At the end of the lesson I dawdled a bit, because I felt safest in the classroom. The teacher put away her things and since I still hadn’t left she began to wipe the board.

“Anything wrong, Victor?”

“No, no, everything’s just fine. Someone takes my picture and then I get dragged through the mud in front of hundreds of people. Otherwise everything’s fine. But I’m told it does you good to feel ashamed once in a while…”

“I saw the photos. She’s a very pretty girl. You should probably feel flattered, all things considered.”

I frowned. Obviously, I wasn’t going to go into all the details concerning Marie.

“She might be a pretty girl, but she’s not my type. It was just a dirty trick my hormones played on me.”

She smiled.

“By the way, since we’re sharing confidences,” I said, “I’ve noticed that these days your dead baby doesn’t seem to weigh you down so much.”

“That’s right, Victor. He’s gone back into my heart.”

“That’s good news.”

After that neither of us dared say anything else, for fear of disrupting the delicate balance of our intimacy.

The day dragged on like a stretchy old snake. I avoided Marie because I was worried stiff that she’d want to know more about the photos. Between lessons, I saw Etienne waiting outside Lucky Luke’s office, which was not a good sign. He told me he had big problems. When he’d gone into class, the pupils were already there but not the teacher, so he’d had the bright idea of yelling out, “So then, any sex going on in here?” It was his bad luck that the teacher was in the little storeroom that opened onto the classroom. It was even worse luck that she was with the head teacher. Result: he’d been given a serious roasting.

“Then the head asked me what job I wanted to do later on,” Etienne added. “So obviously I said I wanted to be a proctologist. She asked me what it involved, so I told her it meant taking care of anuses. So that’s how I’ve ended up outside Lucky Luke’s office.”

“You’re asking for trouble with that choice of profession.”

“I really don’t see what everyone’s got against it as a specialism. It’s no more disgusting than dentistry, maybe even less so. It’s just the other end, that’s all.”