“Maybe you can help me, Pauline. Back when I was here, there was a school paper called Courrier Sud.”

“There still is.”

“I’d like to consult some old issues.”

“I’ll get them for you. What year are you interested in?”

“Let’s say 1992 to ’93. And if you could bring me the yearbook too, that would be great.”

“Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“I’m looking for information about a former student, Vinca Rockwell.”

“Of course, the famous Vinca Rockwell. Everyone here has heard about her.”

“Is that because of Stéphane Pianelli’s book, the one Zélie is trying to ban?”

“It’s because of the spoiled rich girls who claim to be feminists because they’ve read the first three chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“The Heterodites…”

“They’re appropriating the memory of this girl and trying to turn her into some sort of symbolic figure she never was.”

Pauline Delatour tapped at her computer and copied out the reference numbers for the issues I had asked for on a Post-it.

“Take a seat. I’ll bring you the issues as soon as I find them.”

4.

I sat where I always used to sit, at the far end of the room in a little alcove next to the window that looked out onto a completely anachronistic courtyard. With its flagstones, its ivy-covered fountain, and a colonnade in pink limestone, it had always reminded me of a cloister. All that was missing were the Gregorian chants.

I placed the blue Eastpak backpack I’d retrieved from my parents’ basement on the desk and took out my pens and books as though I were about to write an essay. I felt content. Whenever I was surrounded with books or in an academic environment, I would feel a calmness flow through me, feel my worries physically ebb—it was as effective as Valium, but not as portable.

Suffused with the smell of wax and melted candles, this area of the library—pompously named the Literary Chamber—had retained its charm. I felt as though I were in a sanctuary. Old Lagarde et Michard grammar manuals were gathering dust on the shelves. On the wall behind me, a Vidal Lablache school map—hopelessly outdated even when I was a student—showed the world as it had been in the 1950s, with countries that had long since disappeared: the USSR, the GDR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia…

Like Proust with his madeleine, I felt memories flooding back. This was the desk where I had done my homework and my studying. This was where I had written my first short story. I remembered something my father had said: You live in this romantic, literary world, but real life is nothing like that. Real life is brutal…“All existence is a battle.” And my mother’s comment: You didn’t have any friends, Thomas. The only friends you had were your books.