This theory went through my head as I looked around the walls of a soulless bedroom, brightened by a few posters. To judge by those posters, his musical tastes were erratic. His heart was torn between the extreme poles of Nirvana and Angèle: a band of depressives and a young woman full of joie de vivre. Glancing at the Nirvana poster, I asked Jérémie what he thought teen spirit smelled like. ‘Like food that’s gone bad,’ he responded instantly. Once again, I saluted his quick wits. After that, we had a brief conversation about Kurt Cobain, and he seemed interested in what I told him: that I had been blown away by Nirvana’s explosion onto the rock scene in 1991, and devastated, three years later, by their singer’s suicide. I mentioned to Jérémie the famous curse of the 27 Club: the list of stars who had died at that age, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Amy Winehouse … But I stopped myself mid-anecdote. I did not want to win Jérémie’s trust by leading him into such morbid depths. I could see it in his slightly widened eyes; he was looking at me as if I’d just offered him practical advice on how to slit his wrists.

Time to change the subject. Continuing my inspection of his room, I noted the absence of books. He had only a few classics that he’d had to read at school, such as Voltaire’s Zadig and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. This surprised me: his reference to Amélie Nothomb during our first meeting had led me to imagine he was a book-lover. But that was a red herring. He explained to me that he’d never read Nothomb, but one of the girls in his class was obsessed with her. She aped the writer’s fashion sense, dressing in black and wearing large hats. To create a sort of complicity between us, I told him I knew Amélie quite well – a revelation that appeared to leave him cold. He must have noticed the disappointment on my face and realised I was trying desperately to forge some connection with him, because he blurted out: ‘Mbappé’s the one I’d like to meet. Do you know him?’ Regretfully I admitted that I had never met him. So my book was perhaps going to fail due to my lack of footballing friends. I had met Dominique Rocheteau a few years earlier, at a book fair in Saint-Étienne, and we’d talked about his experience filming with Maurice Pialat. But I doubted Jérémie would be interested in that. Time to change the subject again …

I started asking him questions about his daily life, his school, his friends. From his reactions, I had the feeling that he found me annoying. He wished he hadn’t let me into his room now, I could tell. He should have done what his sister had done and simply ignored me. He answered my questions out of politeness, but most of the time his responses were vague and confused. Sometimes he would stammer out a sort of onomatopoeia; had I been Claude Lévi-Strauss, I could have spent hours dissecting his words. But I wasn’t, and in the end I had to admit that I wasn’t getting anything from him at all. This character was a dead end.