25

Outside on the street, I walked around my neighbourhood for a while. Everywhere I looked, the people I saw were no longer residents but characters. I had often sat on café terraces and dreamed up lives for passers-by; this time, I had acted to put an end to my imaginings. Thinking about my book again, I had the feeling that it was turning into a romance. Between Valérie’s marital crisis and Madeleine’s resurrected past, my narrative was very much focused on affairs of the heart. I found this slightly annoying, as I had in the past been criticised for writing too much about love. But let’s be clear: this was not my fault. I had submitted to the lives of my characters. And for most people, love was obviously one of the most important threads in the tapestry of their life.

26

It was almost evening already, and for the second time in two days I was going to have dinner with the Martin family. I deliberately got there a little early so I’d have time to talk to the children. Lola opened the door and greeted me with the words: ‘Good evening, Mr Writer.’ But that was all. She immediately returned to her bedroom, abandoning me in the hallway. Did she just not like my face? Valérie had told me the day before that her daughter was one of the popular kids at her school. All I saw was a shy teenager, as suspicious of me as if I were a surprise test in her chemistry class. This generation might have lost its capacity for surprise, but it was still well stocked with mistrust. With the rise of social media, where reputations could be built or lost on nothing at all, one had to remain vigilant. She saw me as a sort of spy, and she wasn’t wrong.

I was left with no choice but to venture alone towards the living room. As I always do when invited into someone else’s home, I checked out the bookshelves. I feel it’s possible to find out everything about a person simply by looking at the books that they own. Back in the days when I was apartment-hunting, I would always head straight for the bookshelves to discover what novels the residents possessed. If there were none at all, I would leave immediately. I couldn’t possibly have bought anything from an owner who didn’t read fiction. It would have been like finding out that a horrific crime had taken place there years before. (And, yes, I know. But each to his obsessions.) Just as some people believe in ghosts, I consider it perfectly plausible that there is a sort of phantom of philistinism.

In the Martins’ apartment I found a few classics, some bestsellers, and three or four Prix Goncourt winners. From a literary point of view, I was in an average family, the kind that reads the books everyone’s talking about. However, I was surprised to discover a copy of Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born in among all those mass-market paperbacks. That seemed to me as improbable as the Marx Brothers making a tragedy. But then I picked up the book and read the label stuck to it: BUY TWO, GET ONE FREE. So the Romanian philosopher had, posthumously, found himself part of a promotional offer that gave his book a fleeting glimpse of bestsellerdom. He might, I thought, have enjoyed that irony of posterity. Thinking this, I remembered one of my favourite lines by him: ‘It is incredible that the prospect of having a biographer does not make anyone give up on having a life.’ There was a resonance there with my own project, since I was effectively becoming the Martins’ biographer.