By special dispensation, the drama club had always been allowed to use one wing of the most prestigious building. As I came to the side door, chattering students were coming down the steps. It was six o’clock; the sun was beginning to set and classes had just finished. I took the stairs that led to the little lecture hall that smelled of cedar and sandalwood. The room was empty. The walls were hung with framed photographs, the same ones that had been there for twenty-five years (Madeleine Renaud, Jean-Louis Barrault, Maria Casarès…), and posters of previous productions (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, L’Échange, Six Characters in Search of an Author…). The Saint-Exupéry drama club had always been elitist and I had never really felt comfortable here. According to its regulations, the club accepted only twenty students. I had never wanted to join, not even when my mother was running it with Zélie. To her credit, my mother had done her best to open the club up to more students and take a less rigid approach to the repertoire, but old habits die hard and no one really wanted this bastion of old-world elitism to become an open-mic event.

Suddenly, a door at the back of the auditorium opened and Zélie appeared on the stage.

“What are you doing hanging around here, Thomas?”

I leaped up onto the stage next to her.

“Your hospitality is truly heartwarming.”

She stared at me without blinking. “This isn’t your home anymore. Those days are over.”

“I never really felt at home anywhere, so…”

“Stop or you’ll have me in tears.”

Since I had only the vaguest idea of how to reel her in, I cast my first line at random.

“You’re still on the board of governors, aren’t you?”

“What has that got to do with you?” she said, packing her things into a leather satchel.

“Only that, if you are, you’ll know who is financing all this construction work. I assume that the governors were briefed and put it to a vote.”

She looked at me with renewed interest.

“The first stage of the work is being financed by a loan,” she said. “That much was voted on at a meeting of the governors.”

“And the rest?”

She shrugged as she closed her satchel.

“The rest will be voted on in due course, though I have to say, I have no idea how the management is planning to come up with the money.”

One point to me. On the spur of the moment, I asked an unrelated question. “Do you remember Jean-Christophe Graff?”

“Of course,” she said. “An excellent teacher. A fragile creature, but a decent man.”

Not everything Zélie said was bullshit. “Do you know why he took his own life?”

She put me firmly in my place. “Do you really think that there is a single, logical reason to explain why people commit suicide?”