Compassion is a real pain, because it makes you talk nonsense. I thought about Marie, who would be having her music lesson, and all the years it took her to learn to play her instrument. Poetic and musical passion mostly come from hard graft, but how could I have explained that to Etienne and Marcel? Then we changed the subject, because Etienne had been to see the careers advisor about a new professional direction he wanted to take. He’d explained to her that he’d given up on the idea of being a chicken breast cutter and now wanted to be a proctologist. But she didn’t know what that was, so he’d explained that it was a doctor specializing in the anus. Well, of course, she thought he was making a fool out of her, so she blew her top. Then she wound up Lucky Luke, who gave him hours of detention and threatened to cancel the concert.

“Personally,” said Etienne, “I think that sort of attitude doesn’t encourage professional development.”

In the evening, I was puzzling over the word, so I looked it up in my dictionary:

Proctologist specialist in proctology.

Since that didn’t get me very far, I looked up “proctology”.

Proctology the branch of medicine that deals with diseases of the anus and rectum.

A job like that was bound to need many years of study, a bit like a dentist. Well, now I knew. I went downstairs to see Dad, who’d turned on the TV and was watching a film called Paris in the Month of August, with Charles Aznavour in the lead role. I really liked it, the plot was very entertaining. It was about an ordinary, unremarkable man, who worked in the fishing equipment section of a department store. While his wife was away on holiday, he fell in love with a very beautiful young English model who was working in Paris. He wanted to spend as much time with her as possible and take advantage of the way moral standards were becoming more relaxed. So in order to get sick leave from work, he had the bright idea of sticking a fish hook deep into his hand. Problem solved, just like that. An excellent film all round, in fact, and very moving too.