken, nor by whom—my explanations were just hypotheses—but the fact remains that the photograph does exist. You are standing in front of the château with Léopoldine.”

“With Léopoldine?”

“A ravishing child with dark hair. Who else could it be?”

“Show me that photograph.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Show me that photograph, I tell you.”

“A very old woman in the village gave it to me. I don’t know how it ended up in her hands. It doesn’t matter: the identity of the two children leaves no doubt. Children, yes—even you, at the age of seventeen, show no signs of adolescence. It’s very odd: you are both very tall, thin, and gaunt, but your faces and your long bodies are perfectly childlike. You don’t look normal, actually: you look like two twelve-year-old giants. And yet the result is superb: fine features, childlike eyes, but your face is too small in comparison with your skull. Your torso is that of a child, your legs are lanky and interminable—worthy subjects for a painting. It’s enough to make me believe that your insane precepts on hygiene actually worked, and that puffballs are a beauty secret. And you are the greatest shock of all. Totally unrecognizable!”

“If I’m so unrecognizable, how do you know that it’s me?”

“Who else could it be? Besides, you have the same white, smooth, hairless skin—that is indeed the only thing you have preserved. You were so handsome, your features so pure, with such delicate limbs and an asexual complexion so asexual—of the order of an angel.”

“Spare me your religious twaddle, would you? And show me the photograph, instead of spouting rubbish.”

“How could you have changed so much? You said that at the age of eighteen you were already as you are now, and I’m willing to believe it—but in this case, it just makes it all the more astounding: how could you, in less than a year, have swapped your seraphic appearance for the bloated monster I see before me? Not only did you triple in weight, your delicate face became bovine, your refined features so thick as to be completely vulgar . . .”

“Have you finished insulting me?”

“You know very well that you are ugly. Besides, you constantly use the most disgusting adjectives in referring to yourself.”

“I may use them on myself with a witty turn of phrase, but I will not allow other people to use them. Is that clear?”

“I don’t give a damn whether you allow me or not. You’re horrible, that’s all there is to it, and it’s incredible that you could be so horrible when you were once so handsome.”

“There’s nothing incredible about it, it happens all the time. But, as a rule, it doesn’t happen so quickly.”

“Ah, good, you’ve just confessed again.”

“Huh?”

“Yes. By saying that, you have implicitly acknowledged the truth of my words. At the age of seventeen, you were indeed as I described—and unfortunately, no photograph ever captured you like that for immortality.”

“I knew it! But how did you manage to describe me so well?”

“I simply paraphrased the descriptions of Philémon Tractatus in your novel. I wanted to make sure that you were just as you described your character: in order to find out, there was no other way to go about it than to bluff, since you refused to answer my questions.”

“You are a filthy little muckraker.”

“It’s effective, raking up muck: I now know for certain that your novel is strictly autobiographical. I have every reason to be proud of myself, because I had the same elements to go on as everyone else. And yet I’m the only one who has had any inkling of the truth.”

“Be my guest, act all proud.”

“So allow me henceforth to ask my first question all over again: why is Hygiene and the Assassin an unfinished novel?”

“That’s it, that’s the title that was missing earlier!”

“Don’t try to act all surprised. I won’t give up until you answer: why is the novel unfinished?”

“You could frame the question in a more metaphysical way: why is that incompletion a novel?”

“I’m not interested in your metaphysics. Answer my question: why is the novel unfinished?”

“Hell and damnation, you piss me off! Does the novel not have the right to be unfinished?”

“Whether it has the right or not really has nothing to do with it. You were writing truth with a true purpose, so why didn’t you finish the novel? After Léopoldine’s murder, the story comes to an abrupt end, above a void. Would it have been so difficult to wrap it up, give it a proper ending?”

“Difficult! I would have you know, silly goose, that nothing is difficult for Prétextat Tach.”

“Precisely. Which makes this abrupt non-ending all the more absurd.”

“Who are you to rule on the absurdity of my decisions?”

“I’m not ruling on anything, I’m just wondering.”

The old man suddenly looked like an old man, eighty-three years of age.

“You are not the only one. I too am wondering, and I cannot find the answer. I could have chosen dozens of endings for that book: either the murder itself, or the night that followed, or my physical metamorphosis, or the fire in the château, a year later . . . ”

“That was your doing, the fire, wasn’t it?”

“Of course. Saint-Sulpice had become intolerable without Léopoldine. Moreover, I was getting annoyed with my family’s suspicions about me. So I decided to get rid of the château and its occupants. I wouldn’t have thought they’d burn so well.”

“You clearly don’t seem to be troubled by a respect for human life, but had you no scruples about burning down a seventeenth-century château?”

“Scruples have never been my strong point.”

“Indeed. Let’s get back to our ending, or rather the absence of an ending. So, you claim you know nothing about the reasons why the novel is unfinished?”

“You can believe me on that point. Yes, there were any number of elegant endings I could have chosen, but none of them ever seemed suitable. I don’t know, it was as if I had been expecting something else, something I’ve been expecting for twenty-four years, or sixty-six years, if you prefer.”

“What sort of something else? For Léopoldine to be brought back to life?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have stopped writing.”

“So I was right in making a connection between the fact the novel was unfinished and your famous literary menopause.”

“Of course you were right. What is there to be so proud of? When you’re a journalist, all you need is a bit of skill to be right. When you’re a writer, being right doesn’t exist. Your profession is disgustingly easy. Whereas mine is dangerous.”

“And you have managed to make it even more dangerous.”

“What do you mean by this strange compliment?”

“I don’t know if it’s a compliment. I don’t know whether it’s admirable or insane, exposing yourself the way you are. Can you explain what came over you, when you decided to give a faithful narration of the story that not only was dearest to you, but also presented the greatest risk of seeing you dragged before the courts? What obscure perversion did you yield to by taking up your pen and wielding it so eloquently to provide humankind with such a blatantly transparent deed of self-incrimination?”

“But humankind doesn’t give a damn! The proof of it is that for twenty-four years this novel has been collecting dust in libraries and no one, you hear me, no one has ever even talked to me about it. And that’s perfectly normal because, as I told you, no one has read it.”

“What about me?”

“A negligible quantity.”

“What proof do you have that there aren’t other negligible quantities like me around?”

“A dazzling proof: if others like you had read me—and I insist on the word ‘read’, in its most carnivorous sense—I would have been sent to prison long ago. You asked me a very interesting question, and the answer sticks out a mile. Here you have a murderer who has been on the loose for forty-two years. His crimes have never been discovered, and he has become a famous writer. Far from making the most of such a comfortable situation, this sick man ventures into an absurd wager, since he has everything to lose and nothing to gain—nothing to gain, except proof of the most comical sort.”

“Let me guess: he wants to prove that no one reads him.”

“Better than that: he wants to prove that even the very rare people who do read him—because those people exist—have read him without reading him.”

“And that’s supposed to be self-evident.”

“But it is, I assure you. You know, there is always a handful of idle people—vegetarians, budding critics, masochistic students, and other nosy sorts—who actually read the books they buy. I wanted to carry out my experiment on those people. I wanted to prove that I could write the worst things imaginable about my own person, with impunity: this deed of self-incrimination, as you so rightly describe it, is rigorously authentic. Yes, Mademoiselle, you have been right from beginning to end: in this book, not one detail has been made up. Of course you can find excuses for readers: no one knows a thing about my childhood, it’s not the first horrible book I’ve written, how could anyone ever imagine I might have been so divinely handsome, and so on. But I maintain that such excuses do not hold up to scrutiny. Are you familiar with a review regarding Hygiene and the Assassin, one that I read in a newspaper twenty-four years ago? ‘A richly symbolic fairytale, a dreamlike metaphor of original sin and, consequently, of the human condition.’ When I told you that people read me without reading me! I can allow myself to stray dangerously close to the truth, and all anyone will ever see is metaphors. There’s nothing surprising about that: the pseudo-reader, clad in his diving suit, can swim perfectly impermeably through my bloodiest sentences. From time to time he will exclaim with delight, ‘What a lovely symbol!’ That is what you call clean reading. A marvelous invention, very pleasant to practice in bed before falling asleep; it calms the mind and doesn’t even dirty the sheets.”

“What would you have preferred? To be read in an abattoir, or in Baghdad during a bombing?”

“Not at all, dunderhead. I’m not questioning the venue where reading takes place, but the act of reading itself. I would have preferred to be read without the frogman’s suit, without a certain perspective, without a vaccination and, to be honest, without adverbs.”

“You must know that reading of that nature does not exist.”

“In the beginning I didn’t know, but now, in the light of my brilliant proof, you can be sure I do.”

“So? Shouldn’t you be happy that there are as many ways of reading as there are readers?”

“You missed my point: there are no readers, and there are no ways of reading.”

“Yes there are, there are readings that differ from your own, that’s all. Why should your way be the only acceptable one?”

“Oh, that’s enough, stop reciting your sociology textbook. Besides, I would like to know what your sociology textbook would have to say about the edifying situation I have brought to light: a writer-assassin has openly denounced himself, and not a single reader was clever enough to realize.”

“I couldn’t care less about the opinions of sociologists, and personally I think it’s not a reader’s role to act like a cop, and if no one tried to make trouble for you after this book came out, it’s a good sign: it means that Fouquier-Tinville is no longer in fashion, and people are open-minded and capable of civilized reading.”

“Uh-huh, I get it: you are just as rotten as all the others. I’ve been stupid to think you might be different from the masses.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to believe that I am different, however minutely, because I am the only one in my entire species who sniffed at the truth.”

“Let’s agree that you do have a particularly good nose. That’s all. You see, you disappoint me.”

“That’s almost a compliment, coming from you. Am I to understand that for the space of a few minutes I was able to inspire you with a better opinion?”

“You’re going to laugh: yes. You are not completely devoid of human platitudes, but you do have a very rare quality.”

“I’m dying to know what it is.”

“I think that it is something innate, and I’m relieved to see that your stupid apprenticeships have not managed to corrupt it.”

“So what is this quality?”

“You, at least, know how to read.”

Silence.

“How old are you, Mademoiselle?”

“I’m thirty.”

“Twice the age of Léopoldine when she died. My poor young woman, here it is, your attenuating circumstance: you have lived far too long.”

“What! You think I need an attenuating circumstance? What next!”

“You see, I’m looking for an explanation: sitting across from me is someone with a sharp mind, and who is gifted with a rare ability to read. So I’ve been wondering what could have spoiled such fine qualities. You have just given me the answer: time. Thirty years is far too long.”

“You, at your age, are telling me this?”

“I died at the age of seventeen, Mademoiselle. And besides, for men it’s not the same thing.”

“Here we go.”

“It’s pointless trying to sound sarcastic, young lady, you know perfectly well that it’s true.”

“That what is true? I want to hear you say it clearly.”

“It’s your funeral. Well you see, men are entitled to all sorts of reprieves. Women aren’t. On this last point, I am far more precise and earnest than on any other: the majority of males give females a respite of varying length before they forget about them, which is far more cowardly than killing them outright. I find this respite absurd and even disloyal toward females: because of the lapse of time, women begin to imagine that men actually need them. The truth is that from the moment they become women, the moment they leave their childhood behind, they are doomed to die. If men were gentlemen, they would kill women on the day they have their first period. But men have never been gallant, they prefer to let these unfortunate women trail their sufferings through life rather than show enough kindness to eliminate them. I know of only one male who had enough greatness, respect, love, sincerity, and courtesy to do it.”

“You.”

“Precisely.”

The journalist threw her head back. She began to laugh, a thin, hoarse laugh. It gradually picked up speed, climbing the octaves with each new rhythm, until it became an incessant, suffocating fit. It was uncontrollable laughter, at a clinical stage.

“This makes you laugh?”

She could not reply. Her glee did not allow her the leisure of speech.

“Uncontrollable laughter: yet another female ailment. I’ve never seen a man double over the way women do in these cases. It must come from the uterus: everything disgusting in life comes from the uterus. Little girls do not have a uterus, I don’t think, or if they do, it’s a toy, a parody of a uterus. Little girls should be killed the moment their fake uterus becomes real, to spare them the type of terrific, painful hysteria you are suffering from at this very moment.”

“Ah.”

This “ah” was the clamor of an exhausted belly, still shaken by morbid spasms.

“Poor little thing. You’ve had a hard life. Who is the bastard who failed to kill you at puberty? But perhaps you didn’t have a real friend at the time. Alas, I fear that Léopoldine was the only one who was that fortunate.”

“Stop, I can’t take it anymore.”

“I understand your reaction. The belated discovery of the truth, the sudden awareness of your disappointment must come as a terrible shock . . . Your uterus is suffering a dreadful blow! Poor little female! Poor creature, spared by those cowardly males! You do have my sympathy.”

“Monsieur Tach, you are the most ghastly, most entertaining individual I have ever met.”

“Entertaining? I don’t understand.”

“I admire you. To be able to come up with a theory that is both so insane and so coherent is absolutely amazing. In the beginning I thought you were going to come out with some banal macho rubbish. But I underestimated you. Your explanation is ridiculously exaggerated and subtle at the same time: women must simply be exterminated, isn’t that it?”

“Naturally. If women did not exist, things would finally start going their way.”

“What an ingenious solution. Why has no one ever thought of it before?”

“In my opinion, people have thought of it, but no one before me was courageous enough to implement the solution. Because after all, the idea is there for anyone to take up. Feminism and anti-feminism are the scourge of humankind; the remedy is obvious, simple, logical: do away with women.”

“Monsieur Tach: you are a genius. I admire you, and I am delighted to have met you.”

“I’m going to surprise you: I too am happy to have met you.”

“You’re not serious.”

“On the contrary. First of all, you admire me for what I am and not for what you imagined I must be: that is already a good point. And then, I know I’m going to be able to do you a huge favor, and that brings me great delight.”

“What favor?”

“What do you mean, what favor? You know what it is.”

“Am I to understand that you intend to do away with me, too?”

“I am beginning to think that you are worthy of such a thing, yes.”

“Your praise is great, Monsieur Tach, and believe me, it affects me deeply, but . . .”

“I see that you are indeed blushing.”

“But don’t go to the trouble.”

“Why not? I think you deserve it. You are much better than I thought at the beginning. I would like so much to help you to die.”

“I am touched, but you really needn’t bother; I wouldn’t want you to have any problems because of me.”

“Now, now, my little friend, what could I possibly risk? I only have a month and a half to live.”

“I wouldn’t want your posthumous reputation to be ruined on my account.”

“Ruined? Why should it be ruined by such a good deed? On the contrary! People will say, ‘Not even two months before he died, Prétextat Tach was still doing good deeds.’ I will be an example for humankind.”

“Monsieur Tach, humankind will not understand.”

“Oh dear, I fear that once again you are right. But what do I care for humankind and my reputation? I would have you know, Mademoiselle, that I respect you so much that I deeply desire to do something disinterested for you alone, a good deed.”

“I am sure you are greatly overestimating me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Open your eyes, Monsieur Tach. Didn’t you say that I was ugly, stupid, rotten, and then some? And the simple fact that I’m a woman—is that not enough to discredit me?”

“In theory, everything you say is true. But something strange is happening, Mademoiselle: theory is no longer enough. I am currently experiencing another dimension of the problem, and I am feeling delicious emotions that I had not felt for sixty-six years.”

“Open your eyes, Monsieur Tach: I am not Léopoldine.”

“No. And yet, you are not a stranger to her.”

“She was as pretty as a picture, and you think I’m ugly.”

“That’s not altogether true. Your ugliness is not without beauty. There are moments when you’re beautiful.”

“Moments.”

“There are many such moments, Mademoiselle.”

“You think I’m stupid, you have no respect for me.”

“Why are you so eager to discredit yourself?”

“For a very simple reason: I do not want to end up assassinated by a Nobel laureate.”

A sudden chill seemed to come over the fat man.

“You would prefer a Nobel Prize for chemistry?” he asked in an icy voice.

“Very funny. I do not want to end up assassinated at all, you see, be it by a Nobel Prize winner or a grocer.”

“Am I to understand that you want to put an end to your days yourself?”

“If I had wanted to commit suicide, Monsieur Tach, I would have done it long ago.”

“So you say. Do you believe it’s that easy?”

“I don’t believe anything, it doesn’t concern me. You see, I have no desire to die.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Is it so absurd to want to live?”

“There is nothing more praiseworthy than the desire to live. But you are not living, poor silly goose! And you will never live! Don’t you understand that girls die the day they begin puberty? Worse than that, they die without disappearing. They leave life behind, not to reach the beautiful shores of death, but to begin the painful, ridiculous conjugation of a trivial, tedious verb, and they never stop conjugating it, in every tense and every mode, deconstructing it, over-constructing it, and never escaping from it.”

“And what might that verb be?”

“Something like reproduce, in the rather filthy sense of the term—or ovulate, if you prefer. It is neither death, nor life, nor a state in between. There is no other name for it than being a woman: no doubt our vocabulary, with its customary insidiousness, wanted to avoid giving a name to such an abject concept.”

“By what right do you claim to know what a woman’s life is about?”

“A woman’s non-life.”

“Life or non-life, you know nothing about it.”

“I would have you know, Mademoiselle, that great writers have a direct and supernatural access to the lives of others. They have no need to levitate, or to go rummaging in archives, in order to penetrate the mental universe of other individuals. All they need is a pen and a piece of paper to transfer the thoughts of others.”

“Well, I never. My good man, I believe your system is a washout, if I am to judge from the inanity of your conclusions.”

“Stupid woman! What would you have me believe? Or rather, what are you trying to make yourself believe? You think you’re happy? There are limits to autosuggestion. Open your eyes! You’re not happy, you’re not alive.”

“What would you know?”

“You are the one who must answer that question. How could you know whether, yes or no, you are alive, whether, yes or no, you are happy? You don’t even know what happiness is. If you had spent your childhood in an earthly paradise, like Léopoldine and myself—”

“Oh, spare me, stop making yourself out to be some exceptional case. All children are happy.”

“I’m not so sure about that. No children have ever been as happy as little Léopoldine and little Prétextat. Of that I am certain.”

The journalist once again threw her head back and began to laugh hysterically.

“There goes your uterus, at it again. What did I say that is so funny?”

“Please forgive me, it’s those names . . . especially yours!”

“So? You have a reason to find fault with my name?”

“Find fault, no. But to be called Prétextat! I swear it’s a joke. What were your parents thinking the day they decided to give you that name?”

“I forbid you to judge my parents. And frankly, I don’t see what’s so funny about Prétextat. It’s a Christian name.”

“Is it really? That makes it even funnier.”

“Do not mock religion, you sacrilegious cow. I was born on February 24, which is Saint Prétextat’s day; my father and mother, who were lacking in inspiration, complied with the calendar’s decision.”

“Heavens! Whereas if you had been born on Fat Tuesday, they would have called you Fat Tuesday, or maybe just Fat all on its own?”

“Stop blaspheming, vile creature! I would have you know, you ignoramus, that Saint Prétextat was the Archbishop of Rouen in the sixth century, and a great friend of Grégoire de Tours—who was a very fine man, you’ve never heard of him, naturally. It was thanks to Prétextat that the Merovingian dynasty came into being, because he was the one who married Mérovée to Brunehaut, at the risk of his own life, moreover. Which all adds up to the fact that you have no right to laugh at such an illustrious name.”

“I don’t see why these historical details should make your name any less ridiculous. And as names go, your cousin’s is not bad, either.”

“What! How dare you make fun of my cousin’s name? I forbid you! You are a monster of triviality and bad taste! Léopoldine is the most beautiful, noble, gracious, heartbreaking name that has ever been given.”

“Ah.”

“You heard me! I know of only one name that can even come close to Léopoldine, and that is Adèle.”

“Well, well.”

“Yes. Victor Hugo may have had his faults, but there is one thing that no one can ever criticize: he was a man of taste. Even when his oeuvre commits the sin of bad faith, it is beautiful and grandiose. And he gave the two most magnificent names to his two daughters. Compared to Adèle and Léopoldine, all other female first names are ghastly.”

“A matter of taste.”

“Not at all, imbecile! Who could care less about the taste of people like yourself—common, mediocre folk, rabble, riffraff? All that matters is the taste of people of genius, people like Victor Hugo and myself. What’s more, Adèle and Léopoldine are Christian names.”

“So what?”

“I see, Mademoiselle belongs to that newfangled sector of the population that likes pagan names. You would be all in favor of calling your children Krishna, Elohim, Abdallah, Chang, Empedocles, Sitting Bull, or Akhénaton, right? Grotesque. I like Christian names. In fact, what is your name?”

“Nina.”

“Poor thing.”

“What you mean, poor thing?”

“Yet another girl who is called neither Adèle nor Léopoldine. The world is unfair, don’t you agree?”

“Have you nothing more important to say to me?”

“You find this trivial? But nothing could be more important. If your name is not Adèle or Léopoldine, that is a fundamental injustice, a primordial tragedy, above all for you, saddled with a pagan name—”

“Let me stop you right there: Nina is a Christian name. St. Nina falls on January 14, the date of your first interview.”

“I do wonder what you are trying to prove with such an insignificant coincidence.”

“Not as insignificant as all that. I came back from vacation on January 14, and it was on that day that I learned of your imminent demise.”

“And then? Do you think that means we are connected somehow?”

“I don’t think anything, but you said some extremely strange things a few minutes ago.”

“Yes, I overestimated you. You have greatly disappointed me since that time. And your name—that is the ultimate debacle. Henceforth you mean nothing to me.”

“I’m absolutely delighted. This way I know my life is no longer in danger.”

“Your non-life, you mean. What do you plan to do with it?”

“All sorts of things: finish this interview, for example.”

“How insulting. And to think that out of the goodness of my heart I could have ensured you a superb apotheosis.”

“By the way, how would you have gone about killing me? It is easy, when one is an agile boy of seventeen, to murder a besotted little girl. But for an aging invalid to murder a hostile young woman—that seems like an impossible task.”

“I naïvely thought you were not hostile. The fact that I am an old, obese cripple would have been no obstacle if you had loved me the way Léopoldine loved me, if you had been consenting as she was . . .”

“Monsieur Tach, you have to tell me the truth: was Léopoldine truly and consciously consenting?”

“If you had seen how docile and compliant she was, you would not ask.”

“Well, it remains to be seen why she was so docile: did you drug her, or galvanize her, or lecture her, or beat her?”

“No, no, no, and no. I loved her, the way I still love her, by the way. That was more than enough. That love was of a quality that neither you nor anyone else has ever experienced. If you had known her, you would not ask me such useless questions.”

“Monsieur Tach, is it impossible for you to imagine a different version of this story? You were in love, we agree on that. But that does not necessarily mean that Léopoldine wanted to die. If she went along with it, perhaps it was solely out of love for you, and not out of a desire to die.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“It’s not the same thing. Perhaps she loved you so much that she did not want to go against your wishes.”

“Go against my wishes! What marvelous domestic-strife vocabulary to describe such a metaphysical moment.”

“Metaphysical for you, but it might not have been for her. A moment that for you was filled with ecstasy—perhaps for her it was mere resignation.”

“Look, I’m in a better position than you to be the judge of that, am I not?”

“And it’s my turn to say to you that nothing could be less certain.”

“What do you want, dammit! Who is the writer here, you or me?”

“You are, and that is why I find it very difficult to believe you.”

“And if I were to narrate my story to you out loud, would you believe me?”

“I don’t know. Go ahead and try.”

“Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. If I wrote about that moment, it was because it was impossible to speak about it. Writing begins where speech leaves off, and a great mystery lies behind the passage from the unspeakable to the speakable. The written word takes over where the spoken word leaves off, and they do not overlap.”

“Those are perfectly admirable ideas, Monsieur Tach, but may I remind you that we are talking about murder, not literature.”

“Is there a difference?”

“The same difference that exists between the Court of Assizes and the Académie Française, I suppose.”

“There is no difference between the Court of Assizes and the Académie Française.”

“An interesting point, but you’re getting off the topic, dear sir.”

“Too true. But how can I tell the story! Do you realize I’ve never spoken about it in my life?”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“It was August 13, 1925.”

“That’s already an excellent beginning.”

“It was Léopoldine’s birthday.”

“What an amusing coincidence.”

“Will you be quiet? Can’t you see how this torments me, how hard it is for me to find my words?”

“I can indeed, and I’m delighted. I am relieved to know that sixty-six years later, the memory of your crime is at last tormenting you.”

“You are mean-spirited and vengeful, like all females. You are right to say that Hygiene and the Assassin contained only two female characters: my grandmother and my aunt. Léopoldine was not a female character, she was—and will be, forever—a child, a miraculous being, beyond the sexes.”

“But not beyond sex, if I am to believe what I’ve read in your book.”

“We alone knew that it is not necessary to be pubescent to make love; on the contrary: puberty comes and spoils everything. It diminishes sensuality and the capacity for ecstasy and abandonment. No one makes love as well as a child does.”

“So when you said you were a virgin, you were lying.”

“No, I wasn’t. In common parlance, males cannot lose their virginity until after puberty. Whereas I never made love after puberty.”

“I see that you are playing with words, yet again.”

“Not at all, you simply know nothing about it. But I would appreciate it if you would stop interrupting me all the time.”

“You interrupted a life; allow others to interrupt your logorrhea.”

“Come now, my logorrhea suits you fine. It makes your job so much easier.”

“I suppose that’s true. Well then, train your logorrhea on August 13, 1925.”

“August 13, 1925: the most beautiful day ever. I hope that every human being, at least once in their life, will have an August 13, 1925—because it is more than a mere date. That day was a consecration. The most beautiful day of the most beautiful summer, balmy and breezy, the air light beneath the dense trees. Léopoldine and I had begun our day at around one o’clock in the morning, after our ritual sleep of roughly an hour and a half. You might think that with such a timetable we were continuously exhausted: that was never the case. We were so avid for our Eden that we often had difficulty falling asleep. It was only at the age of eighteen, after the fire at the château, that I began to sleep eight hours a day: people who are too happy or unhappy are incapable of such long absences. Léopoldine and I liked nothing better than to wake up. In the summer, it was even better, because we spent the night outside and slept in the heart of the forest, wrapped in a pearl damask bedspread that I had stolen from the château. Whoever woke up first would contemplate the other, and a gaze was enough to rouse us. On August 13, 1925, I was the first to wake, at around one o’clock, and she joined me shortly after that. We had all the time in the world to do everything a beautiful night invites one to do, everything which, on a damask bedspread that was less and less of pearl and more and more of dead leaves, could elevate us to the dignity of the hierophant—I liked to call Léopoldine the hierinfanta, I was already so cultured, so spiritual, but I’m getting off the subject—”

“Indeed.”

“On August 13, 1925, as I was saying. An absolutely calm, dark night, unusually gentle. It was Léopoldine’s birthday, but that meant nothing to us: for the last three years, time had no longer mattered. We had not changed so much as an atom; we had simply grown in length, prodigiously, but in no way had this amusing stretching of our bodies altered our shapeless, hairless, odorless, infantile constitution. So I did not wish her a happy birthday that morning. I believe I did something much better, I gave a lesson in summer to summer itself. It was the last time in my life that I made love. I did not know that, but no doubt the forest knew it, because it was as silent as an old voyeur. It was when the sun rose above the hills that the wind began to blow, banishing the nocturnal clouds to reveal a sky almost as pure as we were.”

“What admirable lyricism.”

“Stop interrupting me. Let’s see, where was I?”

“August 13, 1925, sunrise, post-coital.”

“Thank you, Mademoiselle the clerk of the court.”

“You’re welcome, Monsieur the murderer.”

“I prefer my title to yours.”

“I prefer my title to Léopoldine’s.”

“If you had seen her that morning! She was the most beautiful creature in the world, an immense smooth and white infanta with dark hair and dark eyes. In the summer, with the exception of the very rare times we went to the château, we lived naked—the estate was so vast that we never ran into anyone. So we would spend most of our days in the lakes, to which I attributed amniotic virtues, which may not have been as absurd as it seems, given the results. But the cause hardly matters; all that mattered was this miracle that occurred daily—a miracle of time frozen for eternity, or at least that is what we believed. And on August 13, 1925, we had every reason to believe as much, as we gazed upon each other in a stupor. That morning, like any other, I dove into the lake without hesitating, and I laughed at Léopoldine, because she always took forever to get into the icy water. My mockery was yet another pleasant ritual, because my cousin was never more lovely to behold than when she stood with one foot in the lake, pale and laughing from the cold, swearing to me that she would never manage, then gradually unfolding her long pale limbs to join me, as if in slow motion, like some shivering wading bird, her lips blue, her big eyes full of terror—fright became her—stammering that it was awful—”

“You are horribly sadistic!”

“What would you know! If you had the slightest knowledge of pleasure, you would know that fear and pain and above all shivers make the best preludes. Once she was all the way in the water, like me, the cold gave way to fluidity, to the gentle ease of life in the water. That morning, like every morning that summer, we marinated endlessly, sometimes gliding together toward the depths of the lake, our eyes open, looking at our bodies that were green in the glistening water, sometimes swimming on the surface, competing for speed, sometimes bobbing in place, clinging to the branches of the weeping willows, speaking the way children speak, but with a greater knowledge of childhood, sometimes floating for hours, drinking up the sky with our eyes, in the perfect silence of icy waters. When the cold had completely penetrated us, we pulled ourselves out onto huge slabs of stone to dry in the sun. The wind on that August 13 was particularly pleasant and quickly warmed us. Léopoldine dove in again first, and held on to the little island where I was still getting warm. It was her turn to make fun of me. I can see her as if it were only yesterday, her elbows on the stone and her chin on her crossed wrists, her impertinent expression and her long hair which, in the water, undulated to the rhythm of her scarcely visible legs, almost frightening in their faraway whiteness. We were so happy, so unreal, so in love, so beautiful, all for the last time.”

“No elegies, please. If it was the last time, that was your fault.”

“So? Does that make things any less sad?”

“On the contrary, it merely makes them sadder, but because you were responsible, you have no right to complain.”

“No right? The last thing I want to hear. I don’t give a damn about rights, and however responsible I might have been in the matter, I think I do have a reason to complain. Besides, my responsibility in the matter was negligible.”

“Oh, really? Maybe it was the wind that strangled her?”

“It was I, but it was not my fault.”

“You mean you strangled her in a moment of distraction?”

“No, silly woman, I mean it was the fault of nature, life, hormones, and all that rubbish. Let me tell you my story and allow me to be elegiac. I was describing Léopoldine’s white legs—such a mysterious whiteness, particularly when seen through the green darkness of the water. To stay afloat horizontally, my cousin was slowly kicking her long legs, I could see each one rising alternately to the surface—no sooner did one foot have time to emerge than her leg was already on its way down, swallowed by the void to make way for the whiteness of the other leg, and so on. On that August 13, 1925, lying on my stony island, I could not get enough of that graceful spectacle. I don’t know how long the moment lasted. It was interrupted by an abnormal detail, of a crudeness I still find shocking: the ballet of Léopoldine’s legs caused something to rise up from the depths of the lake, a thin stream of red fluid, of a very special density, judging from its reluctance to mingle with pure water.”

“In short, it was blood.”

“How crude you are.”

“Your cousin, quite simply, had gotten her period for the first time.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“There’s nothing disgusting about it, it’s normal.”

“Precisely.”

“This attitude isn’t like you, Monsieur Tach. You are such an outspoken enemy of bad faith, the carnivorous defendant of coarse language, and now here you act offended, like some hero out of Oscar Wilde, because you’ve heard someone call a spade a spade. You may have been madly in love, but your love could not displace Léopoldine from the human race.”

“Yes it could.”

“This can’t be true: is this you, the sarcastic genius, with your Célinian way with words, the cynical vivisectionist, the metaphysician of ridicule, producing drivel worthy of a baroque adolescent?”

“Shut up, iconoclast. It’s not drivel.”

“Isn’t it? A love story between two little aristocrats, the young boy in love with his noble cousin, the romantic wager against time, the limpid lakes in the legendary forest—if that’s not drivel, then nothing here on earth is.”

“If you would allow me to tell you the rest, you would understand that it really is not a driveling story.”

“Then go ahead, try and convince me. It won’t be easy, because what you’ve told me so far has filled me with dismay. And this boy who is incapable of accepting the fact his cousin has her first period—it’s grotesque. It stinks of vegetarian lyricism.”

“What comes next is not vegetarian, but I do need a minimum of silence to be able to narrate it.”

“I promise nothing; it’s difficult to listen to you without reacting.”

“Wait at least until I have finished before you react. Shit, where was I? You’ve made me lose the thread.”

“Blood in the water.”

“Heavens above, that’s right. Imagine my shock: the jarring intrusion of that red, hot color amidst so much paleness—the icy water, the chlorotic darkness of the lake, the whiteness of Léopoldine’s shoulders, her lips as blue as mercury sulfate, and then above all her legs, like imperceptible epiphanies evoking, in their unfathomable slowness, some sort of Hyperborean caress. No, it was unacceptable: the source of such repulsive effusion could not lie between those legs.”

“Repulsive!”

“Repulsive, I insist. Repulsive because of what it was, and even more so because of what it signified—a terrible rite, a passage from mythical life to hormonal life, a passage from eternal life to cyclical life. You have to be a vegetarian to be content with cyclical eternity. In my opinion, it’s a contradiction in terms. For Léopoldine and me, eternity could not be conceived in any other way than in the first person of a singular singular, because it encompassed both of us. Cyclical eternity, on the other hand, suggests that a third party will come and interfere with other people’s lives—and one is supposed to go along with this expropriation, to be happy about this whole usurpatory process! I have nothing but scorn for those who accept such a sinister comedy: I scorn them not so much for their sheep-like capacities of resignation as for the anemia of their love. Because if they were capable of true love, they would not submit so spinelessly, they could not bear to witness the suffering of those whom they claim to love, and without any selfish cowardice they would take responsibility for sparing their loved ones from such an abject fate. That stream of blood in the lake water signified the end of eternity for Léopoldine. And because I loved her deeply, I decided to restore her to that eternity, without further ado.”

“I am beginning to understand.”

“You took long enough.”

“I’m beginning to understand how very sick you really are.”

“Well, what will you have to say about what’s next, then?”

“With you, I can always be sure of the worst.”

“With me or without me, you may always be sure of the worst, but I believe I have spared at least one person from the worst. Léopoldine saw my gaze stop abruptly behind her and she turned around. She got out of the water as quickly as she could, as if she were terrified. She hoisted herself up next to me onto the stony island. There was no longer any doubt as to the origin of the stream of blood. My cousin was filled with aversion, which I could well understand. All through the three preceding years, we had never evoked this possibility. We had a sort of tacit agreement regarding the behavior we would adopt in this event—an event that was so unacceptable that in order to preserve our blissful stupor, we preferred to keep to a tacit agreement.”

“This is what I was afraid of. Léopoldine had asked nothing of you, and you killed her in the name of a ‘tacit agreement’ that stemmed from the unhealthy darkness of your imagination alone.”

“She did not ask me anything explicitly, but it wasn’t necessary.”

“Just as I said. In a few minutes you’re going to start bragging about the virtue of what remains unsaid.”

“Someone like you would have wanted a contract drawn up and signed in the presence of a lawyer, is that it?”

“I would have preferred anything to the way you behaved.”

“It hardly matters what you would have preferred. The only thing that mattered was Léopoldine’s salvation.”

“The only thing that mattered was your conception of Léopoldine’s salvation.”

“It was also her conception. The proof, dear Mademoiselle, is that we said nothing to each other. I kissed her eyes very softly and she understood. She seemed calm, and she smiled. It all happened very quickly. Three minutes later she was dead.”

“What, just like that, without any time elapsing at all? That’s . . . that’s monstrous.”

“You would have wanted it to last for two hours, like at the opera?”

“But you don’t just go around killing people that way.”

“Oh, no? I wasn’t aware that there are was a prescribed way of doing it. Is there a treatise on etiquette for assassins? A handbook on savoir-vivre for victims? Next time, I promise you that I will kill more courteously.”

“Next time? Thank God, there will not be a next time. In the meantime, you make me want to vomit.”

“In the meantime? You intrigue me.”

“So, you claimed to love her, and you strangled her without even telling her one last time?”

“She knew it. My gesture was the proof, after all. If I had not loved her so deeply, I would not have killed her.”

“How can you be sure that she knew?”

“We never talked about such things, we were on the same wavelength. And besides, we weren’t talkative. But let me tell you about the strangling. I’ve never had the opportunity to talk about it, but I like thinking about it—how many times have I relived that beautiful scene in the private realm of my memory?”

“What a way to pass the time!”

“You’ll see, you’ll begin to like it, too.”

“Like what? Your memories, or strangling?”

“Love. But let me tell you the story, please.”

“Since you insist.”

“There we were on the stony island, in the middle of the lake. From the moment that death was decreed, Eden, which had just been brutally wrenched from us two minutes earlier, was restored to us for three. We were absolutely aware that all we had left was one hundred and eighty seconds of Eden, so we were determined to do things properly, and we did them properly. Oh, I know what you’re thinking: that all the credit for a good job of strangling belongs to the strangler alone. That is not true. The victim is far less passive than you would think. Have you seen that very bad film made by a barbarian—a Japanese filmmaker, if my memory serves me correctly—which ends with a scene of strangling that lasts roughly thirty-two minutes?”

“Yes, Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses.”

“The strangling scene is botched. As something of an expert, I can assure you that it doesn’t happen like that. First of all, a strangling that lasts thirty-two minutes: I ask you, such bad taste! It’s as if there were a reluctance on the part of all art forms to accept that murders are alert, rapid events. Hitchcock at least had figured that much out. And then, another thing that this Japanese gentleman did not understand: there is nothing languid or painful about strangling; on the contrary, it’s invigorating, it’s fresh.”

“Fresh? Not the way I’d describe it! Why not say nourishing, while you’re at it?”

“Why not, indeed? You do feel revitalized, when you’ve strangled someone you love.”

“The way you talk about it, you’d think you do it on a regular basis.”

“All it takes is to have done something once—but done it deeply—in order to do it again continually, throughout your entire life. To this end, it is imperative that the crucial scene be one of aesthetic perfection. That Japanese man must not have known this, or else he was extremely clumsy, because his strangling scene is ugly, even ridiculous: the woman who is strangling looks as if she’s pumping, and the victim looks as if he’s being crushed under a steamroller. My own strangling scene, on the other hand, and you can take my word for it, was splendid.”

“I don’t doubt it. And yet I would like to ask you one question: why did you choose strangling? Given where you were, drowning would have been more logical. That was, moreover, the explanation you gave your cousin’s parents, when you brought them the corpse—hardly a believable explanation, given the marks on her neck. So, why didn’t you simply drown the child?”

“An excellent question. It did cross my mind on that day of August 13, 1925. I reached my decision very quickly. I told myself that if all Léopoldines were to die by drowning, it would become something of a standard procedure, subject to the law of genre, and that would be altogether too trite. Not to mention the fact that the memory of Victor Hugo might have been outraged by such servile plagiarism.”1

“So you renounced the idea of drowning to avoid creating a reference. But the choice of strangling exposed you to other references.”

“True, yet I did not really take that into consideration. No, my decision to strangle my cousin was based, above all, upon the beauty of her neck. Whether you looked at her nape or at her throat, she had a sublime neck, long and supple, admirably conceived. Such finesse! To strangle someone like me, you would need at least two pairs of hands. With a delicate neck like hers, it was incredibly easy to put my hands around her.”

“And if she had not had this beautiful neck, would you have not strangled her?”

“I don’t know. I might have done it all the same, because I’m a very hands-on sort of person. And as far as death techniques go, you can’t get much more hands-on than strangling. It gives your hands an incomparable impression of sensual plenitude.”

“So you see, you did do it for your own pleasure! Why are you trying to sell me on the idea that you strangled her for her own salvation?”

“My dear young woman, you have the excuse that you know nothing about theology. However, since you claim to have read all my books, you ought to understand. I wrote a fine novel entitled Concomitant Grace, which describes the ecstasy that God gives us in the course of our actions to make them meritorious. I did not invent the notion, it’s one that true mystics know well. You see, as I was strangling Léopoldine, my pleasure was a grace concomitant with the salvation of my beloved.”

“You’re going to end up telling me that Hygiene and the Assassin is a Catholic novel.”

“No. It’s an edifying novel.”

“So please complete my edification, and tell me the last scene.”

“I’m getting there. Everything happened with the simplicity of a masterpiece. Léopoldine sat on my lap, facing me. Please note, Mademoiselle the clerk of the court, that she did so on her own initiative.”

“That doesn’t prove a thing.”

“Do you think she was surprised, when I put my hands around her neck, and when I began to tighten the vise? Not at all. We were smiling to each other, gazing into each other’s eyes. This was not a parting, because we were dying together. The pronoun ‘I’ meant both of us.”

“How romantic.”

“Don’t you agree? You will never be able to imagine how beautiful Léopoldine was, particularly at that moment. One mustn’t strangle someone whose neck is scrunched down between their shoulders, it’s not aesthetically pleasing. However, strangling is very fitting for long, graceful necks.”

“Your cousin must have made a most elegant strangling victim.”

“Ravishingly elegant. Between my hands I could feel her delicate cartilage gradually giving way.”

“He who kills by the cartilage shall die by the cartilage.”

The fat man looked at the journalist, stunned.

“Did you hear what you said?”

“I said it deliberately.”

“That’s extraordinary! You are a clairvoyant. Why did I not think of this myself? We already knew that Elzenveiverplatz Syndrome was the cancer of murderers, but we were lacking an explanation: now we have it! Those ten convicts in Cayenne must have had a go at their victims’ cartilage. Our Lord said as much: the arms of murderers always turn against them. Thanks to you, Mademoiselle, I know at last why I have cartilage cancer! Didn’t I tell you that theology was the science of sciences!”

The novelist seemed to have attained the intellectual ecstasy of the scholar who after twenty years of research finally discovers the coherence of his system. His gaze was deconstructing some invisible absolute, while his greasy forehead pearled with moisture like a mucous membrane.

“I am still waiting for the end of the story, Monsieur Tach.”

The slim young woman contemplated the fat old man’s illuminated features with disgust.

“The end of the story, Mademoiselle? The story doesn’t end, it’s only just beginning! And you are the one who has just made me understand it. The purpose of cartilage is to assist articulation. Articulation of the body, but also of this story!”

“What are you jabbering on about now ?”

“You may think I’m jabbering, but it’s the jabbering of coherence regained! Thanks to you, Mademoiselle, I shall at last be able to continue and perhaps even finish my novel. Underneath Hygiene and the Assassin, I will place a subtitle: ‘A Story of Cartilage.’ The finest testament in the world, don’t you think? But I shall have to hurry, I have so little time left to write! My God, such urgency! What an ultimatum!”

“Whatever you like, but before you go on to write the rest of the story, you have to tell me the end of what happened on August 13, 1925.”

“I won’t prolong it, I’ll make it a flashback! Here’s what I mean: cartilage is the missing link, the ambivalent articulation that allows me to go from the past to the future, but also from the future to the past, to have access to all time, to eternity! You are asking me for the end of August 13, 1925? But there is no end to August 13, 1925, because eternity began on that day. So, today, you may think that it is January 18, 1991, you may think that it’s winter, and that we are at war in the Persian Gulf. A vulgar error! The calendar stopped sixty-five and a half years ago! It’s the middle of summer, and I am a beautiful child.”

“Not that I can see.”

“Because you’re not looking at me intensely enough. Look at my hands: they are so pretty, so fine.”

“They are, I must admit. You may be obese and shapeless, but you have kept graceful hands, a page boy’s hands.”

“You see? It’s a sign, naturally: my hands have played an enormous part in this story. Ever since August 13, 1925, my hands have never ceased from strangling. Can’t you see that right now, as I am speaking to you, I am in the process of strangling Léopoldine?”

“No.”

“But I am. Look at my hands. See my knuckles curling round that swanlike neck, look at my fingers massaging her cartilage, sinking into the spongy tissue, the spongy tissue that will become text.”

“Monsieur Tach, I have caught you red-handed using a metaphor.”

“It’s not a metaphor. What is text, if not gigantic verbal cartilage?”

“Whether you like it or not, it’s a metaphor.”

“If you could just see things as a whole, the way I see them at the moment, you would understand. Metaphors were invented to enable human beings to establish a coherence between the fragments in their vision. When this fragmentation disappears, metaphors no longer have any purpose. Poor little blind girl! Someday perhaps you will be able to see things as a whole, and your eyes will open, as mine have finally opened, after sixty-five and a half years of blindness.”

“Don’t you think you need a tranquilizer, Monsieur Tach? You seem to me to be dangerously overexcited.”

“With good reason. I had forgotten one could be this happy.”

“What reason do you have to be happy?”

“I told you: I am in the process of strangling Léopoldine.”

“And this makes you happy?”

“Indeed it does! My cousin is approaching seventh heaven. She has her head thrown back, her ravishing mouth is half open, her huge eyes are swallowing infinity, unless it’s the other way round, her face is one big smile, and there we are, she’s dead. I loosen my embrace, I let her body slip into the lake, and it floats—Léopoldine’s eyes gaze skyward in ecstasy, then she sinks and disappears.”

“Aren’t you going to fish her out?”

“Not right away. First of all I have to think about what I’ve just done.”

“Are you pleased with yourself?”

“Yes. I burst out laughing.”

“You’re laughing?”

“Yes. I am thinking about how, normally, assassins draw their victim’s blood, whereas I, without spilling a single drop of her blood, have killed her to put an end to her hemorrhage, to restore her to her original, unbloodied immortality. The paradox of it makes me laugh.”

“Your sense of humor is extraordinarily inappropriate.”

“And then I look at the lake: the wind has ruffled the surface evenly, erasing even the last traces of Léopoldine’s fall. And I think it makes a worthy shroud for my cousin. I suddenly call to mind the drowning of Hugo’s daughter in Villequier and recall my motto: ‘Careful, Prétextat, no law of genre, no plagiarism.’ And so I dive into the water, far into the greenish depths where my cousin is waiting for me, still so close, yet already enigmatic, like a submerged vestige. Her long hair is floating high above her face, and to me she has the mysterious smile of Atlantis.”

A long silence.

“And then?”

“Oh, after that . . . I lift her back up to the surface and take her light, supple body in my arms, like seaweed. I carry her back to the château, where the arrival of these two charming naked bodies makes a great impression. They quickly discover that Léopoldine is far more naked than I am. What could be more naked than a corpse? Then there begin all those ridiculous effusions of emotion—cries, tears, lamentation, imprecations against destiny and my negligence, despair—a scene of such kitsch, worthy of a third-rate scribbler: the moment I am no longer in charge of arranging things, these scenes begin to display the most hideous bad taste.”

“You might try and understand their distress, particularly that of the victim’s parents.”

“Distress, distress . . . that seems quite exaggerated to me. To them Léopoldine was never anything but a charming decorative idea. They almost never saw her. For almost three years we had been residing in the forest, and they never worried about where we were. You know, those lords and ladies live in a world of fairly conventional imagery; in this instance, they understood that the theme of the scene was ‘The Corpse of the Drowned Child Restored to Its Parents.’ You may imagine the naïvely Shakespearean and Hugolian references that prevailed in the minds of those good people. They were not weeping for Léopoldine de Planèze de Saint-Sulpice, but for Léopoldine Hugo, for Ophelia, for all the drowned innocence in the world. For them, the hierinfanta was an abstract corpse, one might even say she was a purely cultural phenomenon, and their lamentations merely served to prove the profound literacy of their sensibilities. No, the only person who knew the real Léopoldine, the only person who might have a concrete reason to weep over her death, was me.”

“But you weren’t weeping.”

“On the part of an assassin, to weep for one’s victim would betray a blatant lack of single-mindedness. Besides, I was in a good position to know that my cousin was happy, and would be happy forever after. So I was serene and smiling in the midst of all their shaggy lamentations.”

“Something you were subsequently reproached for, I suppose.”

“You suppose correctly.”

“I will have to make do with these suppositions, given the fact your novel does not go much further.”

“Indeed. You will have noticed that Hygiene and the Assassin is a very aquatic work. To end this book with the fire in the château would have ruined its perfect liquid coherence. There’s nothing more annoying than artists who couple water with fire: such banal dualism is downright pathological.”

“Don’t try and fool me—it is hardly metaphysical considerations of the sort that convinced you to abandon your narration so abruptly. You said as much yourself, earlier on: some mysterious cause blocked your writing. Let me recapitulate the final pages: you leave Léopoldine’s corpse in the arms of her weeping parents, after providing them with an explanation so brief that it was downright cynical. The last sentence in the novel reads as follows: ‘And I went up to my room.’”

“Not a bad ending.”

“That’s as may be, but you will agree the reader might be hungry for more.”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“For a metaphorical reading, yes. Not for the type of flesh-eating reading that you recommend.”

“Dear Mademoiselle, you are both right and wrong. You are right, in that something mysterious forced me to leave this novel unfinished. And nevertheless you are wrong because, like any good journalist, you want me to continue my narration in a linear fashion. Believe me, that would have been sordid, because what followed on August 13 was never, to this very day, anything more than a disgusting, grotesque decline. From 14 August on, the thin, sober child that I had been turned into a terrible glutton. Was it the void left by Léopoldine’s death? I continuously craved the most revolting food—a taste which I have preserved. In six months, my weight tripled, I became pubescent and horrible, I lost all my hair, I lost everything. I told you about my family’s conventional imagery: this imagery required that when a loved one died, the family should fast and lose weight. Therefore, everyone at the château was fasting and losing weight, whereas I, all alone of my scandalous species, stuffed my face and blew up like a balloon before their very eyes. I recall, not without a certain mirth, the contrast between our meals: my grandparents, my uncle, and my aunt hardly smudged their plates, and they watched with consternation as I emptied out the dishes and gobbled everything down like a swine. My bulimia and the suspicious bruises they had seen on Léopoldine’s neck fuelled their conclusions. No one spoke to me anymore, and it was as if I were in a halo of hateful suspicion.”

“Well-founded suspicion.”

“You must realize that I wanted to destroy an atmosphere that was gradually ceasing to amuse me. And you must imagine that I would have found it abhorrent to demystify my splendid novel with such a lamentable epilogue. So you were mistaken to want the novel to continue in due form, and yet you were right to think that the story deserved a real ending—but I could not possibly know that ending before today, since you are the one who has brought it to me.”

“I brought you an ending for your novel?”

“It is what you are doing at this very moment.”

“If you are trying to make me feel ill at ease, well, you’ve succeeded, but I would like an explanation.”

“You already provided a supremely interesting closing element, with your comment about cartilage.”

“I hope you don’t intend to spoil that fine novel by grafting onto it the cartilaginous nonsense you flung at me just now.”

“Why not? It’s an absolutely great find.”

“I would be angry with myself for suggesting such a bad ending. You would do better to leave your novel unfinished.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. But there’s something else you’re going to bring me.”

“And what is that?”

“You yourself will show me, my dear child. Let’s move on to the climax, shall we? We have waited the prescribed amount of time.”

“What climax?”

“Don’t act all innocent. Aren’t you going to tell me who you are, in the end? What mysterious ties you might have with me?”

“No ties whatsoever.”

“Are you not the last survivor of the Planèze de Saint-Sulpice lineage?”

“You know very well that the family died without progeny—you had something to do with it, after all.”

“Might you be a distant relation of the Tach family?”

“You know perfectly well that you are the last descendent of the Tach dynasty.”

“Are you the tutor’s granddaughter?”

“Absolutely not! What will you dream up next?”

“Who was your ancestor, then? The steward or the butler of the château? The gardener? A chambermaid? The cook?”

“Stop right there, Monsieur Tach; I have no connection of any sort with your family, your château, your village, or your past.”

“That’s unacceptable.”

“Why?”

“You would not have gone to so much trouble in your research if you did not have some obscure connection with me.”

“I have caught you flagrante delicto under the influence of your profession, monsieur. Like any self-respecting obsessive writer, you cannot stand the thought that there is no mysterious correlation between your characters. Genuine novelists are basically genealogists at heart. I’m sorry to disappoint you: I am a stranger to you.”

“I am sure you are wrong. Perhaps you do not even know yourself what family, historical, geographical, or genetic tie unites us, but there can be no doubt, such a tie must exist. Let’s see . . . perhaps one of your ancestors died of drowning? Were there any stranglings in your immediate entourage?”

“Stop raving, Monsieur Tach. Your search for similarities between our two cases is in vain—and what meaning might any such similarities hold? What does seem significant is your need to establish a similarity.”

“Significant in what respect?”

“That is the true question, and you yourself will have to answer.”

“I see, once again I have to do everything myself. Basically, the theoreticians of the nouveau roman were inveterate pranksters: the truth is that there is nothing new under the sun. Faced with a shapeless, senseless universe, a writer is obliged to play the demiurge. Without the remarkable assistance of his pen, the world would never have been able to give shape to things, and the stories of men would always have been wide open, like some horrible madhouse. And here you are, in keeping with this multi-millennial tradition, begging me to play the glassblower, to make up your own text, and punctuate your dialogue.”

“Well go ahead then, blow.”

“I have been doing little else, my child. Can’t you see that I too am begging you? Help me to give meaning to this story, and do not have the bad faith to tell me that we have no need of meaning: we need meaning more than anything else. Don’t you realize! For sixty-six years, I have been waiting to meet someone like you—so don’t go trying to make me believe you’re just anybody. You cannot deny that a strange denominator must have orchestrated an interview like this. Let me put the question to you one last time—I repeat, one last time, because patience is not my strong point—and I implore you, tell me the truth: who are you?”

“Alas, Monsieur Tach.”

“What do you mean, alas? Have you nothing else to say?”

“I do, but can you bear to hear my response?”

“I would prefer the worst possible response to an absence of response.”

“Precisely. My response is an absence of response.”

“Be clear, if you please.”

“You asked who I am. Well, you already know, not because I told you, but because you already said so yourself. Have you already forgotten? Earlier, amidst your hail of insults, you were spot on.”

“Go ahead, I am perplexed.”

“Monsieur Tach, I am a filthy little muckraker. There is nothing else to be said, you can believe me on that score. I am truly sorry. You may be sure that I would have loved to have another response for you, but you demanded the truth and that is my only truth.”

“I will never believe that.”

“You are wrong. On the subject of my life and my genealogy, I can tell you no more than very ordinary things. If I had not been a journalist, I would never have tried to meet you. You may search all you like, you will always come to the same conclusion: I am a filthy little muckraker.”

“I do not know if you fully realize what a response like this suggests in the way of horrors.”

“Indeed, I do not realize.”

“No, you do not realize, or not well enough. Let me describe those horrors to you: imagine an old man who is dying, absolutely alone and without hope. Imagine that a young person comes to see him, after he has waited sixty-six years, and suddenly she restores hope to the old man by bringing his buried past back to life. There are two possibilities: either this person is a mysterious archangel who is close to the old man, and it’s an apotheosis; or this person is a perfect stranger motivated by the most unhealthy curiosity, and in that case, allow me to contend that it is sordid: it is grave-digging coupled with an abuse of trust, it is stealing from a dying man his most precious treasure by holding up before him the promise of some miraculous retribution and, in the end, giving him nothing in exchange but a huge pile of shit. When you arrived here, you found an old man dying amidst his beautiful memories, resigned to the fact he no longer has a present. When you leave here, you will leave behind an old man dying in the rotting decomposition of his memories, and desperate that he no longer has a present. If you had a bit of heart or human decency, you would have lied to me, you would have invented a tie between us. Now it’s too late, so if you do have a scrap of humane decency, finish me off, put an end to my disgust, because it’s causing me unbearable suffering.”

“You’re exaggerating. I do not believe I misrepresented your memories to that degree.”

“My novel needs an ending. Through your maneuvers, you made me believe that you were bringing me that ending. I had no longer dared to hope, I was coming back to life after an interminable hibernation—and then, shamelessly, you show me that your hands are empty, you have brought me nothing but the illusion of a sudden new plot twist. At my age, one can no longer bear such things. Were it not for you, I would have died leaving an unfinished novel behind. Because of you, my very death will be unfinished.”

“Have you finished with your stylistic arabesques?”

“Arabesques indeed! Might you have forgotten that you have dispossessed me of my substance? I’m going to teach you something, Mademoiselle: I am not the assassin, you are!”

“Pardon?”

“You heard me. You are the assassin, and you have killed two people. As long as Léopoldine was still alive in my memory, her death was an abstraction. But you have killed her memory with your muckraking intrusion, and by killing that memory, you have killed what remained of me.”

“Sophistry.”

“You would know that it is not sophistry, if you had the vaguest knowledge of love. But how could a filthy little muckraker understand what love is? I have never met a greater stranger to love.”

“If love is what you say it is, I’m relieved to be a stranger to it.”

“Clearly, I have taught you nothing.”

“I really wonder what you could have taught me, other than how to strangle people.”

“I would have liked to teach you that in strangling Léopoldine, I saved her from the only true death, which is to be forgotten. You may think of me as an assassin, when in fact I am one of the rare human beings who has killed no one. Look around you and look at yourself: the world is swarming with assassins, that is, people who allow themselves to forget those they claimed to love. To forget someone: have you really thought about what that means? Forgetfulness is a gigantic ocean where only one ship sails, the ship of memory. For the vast majority of human beings, that ship is no more than a miserable tub which takes on water at the slightest opportunity, and whose captain, an unscrupulous character, is only interested in saving money. Do you know what that foul expression implies? A daily sacrifice, among the crew, of those who are deemed superfluous. And do you know which ones are deemed superfluous? Do you think it’s the bastards, the bores, the idiots? Not at all: the ones who get thrown overboard are the useless ones—those who have already been used. The ones who have already given the best of themselves, so what do they have left to give? Come now, no pity, let’s clean ship, and hup! over the railing they go, and the ocean swallows them, implacably. There you have it, dear Mademoiselle, this is how the most ordinary of assassinations is carried out, in all impunity. I have never subscribed to that dreadful slaughter, and you stand here today accusing me in the name of my innocence, in accordance with what human beings like to call justice and which is in fact a sort of instruction manual for informing on others.”

“Who said anything about informing? I have no intention of denouncing you.”

“Really? Well then, you are even worse than I imagined. As a rule, muckrakers have the decency to come up with a cause. But you stir up shit gratuitously, for the sole pleasure of stinking up the atmosphere. When you leave here you will rub your hands together, knowing for sure that you have not wasted your day, since you have smeared dirt across someone else’s world. You have chosen a fine profession, Mademoiselle.”

“If I understand correctly, you would rather I dragged you before the courts?”

“Of course. Have you thought for a moment of my agony, if you do not denounce me, if you leave me alone and empty in this apartment after what you have done to me? Whereas at least if you drag me before the court, it will entertain me.”

“Sorry, Monsieur Tach, you’ll have to turn yourself in: I won’t stoop to that sort of thing.”

“Yes, you’re above all that, aren’t you? You belong to the worst sort of people, those who would rather pollute than destroy. Can you explain to me what was going through your head the day you decided to come and torture me? To what gratuitously foul instinct did you succumb that day?”

“You’ve known that from the beginning, monsieur: have you forgotten our wager? I wanted to see you crawl at my feet. Now with everything you’ve told me, I want it more than ever. So go ahead and crawl, since you’ve lost our wager.”

“I may indeed have lost, but I prefer my lot to yours.”

“Good for you. Crawl.”

“Is it your female vanity that wants to see me crawl?”

“It is my desire for revenge. Crawl.”

“So you have not understood a thing.”

“My criteria will never be yours, and I’ve understood perfectly well. I hold life to be the most precious blessing, and none of your words will change any of that. If it weren’t for you, Léopoldine would have lived, with everything horrible that may imply, but also everything beautiful. There is nothing more to say. Crawl.”

“After all, I’m not holding it against you.”

“That’s all I need. Crawl.”

“You live in a sphere that is completely foreign to me. It’s normal for you not to understand.”

“Your condescension is touching. Crawl.”

“In fact, I’m far more tolerant than you are: I am capable of accepting the fact that you live with other criteria. But you aren’t. For you, there is only one way of seeing things. You are narrow-minded.”

“Monsieur Tach, you may be sure that your existential considerations do not interest me. I am ordering you to crawl, and that’s it.”

“So be it. But how do you expect me to crawl? Have you forgotten that I’m a cripple?”

“That’s true. Let me help you.”

The journalist stood up, lifted the fat man from under his arms, and with a great effort managed to heave him onto the carpet, face down.

“Help! Help!”

But in that position, the novelist’s lovely voice was muffled, and no one could hear him, except the young woman.

“Crawl.”

“I cannot bear to be on my stomach! My doctor won’t allow it.”

“Crawl.”

“Shit! I’m about to suffocate, any minute now!”

“So then you’ll know what suffocation is, since you inflicted it on a little girl. Crawl.”

“It was for her salvation.”

“Well then, it is for your salvation that I’m exposing you to the risk of suffocation. You are a despicable old man whom I want to save from decline. So it’s the same thing. Crawl.”

“But I’ve already declined! I’ve done nothing but decline for sixty-five and a half years!”

“In that case, I want to see you decline some more. Go on, decline.”

“You can’t say that, there is no such thing as an imperative of the verb ‘to decline.’”

“I really couldn’t care less. But if the verb ‘decline’ bothers you with its lack of imperative, I know another one that will work very well: crawl.”

“This is terrible, I’m suffocating, I’m going to die!”

“Well, well. I thought you looked on death as a good thing.”

“And it is, but I don’t want to die right away.”

“No? Why delay such a happy event?”

“Because I’ve just realized something, and I want to tell you before I die.

“All right. I will agree to turn you over onto your back, but on one condition: first of all you have to crawl at my feet.”

“I promise you I’ll try.”

“I’m not asking you to try, I’m ordering you to crawl. If you don’t manage, I’ll let you die.”

“All right, I’ll crawl.”

And the huge sweaty mass dragged itself along six feet of carpet, puffing like a locomotive.

“This is positively orgasmic for you, I suppose?”

“It is indeed. All the more so knowing that I’m avenging someone. I have the impression that if I look through your hypertrophied body I can see a slim silhouette which, through your suffering, is finding relief.”

“Theatrical and ridiculous.”

“You don’t like it? Do you want to crawl some more?”

“I swear to you, it’s time to turn me over. I can feel my soul departing, insofar as I have one.”

“How surprising. If you’re going to die anyway, isn’t a fine assassination better than a slow, cancerous death?”

“You call this a fine assassination?”

“In the eyes of the assassin, murder is always beautiful. It’s the victim who has cause for complaint. Right at this moment, are you really interested in the artistic value of your death? You must admit you aren’t.”

“I admit I’m not. Turn me over, I beg you.”

The journalist grabbed hold of the mass by his hip and armpit and swung him over on his back, grunting with the effort. The fat man was breathing convulsively. It took several minutes for his terrorized face to regain a measure of serenity.

“So what is this thing that you have just discovered and that you are so eager to share with me?”

“I wanted to tell you: that was a rotten thing to have to go through.”

“And then?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“What do you mean? Is that all you have to say? It has taken you eighty-three years to find out what everyone has known since birth?”

“Well you see, I didn’t know. I had to be about to die to understand how horrible it is—not the death we all know nothing about, but the very instant of dying. It is a very rotten thing. Maybe other people have the necessary foresight, but I didn’t.”

“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“No. Until today, I always thought that death was death, period. It was neither good nor bad, it was a disappearance. I didn’t realize that there was a difference between that death and the moment of one’s death, which is unbearable. Yes, it’s very strange: I’m still not afraid of death, but from now on I will sweat with fear at the thought of what I’ll have to go through, even if it only lasts a second.”

“Are you ashamed, then?”

“Yes and no.”

“Shit! Must I make you crawl again?”

“Let me explain. Yes, I am ashamed at the thought of having inflicted that passage upon Léopoldine. But I persist in believing, or at least hoping, that she was granted an exemption. The fact remains that I examined her face during her brief death throes, and I saw no anxiety there.”

“What wonderful illusions you’ve found to ease your conscience.”

“I don’t give a damn about my conscience. My quest is on a higher level.”

“Dear Lord.”

“You said the word: yes, perhaps to certain exceptional human beings Our Lord allows a passage without suffering or anxiety, an ecstatic death. I think that Léopoldine was granted such a miracle.”

“Listen, your story is already despicable enough as it is; do you want to make it even more grotesque by invoking God, ecstasy, and miracles? Perhaps you imagine you have perpetrated some sort of mystical murder?”

“Certainly.”

“You are completely out to lunch. Do you want to know the reality of this mystical murder, you sick pervert? Do you know the first thing a body does after it dies? It pisses, Monsieur, and shits whatever remains in its intestines.”

“You are repugnant. Cease your comedy, you’re bothering me.”

“I bother you, do I? Going around murdering people, that doesn’t bother you, but the idea that one of your victims might piss and shit, that’s intolerable, isn’t it? And the water in your lake must have been very murky, when you went to fish out your cousin’s corpse, if you didn’t see the contents of her intestines rising to the surface.”

“Hold your tongue, for pity’s sake!”

“Pity for whom? For an assassin who is not even capable of assuming the biological consequences of his crime?”

“I swear to you, I swear to you that it didn’t happen the way you say it did.”

“Oh, really? So Léopoldine had neither bladder nor intestines?”

“Yes she did, but . . . it didn’t happen the way you say it did.”

“Let’s just say, rather, that you can’t stand the idea.”

“The idea is unbearable, indeed, but it did not happen the way you say it did.”

“Do you intend to go on repeating that until you die? You’d do better to explain.”

“Alas, I cannot explain my conviction; however, I know that it did not happen the way you say it did.”

“Do you know what they call this type of conviction? It is called autosuggestion.”

“Mademoiselle, since I am unable to make myself understood, would you allow me to approach the question from a different angle?”

“Do you really believe there is a different angle?”

“I fear I do, yes.”

“Well then, go ahead; we’ve gotten this far.”

“Mademoiselle, have you ever loved someone?”

“I don’t believe it! The lonely hearts column!”

“No, Mademoiselle. If you had ever loved someone, you would know that that has nothing to do with it. Poor Nina, you have never been in love.”

“Don’t talk about stuff like this with me, do you mind? And then don’t call me Nina, it makes me uncomfortable.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. There’s something revolting about hearing my name said by an obese murderer.”

“What a pity. And yet I really did want to call you Nina. What are you afraid of, Nina?”

“I’m not afraid of anything. You disgust me, that’s all. And stop calling me Nina.”

“What a pity. I need to call you something.”

“Why?”

“My poor young lady, you are so hardened, so mature—but in some respects you are still like a newborn lamb. Don’t you know it means, when a person needs to say a name? Do you imagine that I feel the same need for just anybody? Never, my child. If, deep within, one feels the desire to say a person’s name, it is because one loves that person.”

The journalist looked at him, speechless.

“Yes, Nina. I love you, Nina.”

“Have you finished with this utter nonsense?”

“It’s the truth, Nina. I had a first inkling of it a little while ago, and then I thought I had made a mistake, but I have not made a mistake. This, more than anything, is what I had to tell you when I was dying. I think I can no longer live without you, Nina. I love you.”

“Wake up, imbecile.”

“I have never been more lucid.”

“Lucidity hardly becomes you.”

“That doesn’t matter. I no longer matter, I am all yours.”

“Stop your raving, Monsieur Tach. I know very well that you don’t love me. There is nothing about me that could possibly be to your liking.”

“That is what I thought, too, Nina, but this love is far above all that.”

“For pity’s sake, don’t tell me you love me for my soul, or I shall laugh so hard I’ll cry.”

“No, this love is greater still.”

“I find you very ethereal, all of a sudden.”

“Don’t you understand that it is possible to love someone outside of any known reference?”

“No.”

“That’s a pity, Nina, and yet I do love you, with all the mystery the verb suggests.”

“Stop it! Let me guess: you’re looking for a decent ending for your novel, isn’t that it?”

“If you only knew how I’ve lost interest in that novel over the last few minutes!”

“I don’t believe it for a second. You are obsessed by the unfinished nature of it. You were disgusted upon learning that I have no personal connection with you, so now you’re trying to fabricate a personal link from scratch, by inventing some last-minute love story. You have such a hatred of insignificance that you could make up the most enormous lies to give meaning to something that will never have any.”

“You are wrong, Nina! Love has no meaning, and that is why it is sacred.”

“Don’t try to fool me with your rhetoric. You love no one, except for Léopoldine’s corpse. You should be ashamed, moreover, to defile the only love of your life by saying such outlandish things to me.”

“I am not defiling that love, on the contrary. By loving you, I am proving that Léopoldine taught me to love.”

“Sophistry.”

“It would be sophistry, if love did not obey rules that are completely estranged from those of logic.”

“Listen, Monsieur Tach, you may go ahead and write such nonsense in your novel if it amuses you, but stopped using me as a guinea pig.”

“Nina, it does not amuse me. Love is not for amusement. Love serves no purpose other than love.”

“How thrilling.”

“Indeed. If you could understand the meaning of the verb, you would be as thrilled as I am in this moment, Nina.”

“Please spare me your thrill, would you? And stop calling me Nina, or I will no longer be able to answer for my acts.”

“Do not answer for your acts, Nina. And let yourself be loved, since you cannot love me in return.”

“Love you? That’s all I need. I’d have to be a real pervert to be able to love you.”

“So be a pervert, Nina, it would make me so happy.”

“The thought of making you happy is utterly revolting. No one is less deserving of happiness than you are.”

“I disagree.”

“Of course you do.”

“I may be horrible, ugly, and nasty, I can be the most vile person on the planet, and yet I do possess one very rare quality, a quality so fine that I no longer find myself unworthy.”

“Let me guess: modesty?”

“No. My quality is that I am capable of love.”

“And in the name of that sublime quality, you would like me to wash your feet with my tears and say, ‘Prétextat, I love you’?”

“Say my name again, it feels so good.”

“Be quiet, you make me want to puke.”

“You are marvelous, Nina. You have an extraordinary personality, a fiery temperament cloaked in icy hardness. You are proud and bold. You have everything to make the perfect lover, if only you were capable of love.”

“I should warn you that if you are taking me for the reincarnation of Léopoldine, you are mistaken. I have nothing in common with that ecstatic little girl.”

“I know that. Have you ever known ecstasy, Nina?”

“I find your question utterly inappropriate.”

“And it is. Everything is inappropriate in this matter, the love you inspire to start with. So, since we’ve gotten this far, Nina, do not hesitate to answer my question, which is more chaste than you might expect: have you ever known ecstasy, Nina?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is that at the moment I feel no ecstasy.”

“You do not know love, you do not know ecstasy: you know nothing. My little Nina, how can you cling to life the way you do, when you don’t even know it?”

“Why are you saying such things? So that I’ll be perfectly docile and let you kill me?”

“I will not kill you, Nina. Just now I thought I might, but in the meantime I have crawled, and the urge disappeared.”

“I could die laughing. So you actually thought you could murder me, old and disabled as you are? I thought you were repulsive, but in fact, you are simply stupid.”

“Love makes us stupid, it’s a well-known fact, Nina.”

“Oh please, spare me, don’t talk to me anymore about your love, I can feel a sort of murderous urge welling up inside me.”

“Is that possible? But, Nina, that’s how it begins.”

“The way what begins?”

“Love. Might I have shown you the way to ecstasy? I can’t tell you how proud I am, Nina. The urge to kill has just died in me, and here it is reborn in you. You have just begun to live: are you aware of that?”

“All I’m aware of is the depth of my exasperation.”

“I am witnessing the most extraordinary spectacle: like any ordinary person, I believed that reincarnation was a postmortem phenomenon. And now before my very eyes, my very living eyes, I see you turning into me!”

“I have never received a more libelous insult!”

“The depth of your irritation is proof that your life has begun, Nina. Henceforth, you will always be as furious as I have been, you will be allergic to bad faith, you will explode with imprecations and ecstasy, you will be inspired, you will revel in your anger and fear nothing.”

“Have you finished, you bloated boil?”

“You know that I am right.”

“Absolutely not! I am not you.”

“Not yet completely, but it won’t take long.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. It’s remarkable. The things I say come to pass before my very eyes, as I am saying them. I have become the prophet of the present—not the future, the present, do you understand?”

“I understand that you have lost your mind.”

“You are the one who has taken it, as you will take all the rest. Nina, I have never known such ecstasy!”

“Where are your tranquilizers?”

“Nina, I will have all eternity to be tranquil, once you kill me.”

“What are you saying?”

“Let me speak. What I have to say is too important. Whether you want to or not, you are becoming my avatar. With each metamorphosis of my being, an individual worthy of love was waiting: the first time, it was Léopoldine, and I’m the one who killed her; and now it’s you, and you will kill me. That is fair enough, don’t you think? I am so happy that it is you: thanks to me, you are about to discover what love is.”

“Thanks to you, I am about to discover what consternation is.”

“You see? You said so yourself. Love begins with consternation.”

“Just now you said it began with a desire for murder.”

“It’s the same thing. Listen to what is welling up inside you, Nina: feel that immense astonishment. Have you ever heard a better-constructed symphony? The workings of it are too perfect and too subtle for others to perceive. Have you noticed the amazing diversity of instruments? Their incongruous chords should create only cacophony—and yet, Nina, have you ever heard anything more beautiful? Dozens of movements are being superimposed through you, making your skull a cathedral, your body a vague and infinite sound box, your thin flesh a trance, all causing your cartilage to relax: you have been possessed by that which is unnamable.”

Silence. The journalist threw her head back.

“Your skull feels heavy, doesn’t it? I know what it is. You will see that you’ll never get used to it.”

“To what?”

“To the unnamable. Try to lift your head, Nina, however heavy your skull might be, and look at me.”

The creature did as he asked, with an effort.

“You must concede that despite the inconvenience, it is divinely pleasant. I’m very pleased that you have understood at last. Try to imagine now what Léopoldine’s death was like. Just now, the instant of my death seemed intolerable because I was crawling, in both senses of the term. But to go from life to death in a moment of ecstasy is a mere formality. Why? Because in such moments one does not know whether one is dead or alive. It would be inexact to say that my cousin died without suffering or without realizing it, like someone dying in their sleep: the truth is that she died without dying, because she was already no longer alive.”

“Careful now, what you just said stinks of Tachian rhetoric.”

“And what you are feeling, is that Tachian rhetoric, Nina? Look at me, my charming little avatar. You will have to get used to scorning other people’s logic from now on. Consequently, you will have to get used to being alone—don’t regret it.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“It’s very kind of you to say that.”

“You know very well that kindness has nothing to do with any of this.”

“Don’t worry, you will see me again at every moment of ecstasy.”

“Will it happen often?”

“To be honest, I had not experienced ecstasy for sixty-five and a half years, but the ecstasy I am feeling at the moment erases all the lost time as if it had never existed. You will also have to get used to ignoring the calendar.”

“What next.”

“Do not be sad, dear avatar. Do not forget that I love you. And love is eternal, as you well know.”

“Do you know that, coming from a Nobel laureate, there is something irresistibly delicious about such platitudes?”

“You don’t know how right you are. When you have attained my degree of sophistication, you do not dare say anything terribly ordinary without disfiguring it, without giving it a touch of the strangest of paradoxes. How many writers have taken up this career with the sole purpose of, some day, reaching a place beyond banality, a sort of no man’s land where words are always virginal. Perhaps that’s what immaculate conception is: to say the words that are a hair’s breadth away from bad taste, yet still retain a sort of miraculous state of grace, always above the crowd, above any ridiculous grumbling. I am the last individual on earth who can say ‘I love you’ without being obscene. You are very lucky indeed.”

“Lucky? Is it not rather a curse?”

“Lucky, Nina. Do you realize, without me, your life would have been so terribly boring!”

“What do you know?”

“It stands out a mile. Did you not say yourself that you were a dirty little muckraker? In the long term, you would have wearied of that. Sooner or later, you have to stop being interested in other people’s shit, and begin to create your own. Without me, you would never have been able to. Henceforth, oh avatar, you will have access to the divine initiatives of creators.”

“I do feel a troubling initiative stirring in me.”

“That’s normal. Doubt and fear are the accessories of great initiatives. You will gradually come to understand that your anxiety is part of the pleasure. And you need pleasure, Nina, don’t you? Clearly I’ve taught you everything and brought you everything. Love, for a start: darling avatar, I tremble at the thought that without me you would never have known what love is. A few minutes ago we were talking about verbs without an imperative: do you know that the verb ‘to love’ presents similar deficiencies?”

“Now what are you going on about?”

“It is only conjugated in the singular. Its plural forms are never anything other than disguised singulars.”

“That’s your point of view.”

“Not at all: have I not proven that when two people love each other, one of the two has to disappear to restore the singular—hence, no imperative?”

“Don’t tell me that you killed Léopoldine to comply with some grammatical ideal?”

“Does the cause seem so very futile to you? Do you know of a more imperious need than conjugation? I would have you know, little avatar, that if conjugation did not exist, we would not even be aware of being distinct individuals, and this sublime conversation would be impossible.”

“If only.”

“Come now, do not disdain your own pleasure.”

“My pleasure? There is not a jot of pleasure in me, and I feel nothing, other than a terrible desire to strangle you.”

“Well, well, you’ve taken your time, my dear avatar. I have spent at least ten minutes, with exemplary transparency, trying to get you to make your mind up. I’ve exasperated you, I’ve pushed you to the limit to tear away your last scruples, and still you haven’t gone through with it. What are you waiting for, my tender love?”

“I find it hard to believe that it’s what you really want.”

“I give you my word.”

“And besides, I’m not in the habit . . . ”

“It will come.”

“I’m afraid.”

“So much the better.”

“And what if I don’t do it?”

“The atmosphere will become unbearable. Believe me, we’ve gotten this far, you no longer have any choice. Besides, you are offering me the unique opportunity of dying in the same conditions as Léopoldine: at last I will know what she went through. Go to it, avatar, I am ripe.”

The journalist did as he asked, flawlessly. It was quick and clean. Classicism never commits any errors of taste.

When it was done, Nina switched off the tape recorder and sat down in the middle of the sofa. She was very calm. If she began talking to herself, it was not the effect of some mental disturbance. She spoke the way one speaks to a close friend, with a somewhat mirthful tenderness: “You mad old fool, you almost had me there. Your words annoyed me beyond belief; I was on the verge of losing my mind. Now I feel much better. I have to confess that you were right: strangling is a very pleasant rite.”

And the avatar gazed admiringly at her hands.

The paths that lead to God are impenetrable. More impenetrable still are those that lead to success. In the wake of this incident, there was a veritable stampede for the works of Prétextat Tach. Ten years later, he was a classic.