It was particularly moving to watch my colleagues who worked in sign language, as they gestured furiously like short-circuited robots in an effort to translate a tiny fraction of whatever they had managed to grasp. Yet if one of us were impertinent enough to ask for a pause to make ourselves understood by the poor wretch for whom we were responsible (and who wasn’t picking up a damned thing), the magistrate would adopt a pained look and close his eyes as if to say I’m just going to hum a little tune in my head while I wait for this moment to pass. Naturally the bothersome person in question would be marked down as a nit-picker and never asked back.

I very quickly stopped trying.

When I felt sorry for my guy, I sometimes managed to slip in a few things in Arabic amidst the torrent of words pouring from the judge. Things like: Just tell these ass-holes what they want to hear so we can get this over with — you were in such a hurry to leave France and go back home, you only stole so you could afford a return ticket.

For the more complicated cases involving several charges, when I had phone taps to translate, I sometimes invented things to help those defendants I thought were most deserving of pity. But I could also do the opposite and decide to sink them, especially when it was a matter of protecting their poor wives, naïve girls who were totally under their thumbs. As the prostitutes or mistresses stacked up, those bastard husbands, whose filthy intimacy I shared through my headphones, treated them like dogs. The cynicism of these men knew no bounds, as they registered their business phone lines, the cars they used for their trafficking, and the property they acquired with laundered cash in their wives’ names. I made sure to tell these women what I had heard over the telephone intercepts, to show them what idiots they were being so at least they would stop showing up twice a week in the visitors’ room laden with sacks of their husband’s laundry, like mules.

Another thing: I was paid under the table by the government department employing me, which meant I had no taxable income.

True karma, indeed.

It’s quite frightening when you think about it, that the translators and interpreters upon whom the security of the nation rests — those very people engaged in simultaneously interpreting the plots cooked up by Islamists in their cellars and garages — are working illegally, with no social security, no pension . . . Frankly, you could devise a better system, couldn’t you, in terms of incorruptibility.

Well, I find it pretty disturbing. And I have been corrupted.

At first I thought it was funny, then one day I wasn’t laughing any more.