“For instance, I found the biology lesson on the eye very instructive,” she said.

She seemed to be lost in thought. She went on, as though talking to herself. “It’s crazy what goes on inside the iris and the cornea…”

“Did you see,” I asked, “when he explained how you go blind because of that shi— tricky cornea?”

We were coming up to the baker’s and I realized that the sun had disappeared and darkness was beginning to fall gently around us like a veil. She stopped suddenly, turned towards me and said, with a smile in her voice, “When you’re blind, you can’t see the snow in the South of France or whether the tide’s in or out. That would be annoying for you, when you love the area and its climate so much.”

She turned her back on me and that was that. I was left feeling utterly humiliated.

Humiliation the action of humiliating or the condition of being humiliated. Impairment to self-esteem. See abasement.

There were at least two words in this definition that I didn’t understand. If you have to be a specialist to understand a definition, you might as well give up.

It was still bothering me when I got home, so I asked Dad.

“Dad, seriously, did you know that there were two writers called Alexandre Dumas?”

He was absorbed in the Journal for Collectors and the Curious, but he glanced up.

“Yes, father and son.”

I sighed deeply and mournfully.

“Why are you sighing like that?”

“Well, it’s just that I’ve realized other people know loads of things that I’m completely in the dark about… On the way back from school I met a girl from my class who already knew that there were two of them. I’ll never dare to speak to her again about The Three Musketeers: I’m sure she must have read it several times already. And as for Haisam, he must have known about it for years… By the way, why did Alexandre Dumas give his son the same first name as himself?”

“I’ve no idea. Perhaps he wanted him to write books too and thought the name would bring him luck.”

“It’s an odd thing to do. The one who wrote The Three Musketeers, was that the father or the son?”

“The father.”

“I thought so…”

“Thought what?”

“I thought that it seems more like a book written by a father than by a son.”

It was getting darker, and I wondered how he could still see to make notes in the Journal, which has such small type. I switched on the lamp on the sideboard and opened my rucksack to get my things out.

“Because I’m sure that the books by Alexandre Dumas’s son wouldn’t be as accomplished or as informative. By the way, what did he write?”