I find chapters that I am sure I have written down in a tighter, clearer version. But that version is lost: entire folders are missing.

I am often so sharply beset by impatience that I rip up wads of papers: sketches that strike me as totally absurd, first drafts that demonstrate my most lamentably unimaginative, inexpressive periods, unrelated notes—whatever they refer to is lost. A bric-a-brac of documents testifying to practically anything—but not the definitive shape of the book, crackpot structural designs, dozens of beginnings . . . It all strikes me as crazy, chaotic, erroneous, and useless. I regret the time, energy, ink, and paper that I’ve squandered. I destroy it like something very shameful, like the traces of a scandalous past. A few hours later, I stick my head in the wastebasket, rummage around, pull out the crumpled tatters, smooth them, and arduously glue them together again.

Once, I almost beat up the chambermaid (a half-dotty, gentle-eyed old woman from Brittany with the dreamy name of Monique) because she emptied the wastebasket before I could salvage a couple of irreplaceable notes.

Sometimes, I write. I often toss out pages with rough sketches I think I have already completed. But they also contain drafts for later sections, notions, discoveries, comments, the order of the subsequent chapters—and only when I reach them do I realize what is lost.

•

Thus do the days go by. At night, I murder.

•

Yet I could have a marvelously simple time of it. Put my book aside, as I’ve done so often in the past, and serve my piglets. Not just four weeks but a full eight (of which still seven are left)—seven fat expense-account weeks in Paris.

•

(To Schwab, in the style of a music-hall ditty:

Oh come to the drum

To Paree, old bum!

and his face: the twisted, tortured smile and the abrupt, simultaneous bloating of the cheek skin in disgust—)

Fifty-six late-summerish early-autumn days in Paris:

Had a nice sleep, well into the morning, had a nice bath, cleaned up nice: not in the usual mobster outfit filmmakers wear—turtleneck sweater, sailor’s trousers, tam-o’-shanter, cowboy boots—but as a gent with a cineastic note:

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. style: just in town for the game, café-society denizen on studio lots; a gentleman with graying temples but crisply suntanned, racing driver and record-album expert, Playboy Club member and St. Tropez yachtsman: elk-leather coat and gold-buttoned Dunhill blazer, Battistoni shirt, Hermès necktie, Gucci shoes.

Dressed like a hack and writing like a hack.

A stroll through the Faubourg Saint-Honoré: swimming through display windows: the smoky reflection of the sentries at the Élysée:

(Petit Larousse heroism: in the rouge et noir of the uniforms the symbol of the hasard of politics.)

Viewed through their transparent astral phenomena in a different dimension (permeating theirs), the harvest festival of de luxe clothing:

feuilles d’automne in silk and velvet; over the hair-tips of fair mink the brilliance of ripe grain; bucolics in the tortoiseshell inlays of Boulle furniture; abundance of fruit petrified in rock crystal and rose quartz; oxblood in the gold-embossed leather of old bookbindings (and everything else besides) . . .