The Valiant Little Tailor: A Novel 9780300268492

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The Valiant Little Tailor

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“Beguiling, charming, and giddy with digression, Chevillardʼs take on the Grimmsʼ classic fairy tale is a comic gem. Hilariously self-aware and proving the journey is always better than the destination, The Valiant Little Tailor is at once completely modern and at the same time a classic yarn in every sense.”—Mark Haber, author of Reinhardtʼs Garden “Hereʼs Chevillard at his cockeyed keenest, bedeviling the Brothers Grimm with a giddy vengeance. Jordan Stump once again proves a superb chaperone on this deliciously macabre, deliriously digressive, almost irresponsibly imaginative field trip into the bowels of narrative.” —Daniel Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels “As Chevillard reinvents, subverts, and digresses from the Brothers Grimm tale, his wit and wordplay leap into life in Jordan Stumpʼs breathtaking translation. A book not to be missed by anyone new to Chevillardʼs antics, or by his longtime, faithful readers.” —Alyson Waters, translator of Chevillardʼs Prehistoric Times “Chevillard takes the Grimmsʼ fairy tale and runs rings around it, torquing and twisting it into new half-shapes. Amusing, maddening, funny, and absurd, this is a new sort of metafiction, like Robert Coover on acid.”—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World “This novel, superbly translated by Jordan Stump, is vintage Chevillard. A fairy tale for our time, it is engagingly playful, telling a story we thought we knew, prompting us to think about how stories are told.” —Warren Motte, author of Mirror Gazing “Chevillard [is] one of the bright spots in recent French literature.” —Publishers Weekly “A major talent, a worthy descendant in the Beckett-Bernhard line.” —Darren Reidy, The Believer “Éric Chevillard is one of the few great experimental French writers still writing today.”—Erik Martiny, The London Magazine

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ÉRIC CHEVILLARD

The Valiant Little Tailor A NOVE L

Translated from the French by Jordan Stump

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The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange. Translation © 2022 by Jordan Stump. Originally published in French as Le vaillant petit tailleur © 2003 by Les Éditions de Minuit, 7, rue Bernard-Palissy, 75006 Paris. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Source Serif type by Motto Publishing Services, Austin, Texas. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021952951 ISBN 978-0-300-25319-1 (paperback : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The Valiant Little Tailor

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Preamble

Yes, this is that story, the celebrated story of the valiant little tailor recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 in their first anthology of utterly inept folktales, as told, mostly, by their pharmacist friend Wildʼs aged servant—a certain Marie, a childish babbling grandmother, as doddering a biddy as the Old World is in the New—but also by a few widows of leisure from the village of Kassel, Dorothea Viehmann and the Hassenpflug sisters, to name only those three hysterics, along with a number of other sources, variously complementary or contradictory. This is indeed that celebrated story, haphazardly built up by generations of windbags who only shut their mouths to take a drink, further reworked (a dash of treacle here, a cut with the kitchen shears there) by loving mothers for the ears of their sleepy-headed little girls and boys, whose dreams kept the story going in who knows what new directions, until the tale was caught in full flight and dressed up for the printed page by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm while their three other brothers were out taking the air, I imagine, whereupon it was subjected to the vagaries of various crude, inexact, often simpleminded adaptations, yes, no doubt a great story, but one that—to sum all this up— has from the start suffered from the absence of an author: itʼs not too late to give it one.

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Which will be me. My service record recommends me. Iʼd go so far as to say that it all but names me to the job. And I can only concur: Iʼve provided more than enough evidence of my abilities to think myself an ideal fit for that vacancy, and I donʼt need to be asked twice. But in truth I accept at some personal sacrifice. A thankless task if ever there was one: step by step, through all their artless iterations and tedious intersections, I will retrace the perfectly predictable twists and turns of a tale that I hope my reader will kindly refrain from comparing to the original creations I produce unmediated from my own mind. Because here Iʼm not inventing anything. Iʼve inherited an age-old daydream. Itʼs a heavy burden. It falls to me to shoulder the responsibility for a collective creation, and to put my name to it. The hour has come to dismiss my shadow collaborators. The popular imagination never runs dry, I would be the last to deny it. In fact, Iʼll gladly repeat it here. The popular imagination never runs dry. What do you expect from a fountain of glue? A few archetypal characters trapped in poses as grotesque as they are obedient to expectations relate to each other in entirely predictable ways, ways constrained by the limited number of combinations and exchanges that can occur in that thick, congealing paste. For instance, the ogre either eats the child or doesnʼt. If he does, he either swallows him in one gulp or sets some aside for the next day. The choices before him are soon exhausted. If he holds off in anticipation of lean times to come, then the ogre is making a foolish mistake, because once the lad and lass who spend these stories chasing after each other fi-

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nally come together they will never move again, except one inside the other, thereby perpetually keeping his boundless hunger sated. They married and had many children. His cullings of fresh meat will in fact constitute what the demographer and the hunter call with one voice a necessary check on the population (without which the exploding birthrate recorded at the end of these stories would inevitably lead to the kind of serious imbalance that forces nature to violate her most basic laws to feed the hordes of brats sheʼs suddenly forced to look after, for instance by serving those brats a lunch of hunter, demographer, or ogre, raw or cooked). No doubt there are those who would have preferred a brand-new book, as original as the ones that came before, I can certainly understand that, and it pains me to frustrate an anticipation that I know must have been trying and even, from certain points of view, agonizing (some of my readers will have died in the course of those long months, carried off by supposed malignant cancers or presumed traffic accidents, letʼs pretend to believe those ludicrous official versions, if thatʼs what the families want), but since in any case they have no choice but to read the story that follows, the competition offering no alternative worthy of consideration, they might find themselves taking a certain pleasure in the peregrinations of the little lad who is its hero. Heʼs a young man of considerable poise and tremendous get-up-and-go, two qualities that so rarely go together: see the very poised cow, solidly supported by her table-like legs, note her grave lack of get-up-and-go, and then while youʼre out in that field observe the butterfly, flitting this way and that, from flower to flower, such get-up-and-go, so rarely poised; and when by some extraordinary circumstance those two qualities are united—in felines, in frogs—they struggle against each

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other and rule by turns, never melding into one single force that could defy the whole world, consider the frog on his lily pad, lots of poise but no get-up-and-go, then suddenly something startles him, or someone, it can only be me, and he jumps, he springs, a sudden burst of energy, such get-upand-go, and into the water he plops like a stone, more belly flop than dive, low marks for poise, whereas the valiant little tailor has the one and the other, both poise and get-upand-go, just wait till you see him in action. This is indeed that celebrated story, just as weʼve so long known it. We read it back when we were children, illustrated by an artist who must have believed he or she had been placed on this earth to patch things up between green and purple, and who tried to do just that on page after page, but succeeded only in further inflaming their quarrel and magnifying their mutual disgust so grievously that they couldnʼt hold it in anymore, and continually vomited all over each other. We all know that story. Some of us, it must be said, have had more than our fill of it, we can stand no more. I dare hope that no one will ever again try to force it down our throats. Our childhood is behind us, with its quaint little whimsies. We want to live. I could just as well have chosen another, “The Bremen Town Musicians,” “The Singing, Springing Lark,” “The Devil and His Grandmother,” “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and ThreeEyes,” to cite but a few of the many tales brought to us by Grimm and Grimm, those tireless collectors meticulously affixing the quavering widowsʼ tales to paper as if to a mirror while their three brothers were out in the countryside decapitating thistles with their walking sticks, I imagine, or for that

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matter why not “Hans My Hedgehog,” the sad story of a rich peasant and his wife who had a herd as vast as their lands, lands so expansive that from the next fields over one could see the curve of the earth in them, but who, no telling if it was his fault or hers, remained childless, much to their chagrin—their lamentations could be heard at all four corners of their fields, and even if those wails were in fact only the bleating and bellowing of the beasts, they did indeed eloquently express the coupleʼs sadness in that raw, desperate register—particularly because the villagers mocked the coupleʼs misfortune without end, their infertility was the subject of a thousand cruel and humiliating jibes, and on that score we should be glad they had no offspring, who from morning to night would have had to endure their playmatesʼ taunts, their cruel repetition of the words and laughter theyʼd overheard behind closed doors. And so, ashamed, the peasant raised his fist to the heavens—those heavens, stretched as tight as they would go, close to bursting at the seams, just barely covered his vast holdings—and begged for a child, any child, but a child, ugly or stupid, but childlike, that alone was essential, the birth of a child, his son—even if it was a hedgehog, he added, strangely. His plea was heard, and soon his wife brought into this world a creature made like a hedgehog from waist to head but with the legs and the mind of a human being; not without pain did she deliver that child, and not without horror. She lay the hideous newborn on her bosom— two times white, two times soft—but soon gave up on nursing it and forever after hid her shredded breast away in a fold of her blouse. They named the child Hans-My-Hedgehog, calling a spade a spade, in hopes theyʼd soon be putting him in the ground. They laid him on a bed of straw, close by their fierce guard dog. They ardently hoped they would soon find

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him dead. He lived. He grew. One day his father brought him a set of bagpipes from town. That was the last straw. HansMy-Hedgehog had horseshoes put on the rooster he used as a steed and exiled himself deep in a distant forest, along with some donkeys and some pigs. He perched in a tree and stayed there for many years, blowing into his bagpipes as his free-range herd proliferated in the forest clearing. A king happened by, lost, far from his kingdom. Hans-My-Hedgehog agreed to tell him the way home on the condition that the king give him the first living creature he saw on his return. The king accepted, all the while telling himself he would do no such thing, for his soul was as black as his crown was not, and thanks to Hans-My-Hedgehogʼs very precise instructions he was soon back in his domain, happy to be reunited with the daughter who, before any other creature who lived on his lands, came running to meet him—“Father, father, youʼre home at last, what did you bring me?” Thirteen moons later, another lost king passed through Hans-My-Hedgehogʼs forest. Life is much fuller of such amusing coincidences than people think, you just have to keep your eyes open. But this king had a heart as pure as the waters of a sun-dappled spring where a fawn comes to drink, assuming the water has subsequently been boiled, and he agreed at once to Hans-MyHedgehogʼs conditions, which really were in no way excessive, must the reader be reminded that our hero, afflicted with a most uncommon deformity, had been living for years in a tree, his only companions a rooster that thought it was a horse, and some donkeys and some pigs? The good king was soon home again, happy to be reunited with the daughter who, before any other creature who lived on his lands, came running to meet him—“Father, father, at long last, how I missed you!” Then Hans-My-Hedgehog left his forest. He first

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went home to his parents, driving his now sizable herd before him. His reappearance brought a scowl to his fatherʼs face—“Son, we thought you were dead.” The animals were bled dry and cut into pieces; the assembled villagers wolfed down that meat, raw or roasted, and what was left over was not wasted, fat hams and donkey sausages hung from the crossbeams of the fireplaces for generations to come, and then Hans-My-Hedgehog, his steedʼs scrawny feet now reshod, leaving behind the dispersing barbecue smoke, set off for the first kingdom, planning to claim what he was owed. Alas, the wicked sovereign had ordered his guards to exterminate any incoming foreigner affecting the appearance of a half-human, half-hedgehog riding a rooster, thereby ruling out any chance of mistaken identity, which nevertheless did not prevent a zealous soldier from plunging his lance into the heart of a man-mule hybrid out for an innocent ride on his turtle, and then beheading with one blow of his ax a magpieman touring the country on the back of an otter, and then slaughtering a man-crab riding along on his sow as he softly sang into her ear, the end result being that soon no one dared enter the kingdom at all, and the innkeepersʼ guild was beginning to grumble. Finally Hans-My-Hedgehog appeared before the soldier, who tried to block his way. The rooster immediately took wing, entered the castle through a window, and deposited his rider in the throne room, where the king and his daughter were busy amusing themselves at the expense of a jester stricken with micromelia. Hans-MyHedgehog threatened to kill them both if the daughter refused to honor her fatherʼs promise, and so the king asked her to quickly gather her things and go along with the nice man. He presented the young couple with a six-horse carriage and a fortune in gold and jewels, then bade his daugh-

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ter farewell. A few leagues from the castle, Hans-My-Hedgehog tore off the princessʼs white gown and lacerated her virgin body with his sharp spines until she was nothing but bloody, mortified flesh from head to toe, whereupon he sent her back to her father in shame and in tears. Delighted at the funny trick heʼd played, that sly little fellow then spurred his rooster and was soon nothing more than a dot on the horizon, over which he was just about to disappear forever when the sentinel on the tower of the other castle, the good kingʼs, finally spotted him and announced his arrival. Everything was ready to welcome him when he appeared at the front gate. Happy to see his benefactor again, the king immediately introduced him to his daughter, who was as pure as spring water but didnʼt hide herself away under a mosscovered stone. She trembled at Hans-My-Hedgehogʼs appearance, but didnʼt let it trouble her. Heʼd saved her father, he had to be good. She made no fuss about marrying him, she only blushed a little, out of modesty. After the ball, however, as the newlyweds were about to retire to the bridal chamber, her fear got the better of her, she who had known only the limp embraces of her spiritual advisor, and for a moment she was terrified that the monsterʼs quills would flay her alive or impale her, she who had known only the stunted, short-lived penetrations of the dwarves charged with her entertainment. But Hans-My-Hedgehog smiled, visibly aroused by the situation, and told the king to post in the bedroom four guards who would snatch up his cloak of spines the moment he doffed it, then throw it on the fire, whereupon the spell cast upon him would be broken. And so it was done, and all at once the princess saw beside her in bed a handsome young man with a noble air, charming of face, a little dusky perhaps, but she summoned the castle doctor, who soon suc-

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ceeded in giving him a milky complexion, then drowned the sickening stench of that scavengerʼs skin in perfume, until at last only his mouth, for a few days more but at every opportunity, evoked the rotting flesh that his hedgehog stomach was now regretfully almost done digesting. This is no place to say how ardently the princess clutched him and held him, what games they played between the sheets, after all there are very small children supposed to be drifting off to the sound of this lullaby murmured by their grandmothers, whose wrinkles, alas, grow deeper with each passing day, and who will not fail to claim that itʼs simply our immoral ways rubbing them the wrong way. Now a king, Hans-MyHedgehog sent for his father, who did not recognize the hedgehog-child his wife had brought into the world, but choked back his shock and his dismay and proclaimed himself perfectly happy with this whole affair, as if a countship, twelve thousand acres of land, and a red-brick castle could ease the pain of a father who has lost the son he so tenderly loved in spite of his difference. The king and queen reproduced in turn, their children were born handsome and appealing, the only vague reminders of their origins being a certain appetite for dead mice, a tendency to cower at the slightest sound, and a habit of burrowing under the fallen leaves when winter was near, wrapped up in their carapace of pointed spines. Let us say nothing of the absurdity of the situation, its forced outlandishness, this portrait of a man as a young hedgehog is a sadly unimpressive effort, lame, and above all laughable: thereʼs a big difference between magical and farfetched. Yes, I really would do better to stick to my original plan. The Valiant Little Tailor will be the universally known title

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that was missing from my bibliography. Perhaps, I will answer all sneerers and snickerers, perhaps my name means nothing or no one to you, but if I say I am the author of The Valiant Little Tailor . . . and then I will hold up this book: that will shut their mouths, and if necessary wipe their noses. But please be so kind as to believe that such is not my primary motivation. I am already a god to ants, and it seems abundantly clear that I take no pride in that glory. Still, theyʼre all at my feet. But I must observe that, for lack of a foundational text, the valiant little tailor has never attained the iconic status of an Oedipus, a Don Juan, a Faust, or a handful of others who were nonetheless not nearly as suited for the position as he. It is the foundational text of that epic, here summoned to unfurl like an unending dream in the individual and collective imagination, that, modestly, suspending for many long months, perhaps years, the ongoing edification of my relentless oeuvre, I here set out to give the world.

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I

About ten minutes ago, I peeled a good-sized onion and didnʼt shed a tear. Though I should say I didnʼt laugh either. Neither that little disclosure nor the ensuing clarification have any connection to the story that begins here, but, having carelessly let that disclosure slip, I had to add the clarification at once to forestall any misunderstanding just when weʼre about to embark on our taleʼs opening scene. Perhaps today marks the end of my reputation as an unrelenting ironist who canʼt hold back the riotous laughter that comes to him in every circumstance of life and even in the face of death, laughing at the sobbing widow, that laugh redoubling before the orphanʼs despair, and if the deceased laid out on his back between four tall yellow candles bears the marks of the illness or accident that made him the man he is today laughing myself hoarse at his battered or sunken or comically bloated face, laughing in every circumstance and in every way at all humankind, whether dead or alive, as if I were already their distant descendent, smarter and sleeker, laughing uproariously at the limp plant that grows in a human belly and only later develops the bony frame that will support and articulate it, like a tree first producing a nim-

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bus of shimmering leaves and only later hanging them onto branches attached to a trunk rooted deep in the ground, the limp plant that forever preserves from those days when its body was swelling like dough, apt to adopt the most aberrant forms, a powerful predisposition to terror and its ugly grimaces but also to the perpetual torment of hesitation and doubt, those clumsy gestures, that vague stare, that vacant face, all the sinister ways of the man at the next urinal, laughing at all that as at everything else, perhaps as a way of loosening my tongue laughing at the flower, that pretentious beauty who mistakes my eye and my nostril for two buttonholes laughing at the fruit fallen lower than dirt while the vegetable boldly bolts but also laughing at the vegetable named broccoli rabe or chickpea whereas the cherry gets to be called cherry laughing at the animal kingdom in all its teeming diversity, from the elephant who murmurs “It wasnʼt me” to the ant who bellows “It was me” and nobody believes either one laughing at the fearsome venomous snake, its shoelace forever undone laughing at the fly thatʼs spent all day turning circles in front of the bathroom mirror, making the motor of my electric razor buzz, but ends up hairier this evening than this morning

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laughing at the mole, so nearsighted that it canʼt see the masterpieces hung on the wall of its gallery any better than if it was feeling its way through a dark, cramped tunnel laughing at the last surviving mountain gorilla, surrounded by caretakers like a pale dying princess, antibioticsaturated fruits mysteriously rolling its way from the nearby bushes every time it sniffles, and now, standing upright, pounding its fists on its mighty alpha-male chest laughing at the cheetah, so swift that its hindquarters can never keep up with it, its elastic flanks stretching so far that when it finally comes to a stop its distended body measures the full distance itʼs run, whereupon its hindquarters come flying and knock it unconscious laughing at the giraffe with that smug face just crying out to be smacked, thinking itself out of reach, and then in the greenery coming nose to nose with the cercopithecus and its nimble little hands, perfectly designed for the task laughing at the whale, all at sea as it lies beached on the sand laughing at things, too, because they are what they are, whereas a hammer, for instance, which can break a walnut faster than it can drive in a nail, is a better nutcracker than it is a hammer just as a sheet is a better handkerchief than a handkerchief, usable for nose-wiping purposes much longer than a

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handkerchief before it becomes that slimy, nostril-chapping rag, and therefore more deserving than the handkerchief not only of being called a handkerchief but of actually being the handkerchief, or at least of also being the handkerchief, even as it remains a bedsheet, a role itʼs performed so well from the beginning, unlike the handkerchief, your feet would get cold just as I see no difference between a drowned manʼs coffin and the object commonly called a bathtub just as I know full well that the black comb that smooths my hair will at the first opportunity slip from between my fingers on its suddenly limber legs and enter my head through my ear to weave its web around my brain just as, simple man that I am, I gaze on the twelve pieces of silverware surrounding my plate and canʼt imagine what that second, adorably rounded little spoon could possibly be used for if not to aid in the consumption, at the hors dʼoeuvre stage, of first one and then the other eye of the mistress of the house, immediately setting about that task, then waiting as good manners dictate to swallow my mouthful before crafting a compliment for her, a compliment worthy of her cuisine, all the while working my tongue to ease out the thin blue strand of an optic nerve stuck between my teeth laughing at all that, then, and interrupting my laughter only to catch my breath and start off again more uproariously, laughing without merriment, for no reason, at nothing, laughing endlessly with a laughter I canʼt hold back, made up of all my cries put together, and other cries as well,

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the kind you hear at gravesides, which reconstitute themselves in my mouth and then emerge in bursts, in salvos, and no one is more surprised than I am at the laughter that rushes over me like a gale, like a horde, like a train, suddenly hacking a way through me, like a baby too fat and too wide to be born, ripping me open, dislocating my jaw, and the first thing that comes out is a head, howling, crimson, faceless, and then, agonizingly, comes the body, deformed, bent double, a hunchback racked by tremors and twitches that leave me broken, breathless, exhausted, but if I didnʼt laugh just now, while I was peeling that onion, itʼs also because I can sometimes contain myself and put on a serious face, if circumstances warrant it. Never would I dream of laughing at the little tailor as he appears to us at last, sitting at his table by the window, wielding his long needle like a glinting sword, energetically plunging it again and again into the body of his limp foe, then taking it upon himself to progressively stitch up the wounds he inflicts on his victim, not sparing the thread, thus innocently encouraging himself in his work, as the sun turns its rays away from the spectacle of the world and slips them one by one into this little garret room, to light up this delightful tableau, and Iʼm there too: this is where it all happens. But whatʼs the hurry, why launch straight into the event that will set this story in motion? It would be so nice to linger here a while, sitting peacefully in the golden light of this summer morning. Why spoil the moment? You do realize, this is a juggernaut of a story we have ahead of us, mile-a-minute, one plot twist after another, and never a lull between them: once we get going, weʼre not going to have many chances to catch our breath. Donʼt you think our little

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hero is lively enough as he is? He sews like a dolphin, making bound after impeccable semicircular bound, he has no idea that his tranquillity is about to be disturbed by a shout, a shout that will change his life forever, even as we bitterly observe that for us, no, nothing new in sight, everythingʼs been said and done. My life would not immediately run off its rails if someone came along and shouted “Marmalade!” in my ear, except perhaps if a police sergeant had chosen that word to inform me, not sugar-coating it, with the goodhearted matter-of-factness so characteristic of our men in blue, that my entire family had been crushed to death. How, come to think of it, does one go about breaking that news? The right words would erase it as they reported it. I am often visited by this dark dream: a man is sitting at the head of a rectangular table, around which are seated some ten people, everyone who matters to him in this world, he suddenly realizes, his close family and his best friends are all there, he finds himself choking up, he tells them he loves them all, that he exists only through them and for them, and just then a massive U-shaped block of stone falls from the ceiling and crushes them, all those cherished loved ones, down to the last, as if they were nothing, as if they were insects, right before his eyes. “Marmalade! Maaaar-malade!” The little tailor hasnʼt heard her yet. Itʼs not too late to stop this thing. The peasant woman could stumble on the uneven cobblestones and send all her wares crashing to earth. Why shouldnʼt she decide to peddle her merchandise on this other street, perpendicular, much more frequented,

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I assure you, whose inhabitants are famed for their great love of jam? No kidding, my good woman, jam is the staple of their diet, they even give it to their horses. They butter their bread with it. Or suppose she collapsed under the weight of her burden? Because sheʼs not exactly a girl, is this peasant woman, and thatʼs a heavy basket sheʼs carrying—hasnʼt she had two bad bouts of chest pain just in the past few months? For goodnessʼ sake, Madame, what you need is rest. Rest, rest, rest. Given your condition, I have only one piece of advice for you: get some rest. Or what if she sold her entire inventory all at one go, all sixty jars, to a wealthy bourgeois who wanted to make of them a birthday present for his plump, insatiable wife? But no, the peasant woman is coming closer, her gait sluggish but inexorable, trudging down the street, punctuating each step with a cry of “Maaaar-malade!” Here she is under the little tailorʼs windows, the die is cast, so we really are going to have to choke this whole story down. And if my reader is dismayed at that prospect, I would ask that he be so good as to put himself in my shoes. “Marmalade! Delicious marmalade!” This time the little tailor hears, and he delights in what he hears, his ears are full of marmalade. He throws open his window, leans out into the street, and falls to his death. Beautiful story, eh? And such a sad ending! I wonʼt try to hide it, Iʼm rather proud of myself for seeing this slightly outlandish project through to the end. Now that I have a moment to look back over my work, itʼs clear to me that success was in no way assured. Because I had to stay as faithful as possible to the story such as itʼs come down to us,

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but without sticking too closely to the Brothers Grimmʼs version of the events, founded as it was on the accounts of the quavering old ladies, who as we have already said were in no way entirely reliable. In all honesty, I think I succeeded quite handily. But an autopsy of the corpse lying on the cobblestones in a pool of blood will quickly and incontestably show that in reality what weʼre seeing is the little tailorʼs reflection as he leans out his window and smiles down at that puddle of black water: once a year, the coalman gives his shop a good rinse, and it had to be today of all days. This first twist is a cruel setback for me. Iʼve known others. I had a plan to reform the world, things were well under way. And then . . . Why is it that when you slip on a bar of soap you never find yourself sitting in a field of sunlit poppies, and always on a bathroomʼs frigid tile floor? I was going to change all that. I wanted to rise up in revolt against precisely that sort of infuriating inevitability. Our joints are just so many kinks our bodies have taken on over time, preventing us from striking a thousand advantageous poses, from making a thousand decisive gestures. I aspired to remedy that. My project included a wealth of ideas never dreamed of before. It had nothing to do with magic, it was all about cleverness and ingenuity. The fairy with her wondrous wand loses the use of one arm: sheʼll never perform the drumroll that would herald the new age.

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I wanted to shorten ladders and thereby lessen the horrors of vertigo. Or, thoughtfully, to create a convex soup bowl—shaped on my lathe and baked in my kiln—for those who canʼt stand the stuff. What else? I wanted to sow the desert with tall trees, generous purveyors of shade and fresh fruit, and then, among the verdant dunes, henceforth called hills, to release eels, wriggling carp, trout, and salmon, along with their chosen element, to make the place a little cheerier. What else? Well, observing the fatigue occasioned by the tedious reiteration of the same moves by elderly fan-bearing marchionesses, I planned to fill the air of hot summer days with a light, cool breeze that would do the work for them, gently agitating that delicate triangle of cardboard and lace. But the reform I was proudest of concerned human childhood, which under my reign would become optional, its duration left up to the free choice of every man and woman: those for whom it promised to be like one of those long winter nights in the woods when the stars pair off and lurk beneath the boughs, silent as wolves, would be done with it forever after theyʼd endured just a few moments; those who would have spent the rest of their lives pining for summer days in that same forest with the uncle who knew the names of all the birds and insects and sometimes offered helpful information to the brachydactylic tree creeper (youʼll find the woodworm youʼre looking for under that piece of bark), they would emerge from their radiant childhood only to clutch one hand over their heart and drop dead. Things were well under way: nothing left but to work out the logistics. And then, as so often happens, just when success is assured, just when itʼs all in the bag, you ease up on

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your efforts, you let things go, you forget to tie up the loose ends, and it all comes undone. “Come up, come up, woman, bring me your wares, youʼll feel ever so much lighter on your feet!” “Ach! My day is done!” thinks the peasant woman, placing her foot on the first step of the stairway that leads—not without twists and turns and perhaps even the occasional abrupt about-face—to the little tailorʼs abode, on the very top floor. Now, I wanted to know, for the sake of this story (and here, for example, is what sets its true author apart from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: he throws himself into the task for all heʼs worth, and he doesnʼt bring his brother along to help) if staircases go up or down, to finally solve that timehonored mystery, to settle it once and for all, and here is my indisputable, definitive conclusion. They go down. The proof? I tried to slide up the banister. Canʼt be done. And so we must picture that slightly plump woman, her hair already gray, weighed down by her basket, struggling up the cramped stairway as if against the current of a rushing mountain stream. How sad to think that this portly old woman is forced to earn her daily bread by hauling that heavy burden through the darkness of a tortuous stairway. The obese octogenarian pauses after every third step, sweating, panting, staggering under the weight of her load, then wipes her face on her sleeve before resuming the ascent amid the stench of the open latrines conveniently located on every floor. 22

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Look at her, nearing the end of her time on this earth, hoisting the dead weight of her elephantine form between the moldering walls of the steep staircase whose wooden steps creak and shift and sometimes give way, pushing and pulling her baskets of jam as best she can, readjusting the shawl that holds the squirming newborn twins left in her care for the day by the farm managerʼs frivolous wife so she could spend the day enjoying the townʼs entertainments, one elbow vainly endeavoring to hold back the lumps of coal sheʼs picked up as she walked and tucked into her underthings, “Come on, lady, letʼs hurry it up,” cries the little tailor from his doorway, here she is, here she is, sheʼs coming, sheʼs climbing the last ten steps, which are so wobbly that sheʼd do better to step over them, while the walls slowly but surely close in, will she make it, she should make it, sheʼs making it, sheʼs made it, she finally emerges from that dark shaft, exhausted, disheveled, much thinner, and bows down before the little tailor. “What do I want with your maaaarmalade?! All I want is some peace and quiet so I can sew.” And he slams the door. Beautiful story, eh? And such a sad ending! But it is in fact the saddest endings that make the most beautiful stories, the ones you really remember. Now that itʼs all wrapped up, Iʼm not afraid to admit I felt some apprehension about taking on this project. It was an audacious endeavor, I had to summon all my courage. I foresaw a great many difficulties, not least making my voice heard through the static of the few vague, distorted memories my readers would believe they had of that story, which I would have to make them forget by imposing my own version, this one destined to permanently take the place, as has already been said, of the Brothers Grimmʼs lifeless transcription. Was I up 23

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to the challenge? Now that a little time has gone by, looking back on the fruit of my labors, I believe I can say without immodesty that I did not fall short. The story has acquired a new density, a new depth, and itʼs lost none of its liveliness, perhaps itʼs even livelier this way, if not every bit as blithe as its clever hero, who lets out a hearty laugh as he opens his door again and invites us in. How can we refuse? Eager to finalize what promises to be a most lucrative sale, the old lady hurtles into the room. Letʼs step aside for the thundering herd of buffaloes. Whatʼs the matter, doesnʼt she trust us? Does she take us for a troupe of rival jam sellers? When in turn we enter the little room—me and my readers, me first, if you donʼt mind, I have to show you the way—sheʼs already unpacked all her jars, and sheʼs droning out her spiel. Her marmalade is to marmalade what fine gold is to tinplate. One taste of her marmalade, and youʼll spit out cream and ambrosia forever after. They say His Holiness the pope has a cross-shaped marble basin filled with it for his bath every morning, and the Prince of the Orient has ordered his personal surgeon to make him a second mouth next to the first so he can down even more of it. Plums, quinces, even apricots have been seen to drop off their branches and into her steaming cauldron just to be part of it. Bees have been known to close up shop after tasting her marmalade, exiling themselves to lands without flowers, where out of sheer spite and mortification they seek their nectar from stones. Applied daily, her marmalade cures lepers so perfectly 24

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that people come from miles around to lick their loins and bellies. Her marmalade changes the bleakest insomnia into a delight and a nocturnal feast. If your wife has left you, that marmalade will bring her running back, but maybe you wonʼt be so happy to have her around anymore. That marmalade is a purée of candied sunshine, a regret for the angels, eight yards of delight for the intestine. Ah! God knew what He was doing when He created this world. Her marmalade fills the heart as full as the stomach. Her marmalade is homemade from fruit picked in her garden. “Well, in that case, moneyʼs no object, my good woman!” And already sheʼs emptying her basket, stacking the jars on the table. “Iʼll have one dollop on this slice of bread, and you can keep the rest. The devil take the expense!” Thus ejected, the dejected crone tumbles down the stairs, her basket clasped to her breast and her head between her knees, picking up speed, rolling into the street and onward down the hill, to this day sheʼs still barreling down one of the earthʼs curves, slicing through tangled wildernesses, hewing ready-made roads that are never longer than the shortest distance between two points, leaving the engineers of the Department of Roads and Highways speechless and livid with fury, convinced as they were that theyʼd set themselves up with work for twelve years to come as, in the azure light of their drafting studios, they designed those same roads with a welter of curves and meanders such that only rivers and garter snakes could have traveled them without spraining something. All for naught. 25

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Back in his cramped room, the little tailor has vowed not to touch his jam sandwich until heʼs finished his doublet, an admirable example of composure and self-control, but the care he devotes to the garmentʼs finishing touches leaves something to be desired: it will forever be a doublet with one sleeve missing, and no room for a head to pass through the collar. Only streams and vipers could put it on without spraining something. With great, sweeping strokes of his needle, the little tailor sews oil to fire, stone to glass, acid to skin, silence to brass bands, boar to hounds, wind to sand: I am not going to pay for that doublet. Have you noticed all the flies on the walls, on the ceiling, on the windowpanes, itʼs appalling, and there are even more on the wing, with no apparent goal but to fill up as much space as they can with their tedious hum—and then they land. Everything is a table to them. And wherever they land, it seems, they find a succulent feast, bounteously served up just for them. Sometimes youʼre surprised to find you have so many good things to eat on your cheek or your forehead. You thought youʼd given your face a good washing. But then comes the fly, sitting down at the table, rolling up its sleeves, picking up the silverware, you wouldnʼt be shocked to see it tucking a napkin into its collar. Then comes the fly, sucking and aspirating and pumping as if determined to leave not one iota of us for the necrophagous vermin you sometimes see wriggling when you kneel at a graveside to reflect or pull weeds. I like animals, Iʼm well known for that, Iʼm going to be a veterinarian when I grow up. One day, I asked my mother if animals also have hearts that beat like ours:

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“Of course they do. Besides, weʼre animals too, you know.” “Weʼre animals?” “We certainly are!” “Which one?” I like animals, even the soft-shelled crab and the warty toad shaped by a drunkard from his diseased liver, with his own trembling hands, even the hyena who wishes I was dead and the cobra who would gladly lend him his glasses for the purpose, even the dung beetle, the shark, and the earwig, but I hate flies, do you hear me, do you hear them, itʼs intolerable, if I were to learn that every last fly had abruptly and permanently disappeared from the face of this earth Iʼd be in heaven. “But youʼd have to learn to live in a world without flies,” people will say to me. I could get used to that in less than three seconds, as if it were all Iʼd ever known. “But it would be the end of an era,” people will say to me. Yes, well, the Terror didnʼt last forever either. I donʼt believe Iʼd need them for reading, for eating, for sleeping. If flies were to vanish, they would take sorrow away with them. The death of a fly means one more dot of blue in the sky, one more dab of cool green in the meadow, a fresh coat of whitewash on walls, and a garden beyond. I hate flies, their flight is an aberration, a mockery of flight (and in any case, why fly when you can walk on the ceiling?), a ponderous, thrumming flight that nonetheless follows the absurd trajectories of a popped balloon. They tirelessly travel the world on the brows of pharmaceutical representatives to bring all the latest diseases to the most remote backwaters.

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It has been predicted that flies will be the only animal to accompany humankind on our intersidereal getaway, like it or not, theyʼll be our traveling companions, alongside us they will colonize any habitable planet. I hate flies, and the little tailor isnʼt crazy about them either: they dare to land on his bread-and-jam sandwich. They come from every direction, clouds of them, darkness in flight, hatching spontaneously in midair, drawn by the smell. The ones that were disintegrating behind the furniture come back to life and emerge through the top of the death spiral that gripped them in midflight and screwed them inexorably into the floorboards, resuscitated and famished as if hunger went right on growing in an empty stomach whether its owner be living or dead, as if even in the afterlife hunger obeyed no laws and no authority but its own, demanding to be sated no matter what. The flies have smelled that luscious jam, which first awakens and then entices their senses, nearly as captivating as rotting flesh. Like misery on the world, they descend onto the sandwich: those two dots are the little tailorʼs eyes as he tilts his diminutive head to assure himself from every angle that heʼs seeing what heʼs seeing, and seeing just that he flies into a violent rage. His fury is first expressed in words—“Hey, get the hell off my sandwich, you filthy flies!”—but the latter are not so vain as to be put off by insults. I myself once called one of them a lousy piece of shit—“Your motherʼs a corpse and your fatherʼs an asshole!” I said—and that fly came and landed just at the corner of my mouth, like a kiss. Next the little tailor tries threatening them—“Get out of

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here, leave that sandwich alone, Iʼm not going to say it again, Iʼll count to three, go away or my big brother will show up and then you better watch out, you wonʼt be safe anywhere, the ethics of the discipline require me to inform you that Iʼm a student of judo, shove off and donʼt come back, next time Iʼll cut off one of your fingers or shoot you in the knee”— but to no avail, threats donʼt work on the flies either, itʼs like theyʼre not even listening. They gather in ever-greater numbers on the sandwich. Infuriated, the little tailor picks up a scrap of cloth from his basket and raises his arm high above the buzzing swarm. As a mere teenager, tallish for his age, shy, dreamy, a collector of beans, insects, and leaves, really quite a surprising boy, Jacques Lanternier slit his twin sister Elviraʼs throat with his pocketknife. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial twenty years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression from ear to ear. Because it was exactly that.” No one suspected him at the time, and the next year Jacques Lanternier pushed his little brother Thibaud into a murky pond. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial nineteen years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression sinking feeling. Because it was exactly that.” The investigation foundered similarly, and the next year Jacques Lanternier cracked open his motherʼs skull with a hefty rock. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial eighteen years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression get blood from a stone. Because it was exactly that.” The death was ruled an accident, and the next year Jacques Lanternier imprisoned his paternal grandfather in his cellar for two months without a bite to eat. “And the day

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before he died,” he revealed at his trial seventeen years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression skeleton in the closet. Because it was exactly that.” That case was shelved, and the next year Jacques Lanternier tied his maternal grandmother to her bed and tortured her to death. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial sixteen years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression twisting the knife in the wound. Because it was exactly that.” The crime was pinned on a prowler, and the next year Jacques Lanternier butchered his maternal grandfather with a meat cleaver. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial fifteen years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression hacked off. Because it was exactly that.” An innocent man was arrested, tried, and convicted, and the next year Jacques Lanternier pushed his paternal grandmother off a bridge and onto a highway. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial fourteen years later, “I understood whatʼs meant by the expression fall to pieces. Because it was exactly that.” A hypothesis of suicide was suggested and confirmed, and the next year Jacques Lanternier tossed his father into a basin filled with sulfuric acid. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial thirteen years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression soaked to the bone. Because it was exactly that.” The victimʼs body was never found, and the following year Jacques Lanternier used an oyster fork to blind his first girlfriend. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial twelve years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression pop-eyed. Because it was exactly that.”

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He was granted police protection for several months, and the following year Jacques Lanternier used a scythe to gut his second girlfriend. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial eleven years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression to know someone inside and out. Because it was exactly that.” This fresh misfortune elicited widespread sympathy, and the next year Jacques Lanternier sank a paper cutter into the heart of his third girlfriend (quite the lady-killer, he was). “And that day,” he revealed at his trial ten years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression to get someoneʼs juices flowing. Because it was exactly that.” The murder was pinned on her cuckolded husband, and the next year Jacques Lanternier decapitated the concierge of his apartment building with a sword. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial nine years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression a weight off his shoulders. Because it was exactly that.” The police troubled him no further, and the next year Jacques Lanternier murdered a homeless man, bisecting his legs with an ax. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial eight years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression brought to his knees. Because it was exactly that.” The law left him in peace, and the next year Jacques Lanternier set fire to a Polish prostitute heʼd brought to his apartment. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial seven years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression up in smoke. Because it was exactly that.” The victimʼs vaporization was never reported, and the next year Jacques Lanternier stabbed an obese cleric who had granted him hospitality. “And that day,” he revealed at

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his trial six years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression like a hot knife through butter. Because it was exactly that.” The inquest reached no conclusion, and the next year Jacques Lanternier crushed a newborn baby beneath a cinder block. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial five years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression get mushy. Because it was exactly that.” The childʼs mother hanged herself in her cell, and the next year Jacques Lanternier eviscerated a little girl with a fireplace poker. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial four years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression gutless wonder. Because it was exactly that.” The village idiot confessed, and the next year Jacques Lanternier poured rat poison, arsenic, and curare into his mistressʼs soup. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial three years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression toxic masculinity. Because it was exactly that.” The death was ascribed to natural causes, and the next year Jacques Lanternier caused his wife a fatal shock by showing her the collection of newspaper articles and crime scene photographs recording his monstrous misdeeds. “And that day,” he revealed at his trial two years later, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression tremble like a leaf. Because it was exactly that.” The viselike grip of the police force was quickly closing on him, but he managed to slip free, and the next year Jacques Lanternier used a scalpel to strip the skin off his sleeping son. “And that day,” he confessed at his trial last year, “I finally understood whatʼs meant by the expression howl like a flayed cat. Because it was exactly that.”

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We could, without loss or harm, have done perfectly well without this tedious account of a sordid serial-killer existence, since the little tailor, such as we now see him, eyebrow furrowed, nostril dilated, his rag lashing the buzzing swarm, explains by that act just as well as and even better than Jacques Lanternier whatʼs meant by the expression dropping like flies. Because itʼs exactly that. A hecatomb. He sees not twenty flies crushed on his sandwich or scattered in pieces over the table, he sees not a hundred, not a thousand, no, his shining eyes see no fewer than seven! A veritable bloodbath. The little tailor savors the moment. He puffs out his chest. He hears the hurrahs of the crowd, their thunderous applause. He takes a bow before his mirror. “My lad,” he says to himself, blushing a little at the compliment, “youʼre a gallant one! In all my life, Iʼve never witnessed such panache, such assurance. What heroism! I can only marvel at the deftness of your hand. Know that I intend to set off forthwith to travel the highways and byways of this world singing your praises everywhere I go. You look after the shop. If anyone asks for me, tell them Iʼll never be back.” And the little tailor cuts himself a broad belt from the velvet of the abandoned doublet, then swiftly embroiders it with these letters of fire: SEVEN WITH ONE BLOW! And in all the workrooms of the neighborhood, bewildered tailors see their bobbins of gold thread mysteriously unspooling to the end: it takes a lot to dazzle the world with mere words. And so the little tailor doubles his stitches, triples them. In that brief, categorical formula he encloses the story of the events and the moral of that story. Thereʼs nothing more to say.

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There are poets who, with every tiny exploit they or their lord and master performs, immediately loosen their tongue, let it roll full length from their mouth like a red carpet beneath the feet of the hero and his horsemen, and lengthy verses ensue, lining up one after another to make interminable epics: the saga of the flies could have become one of the most long-winded works in all Western literature. But those four words are far better. In them we can read the heroʼs quick resolution, we can see his avenging arm rising high, we can hear the crack of his pitiless whip: he alone is left standing on the field of battle. In this case, concision equals precision. I choose my words just as carefully. My ambition would be to triumph similarly over every adversity—the flies on my sandwich or on my wound—by countering it with a single stinging phrase. Iʼm laid out on the ground, the enemy is lashing me, trampling me, but I gather my last reserves of strength and spit my phrase in his face. It encloses him. He struggles in vain against the unyielding net of my phrase. Look at that clown, knocked flat, grimacing, in the glass cage of my phrase. That will be his coffin. Now he can scarcely move: my phrase is clasping him tight. My phrase is sitting on his stomach, now slapping him, now twisting his nose, now ripping off an ear or out a tooth. My phrase does all this with no effort, it doesnʼt foam at the mouth, doesnʼt wildly wave its arms; on the contrary, this is all a game for my phrase. My enemy is vanquished by my phrase. If he tries to speak or cry out, itʼs my phrase he finds coming from his mouth, turn-

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ing back against him, drowning him in shame. My customtailored phrase clads him from head to toe. My phrase is his hat and shoes. Thatʼs the only skin he has left. My phrase embalms my adversary, now cold and pale (my phrase having drunk all his blood). My phrase is a handtailored shroud, no matter the enemyʼs size: I have fat rolls of shimmering mauve silk in my workroom. I fear no man. Equally valiant, the little tailor ties the belt around his stomach and prepares to invade the big, wide world to show off his courage. Heʼs leaving now, and thatʼs that. He walks out of that workroom, too cramped for the hero heʼs suddenly become. His four limbs require as much space as four dogs. Letʼs take along a few provisions for the road. Having ingested and regurgitated the horrid fly-and-marmalade sandwich, the little tailor opens his larder—Here, hams! Here, sausages! Here, pâtés en croûte! Come on, into the bag with you!—and finds only an old piece of cheese, which he pockets. Then he goes out. He doesnʼt bother to lock the door behind him: he wonʼt be coming back. For rent, garret room, 130 sq ft, table, straw mattress, jug, basin. A stunted, thorny bush grows between two paving stones outside the front door. Caught in the brambles, an exhausted sparrow seems resigned to dying there. Its wispy gray feathers rise and fall in time with its breathing, theyʼre planted in the birdʼs very lungs, swelling along with them and then set-

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tling back over the helpless birdʼs delicate carcass. It makes no attempt to disentangle itself from the thorns, if I were a cat Iʼd seize the moment. But no: rather, itʼs the little tailor who gently extricates the bird, then deposits it in his pocket along with the cheese, under his handkerchief, nice and cozy. Now, which way to set out? Right? Left? What does it matter, when the goal is to discover the big, wide world?

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II

Either way, a mountain looms in the distance. The valiant little tailor strides through the city. The houses stand aside as he passes, fearfully pressing themselves into their neighbors, making two serried ranks on either side of his inflexible path, some of the facades begin to crack under the tension. His reputation has preceded him. The world knows who itʼs dealing with. The revolution on the march comes out of his bootmakerʼs shop. The valiant little tailorʼs heels clack against the paving stones like exploding caps. An old woman opens her window and empties a basin of wastewater into the street. But the sun is warm. The valiant little tailor will soon be dry. The city is behind him now. Heʼs never ventured so far in his life. When he turns around, he can scarcely make out the three colors of the cat playing with a clay marble on the Rue du Poids de lʼHuile.* * The Rue du Poids de lʼHuile is a street in Toulouse, a city that Chevillard called home for several years. (Translatorʼs note, as all subsequent notes will be.)

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Personally, Iʼm not that fond of traveling. Homesickness awaits you on both ends. The horizon? Hey, I just came back from the horizon. Wonʼt catch me going there again. The valiant little tailor makes for the mountain. The tiny creatures of the fields flee as he approaches: mice, shrews, voles scurry into the tall grass or under the leaves, a terrified mole goes so far as to sink straight into the earth. Again, his reputation is one step ahead of him. The world knows who itʼs dealing with. If you find one daisy youʼve found them all. The little tailor clasps it between his teeth. Now the pastureland. The last time I saw a sheep, if I remember correctly, it too was standing in a field and grazing. A tick rubs against a tree trunk to scrape off a bovine parasite. A family of cèpes is scattered around the trunk of a big oak tree, looking for mushrooms, and finding plenty. At every moment, the valiant little tailor lets out an astonished “Oh,” as if with a straw and a bowl of soapy water. Say, I know that woman whoʼs coming out of the pharmacy: itʼs Jeanne, she works with Méline. Donʼt expect me to describe her with the distinctive accent of the land the val-

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iant little tailor is now journeying through, or to take up residence there: I can see everything there is to see from my window. Antlers locked, two battling stags buck and twist in a desperate struggle to free themselves, as all the while a fallow deer in the audience whispers suggestively in the doeʼs ear, making her laugh. A cloud in the sky affects the form of a huge bird, another that of a horseʼs head, yet another the shape of an airplane— an anachronism all the more flagrant in that no one would ever notice it, alas, for the observer, half amused, half horrified, will have spotted another cloud just a little below it, this one inflated like a parachute, and it does indeed seem that the flying machine is doomed, leaving behind a disturbing trail of smoke. The valiant little tailor tirelessly marches on, never slowing his gait. The mountain is not so high and mighty now. It timidly comes forward. The trees shiver in the wind, some of them bow down. The world knows who itʼs dealing with. Hey, a coypu! A rodent native to South America, the coypu can grow to a length of two feet, but this one is a bit smaller, with orange canine teeth. Its diet consists primarily of freshwater plants. Its interior fur neatly imitates a beaverʼs: a private little luxury the coypu enjoys in secret, not making a display of it.

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A rigorous winter follows the rainy fall, and is in turn followed by a sunny spring, and then a blazing summer, now nearing to its end, here come the first rains of autumn. I found a perfect definition for fog, and then I lost sight of it. The valiant little tailor feels hunger mounting inside him. He pauses beneath an apple tree and reaches out to pick one. But which to choose? He canʼt make up his mind. Every one of these apples looks just right. How does the worm do it? The next day, thirst catches him unawares. He kneels on the bank of a limpid stream. But at what precise moment are you supposed to plunge your cupped hands into that flowing water? Which mouthful to drink, and why that one as opposed to another? How many days has the valiant little tailor been walking now, how many months? His city is already just a dot on the horizon. On the Rue du Poids de lʼHuile, the three-colored cat is ferreting around in the corners. Probably looking for that marble, thinks the little tailor. Itʼs over there, under the rag-and-bone manʼs cart. He believes heʼs lost in a dense forest. But only one tree grows on this plain. He walks circles around it endlessly. Exhaustion falls over his shoulders. The little tailor lays it down on a bed of grasses and tiptoes away. But when he finally undoes his belt for the night, everything goes still and silent on earth and in the heavens. Whatʼs

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that tiny trembling glow up there? The seven stars of the Big Dipper: theyʼve read it. “All night long Iʼm out like a light but my eyes are wide open: who am I?” “The valiant little tailor?” “No!” “The author?” “No! The moon!” Then day breaks, dispelling the dreams of the night, the little tailor wakes up in his garret. Strange dream: heʼd bought some marmalade from a peddler, a horde of flies landed on his sandwich, he killed seven of them with one blow of his rag, and then he set off to travel the big, wide world, his head swelling with pride. The end. Now, thereʼs an elegant and original dénouement. Iʼm not unhappy with it, if I say so myself. Be well. May fortune favor you. This is where we part ways. “May I return the invitation, and ask you to dinner at my place one day soon?” The invitation is addressed to a spider, and spoken in a meek little voice by another spider, caught in its web. Off we go again. The valiant little tailor only dreamed that he was dreaming, as did I, and all the while impassive reality was warming its dull, flat stones in the sunshine. Bending down to pick up a lucky horseshoe from the grass, the little tailor finds a four-leaf clover. So it works.

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A partridge takes off, with a great flapping of wings: weʼre back in the days of the first inhabited flights, rockets will come much later. The mountain grows higher beneath the valiant little tailorʼs feet, merrily lifts him up toward the heavens. How long ago was it that he began this arduous ascent and didnʼt even know it? Snow has big feet, the little tailor canʼt help stepping on them, but he weighs next to nothing, and on reaching the summit he continues on for some time, into the deep blue sky, thereʼs one exploit the Brothers Grimm kept quiet, caring only for their characterʼs ruses and tricks, denying him all the miraculous or magical powers they generously bestowed on the heroes of other stories, you have to wonder why they should be treated so differently while before our very eyes the little tailor climbs right into the sky just by kicking his legs and wriggling his shoulders in an attempt to force the golden eagle to let him go, which it does in the end, dropping him into a bush that breaks his fall. I refuse to believe that the utterly ridiculous maroon smoking cap worn by the older Grimm in Elisabeth JerichauBaumannʼs double portrait, which shows him alongside his inevitable brother while their siblings are out lying in the grass chewing on sorrel leaves, I imagine, could possibly have passed even then for anything other than an utterly ridiculous cap. I really would be extremely surprised to learn that such was the style of the time, that every German of a certain rank owned the same sort of cap, and displayed it in public, giving rise not to jeers and hilarity but to envy, and

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to the frustration of any poor soul who had no such cap to his name. Because really, that fuzzy cap is nothing short of grotesque. Has anything so ugly ever been seen in this world? Add a few little bells and your jester is protected from inclement weather. How to imagine a woman willingly offering her lips to any gentleman sporting such a cap? I donʼt dwell on this detail to be cruel. Iʼm only trying to show that the Brothers Grimmʼs often disconcerting lack of sensitivity extended to their choice of apparel, and in all likelihood to their love lives. And in any case, who could possibly pretend not to notice that ludicrous felt hat! You canʼt take your eyes off it. If you ever find yourself in Berlin, run quick as you can to the Staatliche Museum. Try to find an occasion to make at least one trip to that city sometime in your life, if you like to laugh, but if you like to laugh youʼll find yourself going back again and again. From his lofty bush, the valiant little tailor beholds a big, wide world laid out before him. Heʼs surprised, itʼs understandable, this is the first time heʼs seen it. But itʼs not so much its immensity that astounds him—yes, itʼs big, so big that the little tailor even wonders if it doesnʼt go on just a bit beyond the lands his eye surveys—what astounds him more than that is the discovery of how tiny the things and beings that fill it are in reality, which is to say when theyʼre not isolated from the others, when theyʼre all together sharing the same space, which is objectively how it is. But the little tailor has only ever seen things and beings from close up. This is the first time heʼs had some distance. In reality, then, as he now discovers, that ant running

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along the back of his hand would make no more than a single mouthful of the sheep that was out grazing a while ago and no doubt still is, but which, finally returned to the world, disappears into it so completely that it can be found only with the aid of the index. “Maybe this is all an effect of my heroism,” the little tailor thinks. “Iʼm not intimidated anymore, I see things in their true proportions. Am I not holding this mountain down under my heel? You really are a valiant lad,” he adds, speaking to himself, staring at his shoes, blushing a little. Now the ant is sick. He was wrong to feed it mutton. Its stomach wants no part of meat. Reality escapes you yet again, little tailor. Ants feed only on leaves. They eat only trees. Suddenly, a violent tremor nearly casts the valiant little tailor to the ground. The earth has trembled beneath his feet. It knows who itʼs dealing with. Which we ourselves would very much like to know, who weʼre dealing with I mean, forgive me for belaboring the point, but just one minute more, if you would: what head could possibly agree to be sheltered by such a cap, what brain is so oddly conformed as to want to think at the bottom of that hole? What manner of man came up with the idea for that very likely custom-made cap, what manner of man chose that style, that fabric, that color, what manner of man tried the thing on before his mirror and said he was pleased and blew kisses at himself and smiled at the milliner, what manner of man could bring himself to part with a quarter of a sou to take it home with him? Is it wise to suggest that our children, with their fragile, malleable minds, read tales written by such a man? Indeed, all evidence sug-

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gests that he wrote his tales WITH THAT CAP ON HIS HEAD, and for all we know he couldnʼt write them any other way than WITH THAT CAP ON HIS HEAD. Elisabeth JerichauBaumannʼs painting does show him with his pen in his hand. Heʼs writing, but not looking at his keyboard: his eyes are fixed on the painterʼs lens. In the foreground, on the right, in profile, with the longish graying locks of a gone-to-seed romantic, the slightly clenched-looking Wilhelm seems to be having a harder time holding the pose. Very conventional in style, the painting is on the whole fairly ugly. As it happens, I managed to filch it from the Staatliche Museum, taking advantage of the guardʼs postprandial siesta. I cut the canvas away from the frame with a razor blade, then rolled it up under my jacket and discreetly went on my way. But now I donʼt want it in my living room anymore. After two days I was sick of it, sick and tired. The two brothers are captured in a chiaroscuro so perfectly copied from Rembrandt that the Dutch master himself would have been fooled, would have thought it the very image of the wine sauce he simmered his kidneys in, once it had gone cold and congealed in the pan. I discreetly brought the canvas back and replaced it in its frame. No one seemed to have noticed its absence, but museum attendance soared while it was in my hands, much to the curatorʼs surprise, he couldnʼt explain that sudden rush of enthusiasm. Which didnʼt last: now that the two brothersʼ portrait is back, the place is once again as silent as the grave. As it turns out, the bush that our valiant little tailor has landed in is actually the tangled mop of hair on a giantʼs head.

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That giant thinks himself something of a philosopher, which in his case means pensively nodding before the spectacle of the world. Thrown off balance by the first nod, as weʼve seen, the little tailor struggles to his feet by clasping the branches (of course, the reader knows those branches are the giantʼs hairs, but the poor tailor doesnʼt, and the scene is narrated from his point of view in the mode of a psychological realism that I believe takes precedence over scientific objectivity, the truth being a very relative thing, measured more in terms of sensation in an emergency or a catastrophe, as is the case here). But the second nod, this one accompanied by a deep sigh (of course, the reader knows itʼs not the wind that blows the roofs off the houses and the horns off the cows, as the obtuse villagers of the valley stupidly imagine), throws him headlong into the void. One day or another, one way or another, the valiant little tailorʼs edifying adventures had to come to an end. He walked a long way, he learned many things, and maybe he was right to leave his workshop even if it meant he was marching off to his death, because a hundred-year lifetime in his little garret room would never have been as full or as rich in discoveries and experiences as this brief foray into the big, wide world: such, no doubt, is the lesson weʼre invited to consider as we close the book, and if we can understand it, absorb it, then we will also know what we should do with whatʼs left of our days, everyone will agree that weʼve changed, our gaze will burn with a newfound fire, our every move will unfold in a more expansive space, one finally to our measure, our now rarer words will have the weight of inarguable orders, animals will no longer fear us and we will have nothing

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more to fear from them, weʼll live in sunlit villas with flights of terraces overlooking the sea, our sallow skin will regain its glow, our dull hair its luster, our teeth will shine white, but the giantʼs hand reaches out and catches the little man, who laughs as he tumbles into that cushioned palm. Back to the drawing board. Keeping his cool, then, the valiant little tailor leaps to the ground, lands on his feet, and looks at the giant with that impudent, cocksure air of his, which might well end up becoming annoying. There arenʼt many giants left today, but in the age in which this tale is mired their numbers were still growing, at a rather inexplicable rate, actually, since no author has ever attested to the existence of giantesses—perhaps they lived hidden away deep in dark caverns?—or alluded to the presence of little baby giants. But even if we suppose that such fantastical creatures did not employ the laborious method of reproduction widespread among humans, they canʼt have sprung up out of nowhere, all at once, engendered by the encounter of a scent and a puff of wind. That mystery will have to be solved if today we are to restore the mountaindwelling-giant population, as has already been done with bears and wolves—“And why not build a little chalet for Panurge while youʼre at it?” ask the outraged shepherds.* “Why not dig holes all over the pastures and put pointed sticks at the bottom and cover them over with matted grass? Why not mine the sheep tracks? Why not shear our animals * See Rabelaisʼs Quart livre, in which Pantagruelʼs friend Panurge protests the cost of a sheep by tossing it into the sea, which causes all the merchantʼs other sheep to follow and drown, along with the merchant himself.

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and cut them up to sell their legs? If things go on this way, the extermination of our flocks will come to seem like a perfectly normal thing, weʼll see our sheep flayed and displayed in butchersʼ shops, and the brains of our lambs will end up on your dinner tables!” “Greetings, friend! Howʼd you like to come with me into the big, wide world instead of staying here stupidly impaled on your mountain? Come seek your fortune! Pick up your staff and letʼs be off !” The giant eyes the half-pint and gives a scornful shrug. A mountain goat that had been clambering up his spine finally carries off the leap that every mountain goat dreams of: on touching the ground again, his hooves raise a little cloud of red dust—Mars! “Louse! Pitiful runt!” the giant answers the valiant little tailor, if we are to believe the firsthand accounts collected in Kassel by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm while their three other brothers were out in the yard playing croquet, I imagine. What fun to picture the widows at the debriefing, stiff and still despite the quaver that shakes them and musses their hair, trying to swell their voices to imitate a fearsome giant and managing to emit only ultrasounds from their narrow anatomical caverns, thus recounting these absurdities in the piercing tone they usually employ for rebuking their servants, my poor girl youʼre nothing but a ninny, Josef we know youʼve been filching our pear liqueur, you can sleep in the hunting lodge tonight, but by noon tomorrow you must be gone! “Just you read this, quintuple dwarf, and learn who youʼre talking to!” retorts our pitiful runt, chest puffed out, one finger pointing to the golden letters on his belt.

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A great silence follows these words. Nature warily backs away. Nothing moves. A studded club descends from the heavens onto the valiant little tailor, who quietly bursts like an egg. “Dunno how to read,” says the giant. Yes, to be sure, illiteracy is a terrible handicap, but was it really necessary to end this short tale by hammering that truism home? Thatʼs the weak spot of this genre. The reader obediently makes his way through a story thatʼs not too dull, he canʼt wait to go back to his reading whenever some secondary activity—most commonly of a professional or sentimental nature—takes him away from it, he returns to it with pleasure, he loses himself in it, and then comes the ending, and suddenly a heavy-handed bromide flattens the fragile metaphorical construction in which heʼd found such enchantment. Letʼs build a pyramid of eight hundred men on the village square. The pyramid collapses, everyone picks themselves up, the women sing, they patiently seek a more balanced and stable structure, they call on the architectʼs expertise, the carpenterʼs experience, hands grasp ankles, shoulders share the load. Itʼs holding, itʼs solid. Finally a child as light as an elf climbs to the top, stepping on their heads. Moral: we all need each other. Well, if it was simply for the sake of that little lesson that Iʼve been letting my back get pummeled and scratched by big filthy feet, my nose inhaling halitosis as foul as any jackalʼs, my ear almost ripped off by that little chimp scamper-

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ing up the pyramid, if in the end the only point of all this is to teach me that lesson, then Iʼd just as soon pull out. Theyʼll simply have to make do without me. Iʼm letting the whole thing drop here and now. And going back to my story, see above, youʼll remember the situation: the valiant little tailor, peacocking like a musketeer, invites the giant to read the words on his belt. And not only does the giant know how to read, he is in fact an avid bookworm, well versed in literatures both ancient and modern, and while he never stops returning to the classics, he feels a genuine curiosity for the avant-garde. Itʼs very simple: heʼs read everything. If you want to get rid of a giant, just give him a book. Because whatʼs true of this one is true of them all, and thatʼs why you so rarely meet giants: theyʼre all reading, hunched over books whose dimensions are too small for them but which can nevertheless absorb them completely, they literally disappear. Let me take this opportunity to remind you that verisimilitude is the aim of a liar. When giants emerge from their reading, thatʼs what we call earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, eclipses, their big heads hide the sun, and theyʼre the first to regret it, since they canʼt read in the dark. Seven with one blow! Astonished, the giant bends down for a closer look at the little freak. The authority of the printed word never fails to amaze me. The feeble and the timid seem to gain a new force when they find their way into print. Their garbled thoughts ac-

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quire a deceptive clarity and assurance, just as an invertebrate immediately turns straight and true when it slithers into cement. But the garble remains all the same, all the more dangerous for being thus arrayed: their awkward writing is seen as a bold formal experiment, the poet slumped in his own vomit has simply allowed himself a bit of license, as is traditionally his right, and every grotesque jumble of ineptitudes and turgidities passes for an original style. But if the printed word inspires such respect, what then of the embroidered word? The embroidered word leaves the reader blind and deaf. The embroidered word cannot be questioned. A revealed truth, the embroidered word is beyond all dispute. Not even the printed word can compete with the embroidered word. Had the Gospels been embroidered, there would never have been a Reformation, heresy would have been unknown, and skepticism too. Suppose that on this page I print the following sentence: Tangerine sellers are vile monsters who think nothing of gouging out orangesʼ eyes to procure their product. You wonʼt believe me—it might briefly give you pause as you read it, but on reflection you wonʼt believe me. As it happens, itʼs perfectly true, I have irrefutable evidence, itʼs all on film, Iʼll turn it over to the authorities at the appropriate time. Youʼre still not convinced, and Iʼm not surprised: I was expecting you to be dubious, I was hoping for it, I need it for my demonstration, because now suppose that rather than print it I embroidered that very same sentence on my vest: Tangerine sellers are vile monsters who think nothing of gouging out orangesʼ eyes to procure their product. This time you would believe me. You would believe me.

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I can hear your cries of shock and horror even now. So hear me too. The verb embroider has taken on a pejorative sense in the literary realm, which is of course not the sense Iʼm thinking of when I speak of the authority of the embroidered word. Itʼs nothing to do with droning on and on, wildly rambling in every direction from the starting point of a few straightforward facts, drawing unlikely consequences, nor is it a matter of embellishing or decorating a little-known reality with flourishes, birds, and butterflies, and even less, contrarily, of inventing ugly details, malicious intentions, losing oneself in pointless deductions, because that is indeed what is suggested, most notably in the literary realm, by the word embroider: a fantastical elaboration, an exaggeration, an extrapolation, the outlandish amplification of an imagination bent on immediately seeing the best or the worst. But we need only read the words embroidered on the little tailorʼs belt to see how utterly that notion gets it wrong. No interpretation mania here, no exaggeration—on the contrary, the simple truth, the stark reality, captured in four words, sixteen letters: Seven with one blow! But whatʼs this? Why is the giant suddenly trembling? Hereʼs why: it is in fact the giant whoʼs embroidering, in the pejorative sense of the word as Iʼve just defined it. Itʼs him, itʼs the giant whose thoughts are racing and rambling, and his imagination is showing him scenes of a most terrifying sort: the valiant little tailorʼs lance perforating seven bellies at once, his sword severing seven heads, his crossbow skewering seven hearts with one shot, blowing away seven castles with one puff, obtaining the capitulation of seven kings

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with one glance, annihilating seven flies with one blow of his rag, that last exploit especially unimaginable for giants, whose fat fingers cannot dislodge the dipterans that land at the corners of their eyes to lay their eggs, which produces a tickle so unbearable that the giants plunge their heads into the ocean for relief, and then you hear talk of cyclones and tidal waves, or else they pummel themselves with their fists to crush those foul eggs, inevitably causing a certain amount of collateral damage, whence their lumpy faces, their hideous, monstrous mugs. The giant is ready to believe anything. Because itʼs embroidered. The little tailor could be a habitual liar, a blowhard like so many would-be heroes who boast of their desperate flight through the gorse, transformed by their telling into a triumphant assault, a conquest, and though greater in number their adversaries succeeded only in giving them these few little scratches with the tips of their swords, while they were being run through with the pike . . . The giant believes the little tailor, but he has to think of his reputation as a mindless brute. His way is to break menʼs heads two at a time, like walnuts in his hand. His way is to swallow the horse and its rider whole. So he feels a little ashamed to be trembling before this minuscule representative of the human race, who could surely leap into his ear and after a three-day slog reach his brain, causing a cyst, or perhaps slip under his eyelid, then behind the eyeball, and there wriggle and writhe, wreaking irreparable damage. Still, in single combat the giant would surely have the advantage: he would for example have only to extend one finger to crush his foe, unless he preferred to drown him in a puddle of spit.

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Yes, but all it says is Seven with one blow! and nowhere is it embroidered that the seven in question are not seven presumptuous giants. So best to tread carefully. Best to get an idea of this jackanapesʼs strength before smashing him to bits. Wasting no time, the giant picks up a stone and squeezes it so tightly in his fist that water trickles between his fingers, no doubt a piece of permeable limestone impregnated with the previous dayʼs rains. “So basically a sponge,” the valiant little tailor scoffs. “Let me try,” he adds, deftly replacing the shard of quartz heʼs picked up with his pocketed piece of cheese, which he kneads and presses until blood drips onto his jacket sleeve. “Oh God,” he murmurs, dropping a wad of crushed feathers and flesh onto the grass, “the bird . . .” And that would be the end of the story, even if the giant, seeing blood ooze from what he takes for a stone, admits heʼs been beaten in this particular challenge: itʼs hard to imagine how the little tailor could possibly pull off the next one. Because the humiliated colossus now picks up another stone and throws it heavenward with such force that it caroms off three stars before it begins to drop, eventually— by which I mean tomorrow, mind you—falling beyond the horizon. “Didnʼt stay up long, that star of yours,” the little tailor scoffs. “Let me try,” he adds, deftly replacing the pebble heʼs picked up with the pocketed sparrow, now rested, warmed, restored, only too happy to be free, which takes flight, leav-

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ing a creamy wake behind it, until it completely vanishes from sight. “Whereas my comet will never touch the ground again,” the little tailor concludes with an insufferable smile. “Youʼre a pretty good thrower,” the mortified giant concedes, “but youʼre still a little runt. Iʼll bet your puny arms canʼt lift anything more than their empty hands, and even then, only with one helping the other. Follow me and weʼll see what they can carry.” “Youʼre going to ask me to pick up rocks again? Watch out, because before you know it Iʼll tip your mountain onto its point like a top!” But the giant has led the little tailor into the forest, to a felled oak, an enormous tree, all your furniture put together, broken cleanly off at the base, so thick that it must be three or four centuries old, so thick that twelve men couldnʼt encircle it with clasped hands unless they were replaced by twelve orangutans with long, elastic arms. The monkey is the only family weʼve got, thank goodness heʼs so good at hugging, at clasping, at brotherly embraces. “You claim youʼre so strong, I suppose you wonʼt mind helping me get this tree out of the forest.” “What tree? All I see is a piece of straw! Let me at least take the branches and leaves, thatʼs the heaviest part by far. You can hold the trunk.” And so the giant hoists the tree onto his shoulder, while the clever little tailor straddles a branch behind him. And then he begins to joke, to chitchat, to hum. He whistles the tunes of his trade, “Three Tailors Went A-riding,” “The

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Draperʼs Wife,” “Whoops, Iʼve Botched My Hem,” “One Buttonhole, Two Buttonholes, Hey,” “The Needle and the Spool,” “Put a Patch on It, Boy,” “Poor Tailor,” “Donʼt Sit on My Needles, Suzon,” “Black Thread, White Thread,” as if making light of the giantʼs toils, as if his own load weighed nothing at all. “Can we put it down for minute?” the giant asks every now and then, his voice growing ever more strained. “Put what down? Come on, letʼs keep going!” And then he breaks into “The Thimbleʼs Lament.” “Can we put it down?” “What for? Letʼs keep going!” And then he breaks into “Thereʼs Nothing So Fine as an Otter-Fur Collar.” “How about now?” “Way too soon, come on, keep it up!” And then he breaks into “My Velvet and Your Flannel.” “I canʼt go any farther . . . Iʼm going to drop it!” And as the giant sinks to his knees and lets the tree roll off his shoulder, the little tailor nimbly leaps to earth and takes the leader branch in both hands, as if heʼd just set down his burden. “You disappoint me, friend! Lot of good it does you to be built like a brick tower!” What is the giant thinking at that moment? Nothing at all. His brutish mind has never conceived a single idea. Sometimes a naïve little notion takes shape, but it could just as well have been born in his stomach, itʼs always about his appetites. But the repeated humiliations inflicted on him by the valiant little tailor at least excite his imagination

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enough to come up with ever-new methods for putting him to the test. Here is a cherry tree on their path, its thousand apoplecticsʼ heads hanging from the branches by their last remaining hair, the almost black blood already coming to the surface, as if pulsating beneath the fine membrane of their taut, glistening skin, by all appearances more tempting to the carnivoreʼs tooth than to the sparrowʼs beak. The best fruit is always the highest up. The giant effortlessly bends down the treetop and hands it to the little tailor, who is manifestly too weak to keep the cherry tree from springing back, like a bow whose string suddenly snaps. Such that our little braggart finds himself abruptly projected heavenward, to such an altitude that weʼre going to have to get by without a hero for a while, what to do, what to do, if you donʼt mind Iʼll use his absence to discuss a matter that seems to me of the highest importance: To narrate this scene, Iʼve followed the Brothers Grimmʼs account, which was itself, need I repeat, based on the quavering recital that took place in Kassel. But the story as told contains at least two incongruities (or blunders) that only disingenuousness (or blind indulgence) would allow us to ascribe to the fanciful and even whimsical nature of the story when in fact they betray the most basic ignorance of the science of botany. It is, for instance, not whimsical but quite simply ridiculous to speak of the top of a cherry tree, which would be to confuse it with a larch or a poplar, because the foliage of the tree in question does not taper but spreads, youʼd have to be born in Hanau to claim the contrary. Thereʼs no more top on a cherry tree than there is a miter on a beadle.

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A quick upward glance: our little tailor is still valiantly spinning in the endless expanses of space. So to continue. Second aberration: a cherry tree doesnʼt bend, it breaks. Thatʼs just how it is, thatʼs the rule. Itʼs as inflexible as can be. The giantʼs hand should have snapped it in two (and that would have been the end of the story). The convict hanged high from one of its branches far more often dies from his skullʼs collision with a rock when the branch inevitably gives way. And once the cherry tree dies in turn, its fragile wood would actually make excellent glass, glass of the finest quality, if not for its infuriating opacity, which might at least make it suitable for certain interesting applications. For instance, we would then have window and shutter in one single piece. Projected through the air by that spring that is thus in reality less elastic than an arthriticʼs cane, the valiant little tailor canʼt have got far, hurry, letʼs catch him in our arms—ouch! And then we set him down on his feet and disappear without awaiting the thanks that will never come anyway. We reward ourselves for our trouble by thinking of the elegance of our altruistic gesture, the moral benefit we draw from it, the boost it gives our self-esteem and our social standing, such that if the little squirt were to begin expressing his gratitude weʼd pummel him with our knees and elbows to shut him up, a peewee like that must have fragile ribs. “Whatʼs this?” the giant cries in astonishment. “You canʼt hold back that little twig?” “Youʼre joking, I assume. Didnʼt you hear the hunters firing their rifles in the brush behind you? I quickly sought cover by leaping over the tree, and Iʼd advise you to do the same!” 58

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And to lend credence to his words the little tailor digs into his pocket for the paper bag heʼd stuffed into it along with the cheese and the bird on the way out of his workshop. Yes, I forgot to mention that, but so did the Brothers Grimm, and in their case rather than simply come out with it they doubled down, adding a second omission to the first, leaving the crumpled bag in the little tailorʼs pocket straight through to the end of the story, when in reality he now takes it out, as I say, blows it up, then pops it with a smart smack of his little hand. POW! But the giant too weighs six tons, and when was the last time you saw an elephant pull off a high jump like that? He falls heavily onto the boughs, and according to the Brothers Grimm stays caught in the branches, and according to me crashes thunderously through them, one by one. Oh! what a pitiful sight! And with a pathetic smile the giant invites the valiant little tailor to follow him to his cave for the night. “Well, since youʼre asking . . .” Thereʼs nothing so fine as an otter-fur collar Astrid, Iʼm drunk on your scent Iʼll make you one, Astrid, tra la la la loller If you kiss me then Iʼll be content Stitch here, sew there Love is in the air

Thus the giant and the little tailor make their merry way. Thereʼs nothing so fine as an otter-fur collar Hanna, letʼs lie in the hay Iʼll make you one, Hanna, tra la la la loller 59

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If your hand you do not snatch away Stitch here, sew there Love is in the air

As they pass by, the wary dormouse stands still as can be in front of its hole, the fox changes color, the coelacanth congratulates itself on living far undersea, in the remotest depths of the ocean. Thereʼs nothing so fine as an otter-fur collar Hildegarde, donʼt you be shy Iʼll make you one, Hildegarde, la la la loller If your lips you will part by and by Stitch here, sew there Love is in the air

His eye downcast, never slowing his gait, the giant drags the little tailor through the tall, flowering grass. Thereʼs nothing so fine as an otter-fur collar Come closer, Rebecca, letʼs snuggle Iʼll make you one, Becca, tra la la la loller So long as you donʼt try to struggle Stitch here, sew there Love is in the air

They climb an ever-steeper path that snakes through a mass of piled boulders. Thereʼs nothing so fine as an otter-fur collar Olga, get on your hands and knees Iʼll make you one, Olga, tra la la la loller But when I enter you, donʼt cry out, please 60

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Stitch here, sew there Love is in the air

“This is it,” says the giant. A grim lair is that cavern, where other giants squat in a circle around the fire devouring whole-sheep brochettes and draining wine casks that they then carelessly toss over their shoulders to shatter against the stones. They wipe their grease-smeared lips on their sleeves and let out hearty laughs that echo under the vault of the cavern. Bones and carcasses scatter the floor, like in a bearʼs den. And indeed, a thick stench of blood and wild beast hangs in the air like a fog. The flames cast menacing shadows on the walls, except for a few of them, which can only do funny little rabbits. “Say! This is bigger than my place!” our hero exclaims. The giant leads him down a winding passageway to the communal bedroom, where already a few giants lie snoring— down below, in the valley, thereʼs talk of a storm on the way, rumbling thunder—and points him toward an empty bed. “Here, lie down and sleep as long as you like.” Oh, come now, did you get a look at that bed? How could anyone hope to find sweet repose in such a vast bed? It might be way off on the other side, or down at the other end, and so might elude your search until morning. No sooner has his host turned around than the little tailor grabs a blanket and goes off to curl up in an isolated corner of the cave, heʼll be much more comfortable there. Some of us are like that, more at home in a tight spot. But beneath his welcoming manner, the giant is still stewing in his resentment and brooding over the humiliations this day has brought. 61

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The clock (which doesnʼt exist) chimes midnight. Armed with a stout wooden beam, the giant creeps into the room, on tiptoe, the ground just barely trembles beneath his feet— down in the valley not everyone feels the tremor, and those it awakens wonʼt always be believed in the morning. The brute stands perfectly still, holds his breath. “It most certainly did, Madame, I assure you, the ground shook, and then the wind died down all at once.” The giant raises the beam over his head with both hands and brings it crashing down on the bed like a rag on a swarm of flies, so violently that it splinters into seven pieces. And that would be the end of the story. But the next day, as the giants are out in the forest doing their dark, fearsome chores, who do they see coming straight toward them, nonchalant and bold as you please, with a merry refrain on his lips? Justifiably terrified, fearing for their lives, the giants scurry away, some of them preferring to leap into the bottomless abysses before them, others trying to make themselves very small, so small that theyʼre still living among us today, in the valley, indistinguishable from the other villagers, buying their clothes off the rack as if they were born to it. You have to look at their feet, which are still long, the feet of panic and flight, and their eyes, wide with fright, permanently unlidded—thatʼs the one way you can recognize them.

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III

At the price of certain sacrifices, such as the pleasure of a strawberry cake for six, a man bought this book. He didnʼt give his son his much longed-for day at the dolphinarium, and at the wineshop he opted for a second-rate bottle to celebrate his partnerʼs birthday: he wanted to buy this book. His family is a touch cold toward him, but he doesnʼt care, look at him, ensconced in his armchair, comfortably, deeply, albeit with his feet on the coffee table, holding this book in his hands. Breathless with astonishment. And his astonishment is on the verge of turning into rage at any moment. That really was a very appetizing strawberry cake, with a rich, creamy frosting. And how long has he been promising the kid he would take him to see the dolphins on Saturday? And my wife, Iʼve never treated her this way before. I love her, weʼre going to grow old together, and here I am putting that serene happiness at risk, for what? For a book whose very author—him more than anyone— canʼt seem to wait to be done with it! Constantly balking and caviling, itʼs like heʼs unhappy with his chosen profession, ground down by his existence, wishing he were somewhere else, doing something else. Or at least writing something else.

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Whereas we readers are here for one reason alone, and thatʼs to read this book, The Valiant Little Tailor, like it says on the cover, a book we trustingly picked out from the dizzying multitude of other books, remembering the Brothers Grimmʼs celebrated tale. There were even a few of us—their teeth now clenched in fury—who sincerely believed from the title that they were buying the Brothers Grimmʼs story just as they knew it, just as mama—again that word, spoken in sorrow: mama—just as she read it to them at night but perhaps in a new translation to justify this republication: imagine their disappointment. Which the present lines certainly arenʼt doing anything to assuage, even if they cynically seem to take the readerʼs side. It was a three-layer strawberry cake, with bright-red fruit. And so now the frustrated child has tearily locked himself in his room and my wife is packing her bags. No one was forcing the author to take on this task if he didnʼt feel like it. Why should he take his artistic torments out on us? Maybe his life is an endless succession of failures and false starts, broken dreams, thwarted hopes, bitter disillusionments, daily tragedies, but he could at least put off his writing until things improve a little, he might at least take advantage of the occasional sunny spell, show just a little bit of reserve instead of forever forcing his incurable, babbling gloominess on us—as if we didnʼt have to deal with our own share of humiliations and sorrows! All weʼre asking is that he do his job. Thatʼs what weʼve paid for. He has manifestly signed up to tell us the story of the valiant little tailor, and itʼs time he got on with it. Gentle reader, letʼs all just stay in our lanes, shall we? I know whatʼs expected of me. I donʼt believe Iʼm doing too

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bad a job, for a man trained in a very different sort of work. Iʼm telling you this story, just as you ask. Iʼm giving it an author. Iʼm even inventing a reader, though, Iʼll grant you, on that score there may be some grounds for complaint, thatʼs not my finest work. Iʼm not particularly pleased with myself. I could just as well have picked a pensive young woman stretched out on her bed: with one finger she sweeps back the lock of black hair thatʼs forever falling over her eyes, tucks it behind her delicate ear, and curls up on her side, purring as if from a tender caress as she reads these pages. She was right there waiting for me, I can clearly picture her now, I can see her, nothing but her, and indeed every manʼs head turns when she walks by, but she pays no mind, her thoughts are wholly devoted to the book lying on her bedside table, she canʼt wait to get home. Her heels clack over the gray paving stones lined up as neatly as the letters on a keyboard, sparks shoot from my fingertips, in the gathering darkness I write my finest sentences just for her. Sheʼs had only one liaison before me, with a mirror delivery man. It didnʼt end well. Today her life is beginning anew. My reader picks up her pace. Iʼm feeling more chipper myself. I sense my love for my work coming back. Itʼs not really so horrible. Sheʼs coming closer. I recognize her, blue or brown eyes, blond or brown hair, yes, thatʼs her. How right she was to leave her tiresome husband at the first opportunity—he didnʼt forget her birthday, the bastard, so she had to have a fit about the wine—to come and join me in this hotel room! Do not disturb. We barricade the door with the dresser. We rip out the phone lines. I know she cares as little as I do about the val-

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iant little tailor and his tedious bluster. We only need him to hold the candle.* We undress in that gentle light. Her long, slender finger slides between my pages as if over my cheek. She at least understands what Iʼm after. She avidly follows the puppetʼs every move because my hand is inside it. That adroit, supple hand runs over her body. Plucks flowers for her in the meadows we stroll through. Cups limpid water for her in its palm. Makes a fist to defend her and strike down any interloper (the dejected husband slumps unconscious in his armchair). With its index finger, it points out a few stars, a flutter of butterflies, gilded insects. And now, via the middle and ring fingers, itʼs gliding down the mountainʼs other slope. See the beginning of the preceding chapter, where you will find a fairly faithful account of that journey. But take care to skip over the discussion of the mountainous horizon as well as everything having to do with the Rue du Poids de lʼHuile and the little tailorʼs hometown, then shuffle all the remaining images like playing cards, since only the variety of the combinations and the unpredictability of their appearances saves us from the wearying monotony of landscapes and objects. Then slip the following pictures randomly into the deck, the better to shake things up: A ribbon binding water to fire. The little tailor considers the rainbow a true professional.

* To hold the candle (tenir la chandelle) is, in the French expression, to be a third wheel.

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The cow, the rabbit, and the sheep eat the dishʼs garnish of clover, alfalfa, wild thyme, chicory, chervil, and cress. All they leave for us is the meat. Mint leaves are chewed with the feet. Oh, to think that these beautiful woods will be cleared away tomorrow to make room for dreary apartment blocks, industrial zones, and commercial complexes besieged by boredom, sighs the valiant little tailor. Snow is blue, like the wing of a crow. We never know if itʼs a viper or a garter snake slipping by between our feet. Just in case, we welcome it as warmly as a cobra. This evening the valiant little tailor bivouacks at the foot of a hundred-year-old oak tree. “101, as of three days ago, Monsieur,” says the oak. The valiant little tailor never turns up his nose at lowhanging fruit, except when heʼs nibbling at it. A wild boar charges. “Itʼs what I do,” he says. Just you try singing with the river without drowning in it. The crocodileʼs jaw splits its tail. Now, donʼt go thinking the authorʼs losing his way or the little tailorʼs drifting off course. In the presumed time of this

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story heʼs bound to end up in the courtyard of a royal palace sooner or later. Never before had our hero seen such a majestic castle . . . alas, weʼll hear no more, heʼs closed his eyes, heʼs sprawled out on a grassy lawn, exhausted by his long walk, heʼs already asleep. Letʼs have a look at him, since from where we stand thereʼs nothing else to see. What age might he be? Not much more than seventeen, by the look of him, but his slight build and boyish features might be deceiving us. Letʼs not forget that he lives with his parents and rents a workroom where he practices a trade that requires a long apprenticeship, so I believe weʼd be closer to the mark if we added ten years to his age, then tacked on another three. But by age thirty he would logically have left his garret behind and opened a shop on the street, so we must assume that some reversal of fortune forced him back up to the top floor. You canʼt go bankrupt in a week, which leads us to reconsider the age we ascribed to our little tailor. Letʼs add another ten years. But by age forty wouldnʼt he have a family around him, a wife, children? What can have happened, that everyone he ever loved was cruelly taken from him, one by one? So many sorrows canʼt have befallen him at the same time. When misery sets its sights on you, it settles in for the long haul: letʼs put on another ten years. But at age fifty, would he still have that doll-like face, those pretty pink cheeks, seriously? Not at age fifty, no, but at sixty, why not? Have you never met one of those youthful old people, full cheeked, unwrinkled, aglow from plenty of good food and fresh air? Nothing like idleness to perk a person up. Although our hero isnʼt that plump. Age has melted away his fat, I see no other explanation: letʼs say another ten years.

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Now weʼre not the only ones bent over the unconscious septuagenarian. Others come running from every corner of the courtyard. They form a circle around him. With alarm in their eyes, they read the words Seven with one blow! on the valiant geezerʼs belt as he lies stretched out on his back, his hands clasped behind his neck. He doesnʼt seem so tough, his regular breathing gently lifting his breast, the daisy we saw him pick quivering at the corner of his lips. But the words work their powerful magic. Everyone is deeply impressed, soldiers, merchants, old bags, everyone but an undaunted fly thatʼs just landed on his forehead. “Seven with one blow! What could this swashbuckler be doing here?” For years the kingdom has known peace, but who can believe that will last? The courtiers hurry to inform the king. “A mighty warrior has come to us, sire, we must keep him here at all costs. If those dogs in Walburg, those rats in Würz, those cockroaches in Wasau, those hyenas in Wogen, those swine in Wartz ever declare war, heʼll fight beside us.” The king consents, secretly nursing his old dream of conquest, of wiping out at long last those nightingales in Wurft, of enslaving those kittens in Wantzing, of humiliating those lambs in Wuelzen, of exterminating those ducklings in Wilbrau . . . He savors that delicious fantasy for a few moments more, then orders his ambassador to give the prestigious visitor a reception with full honors, and to offer him command of the army. The wing-footed messenger doesnʼt have to be asked twice; he immediately transports himself to the side of the valiant little tailor—taking a shortcut, jumping through windows, walking on our heads—and finds him still as sound asleep as ever, whereupon he molts into a statue of patience.

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Personally, Iʼd say no. No question about it. I would definitely turn down any offer to take command of the army. And that certainty can in fact easily be put to the test. Just ask me. “Would you like to take command of the army?” No! You heard it, the answer came back like a shot. Not a momentʼs hesitation. I was in fact expecting that refusal, I had a sense it was coming, in all honesty I donʼt think I would have run the risk of hearing myself answer yes. But what made me so sure? Just listen. Open your ears wide. Iʼm going to tell you about my military service. “Waiter! Check!” Why are you making that face? My martial exploits are nothing to sneeze at, you know: blood has been shed by my hand. A mouth falls open in astonishment. Glances are exchanged. Murmurs are heard. I see that Iʼve piqued your curiosity. “Blood has been shed, you say?” It has indeed. Just listen. This all goes back to the days of compulsory military service, my little man. I was called up to learn soldierly discipline along with the others. The medical board refused to take note of my pantomimed schizophrenia. For three days Iʼd sat silent, prostrate, scarcely eating. I put down nonsensical answers on the logic and general knowledge tests. I made a great show of dragging one leg. To the doctor who was examining me, I declared myself as good as blind, as good as deaf.

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And was consequently pronounced fit for service. In the barracks, shorn along with all the others summoned to a seat in front of a huge wall mirror, I had my first taste of the horrors and atrocities of war: so I too was capable of that look, that grimly remembered look, the look of an implacable brute, bony, eyes like blue steel. The lout I had in front of me would go on to bomb schools, deport populaces, burn villages, rape women, torture prisoners, Iʼd seen his ugly face before, that was him, no doubt about it, for more than half a century heʼd been sowing desolation and ruin everywhere he went, so that was me, possibly, all it took was a pair of electric shears to bring about the metamorphosis—would I be named overseer of a concentration camp, or appointed to some clean-up operation in a desolate land of sand and shattered stone? Yes, no doubt about it, I had the mug of a guy who wouldnʼt balk for a minute at such a mission. I eyed myself with repulsion. Hadnʼt that murderer just hacked up the tender chicken I was not five minutes before? He was capable of anything. And they were planning to teach him to use a machine gun. They wanted to arm that heartless monster! His open parachute would veil the sky of an entire country. He would be the hideous spider with its web draped over a terrified anthill. I could scarcely bear to meet his gaze in that mirror. He was still wearing the blue coveralls issued me on my arrival, and I made up my mind to let this dangerous game go no further. The time had come to neutralize that Nazi before it was too late. I refused to go and pick up his duffel bag. They brought it to me. I refused to open it.

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I wouldnʼt put on the uniform. I wouldnʼt put on the big clunky boots. My case was remanded for further consideration until the next day. I was laying myself open to IMPRISONMENT for DISOBEDIENCE and INSUBORDINATION. “Check, please!” Consigned to the dormitory, I patiently used the following hours to grow out and tangle my hair. I stayed awake all night long. Iʼd come up with a plan. I was a born soldier, and above all a brilliant strategist. Fifteen minutes before reveille, I reached under my bed and picked up a shard of glass Iʼd spotted the afternoon before: it glittered like a golden coin. It was thick, not very sharp, it probably came from a broken windowpane, but I still managed to slash my left wrist a few times and bloody the sheet. Then I dropped my head back in feigned unconsciousness, made more credible by the very real sweat covering my brow: this was the first time Iʼd spilled blood, the only time that counts, as every soldier will tell you. Even the toughest among them, the ones dressed up to their earlobes in the leather of their boots, will confess that they had to wait for the second time, the second man cut down by their bullets, to taste unmingled joy. The reveille bell sounded. The ceiling lights blazed. I heard a gasp, then a curse, then a shout. A crowd gathered around my bed. Someone was shaking my shoulder. “Would you like to take command of the army?” “You bet I would! Nothing Iʼd rather do! Thatʼs the only reason I came here!” And so the valiant little tailor is led to the royal chambers, now placed at his disposition, whereas I myself was

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moved into a cramped windowed cell in the Military Hospital for observation. I wasnʼt the only houseguest there. The elite squad of the psychiatric division counted some twelve handpicked warriors. Our uniform consisted of light-blue pyjamas, a pair of taupe-colored corduroy slippers, and a white terry-cloth robe. The pyjamas were too big, the slippers too small, in my case the robe was stained with egg yolk, but that did nothing to diminish my ardor to see my mission through, for the honor and glory of my fatherland. The special forces had their own rules. Recruited for the very qualities that sometimes put them starkly at odds with military discipline, the men of our battalion, far from fading and melding into the anonymity of the troops like all the others, were bent on distinguishing themselves, and here more than anywhere else their irreducible, intransigent, untamable personalities were allowed to thrive. There was, for example, the one whoʼd surrounded himself with a prodigious collection of ammonites. Every day his mother would bring him new fossils, which he would lay out on the floor of his cell in a rigorous order. For his part, my roommate had made of his bedside table an altar dedicated to the memory of his late grandfather: he was watched over by a wax death mask that I strongly suspected heʼd molded on his own face, that and a few photographs of the pallid corpse. Before them he lay prostrate all day long, in the service of France. Another of our comrades fancied himself a writer, and had at his own expense published his autobiography. Was it Little Lulu or Little Juju? Alas, I must confess I donʼt remember. He pressed everyone to buy one of those dull yellow vol-

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umes, devoting the greater part of his time to that unproductive commerce: it should be quite clear what profit the nation might have expected from such a servant. There was also the one who wept from morning to evening, and wouldnʼt let anyone take over for him. And then the one who was forever pulling off his clothes, and the one who tried to escape by any means necessary (he once hid in a garbage can, under the trash). There was the one who charged the wall, head down, and had to be tied to his bed. These united skills made our unit an elite corps, one of those top-secret crack intervention teams that can change the course of a war in the blink of an eye. Even today I speak of them with unfeigned emotion, as any skeptic can see by these tearstains on my page, 0 0 0. “Check, please!” It must be said that I competed in some of the most memorable Ping-Pong matches of my life in that ward, once the doctors and nurses turned their backs, when we could doff our tragic masks and drop our histrionics. For by a fortuitous stroke of fate we were all excellent Ping-Pong players, apart from my roommate, who, not content simply to feel no grief at his grandfatherʼs death, claimed heʼd slain the old man himself, that heʼd ripped out his tongue with his teeth, and agreed to serve as referee. After three weeks of observation I was relieved of duty on the grounds of mental instability, declared unfit to drop bombs on civilian populations. Not entirely taken in, however, the head doctor used all his subtle eloquence to try to make me ashamed, and I must admit that he nearly succeeded.

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When he called me a faggot, my amour propre was cruelly wounded, and I came close to snatching up a weapon and setting off all alone, then and there, to reconquer our lost colonial empire. I donʼt know what stopped me. Instead of that, I smiled. So youʼre paying, right? Make no mistake, we were good soldiers, we knew no mercy. There were deaths. On my last night there, two of my friends hanged themselves. A generalʼs uniform is brought for the valiant little tailor. Ha ha! Look at him, look how it hangs off him, heʼs like a kitten in a bag! Ha ha! Is that the general or his banner? Ha ha! Take off your mommyʼs dress, little girl! Ha ha! Wait till you get a horse to put on the saddle blanket! Ha ha! Sorry, youʼre too short for this part—next! But the next day, the valiant little tailor appears at the court in a uniform impeccably suited to his size. Four pins and heʼs dressed to the nines. And thereʼs our hero. My twin. Another me. He makes quite an impression. What is the defining feature of his character, apart from that blend of impudence and braggadocio, if not his gift for

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triumphantly finding a way out of the trickiest situations? In a word, his ingenuity. Heʼs a little monkey with four hands, who makes his way by playing with words to turn every sentence to his advantage. Now, Iʼve never believed in that business about characters slipping through their authorʼs fingers to live it up in their books. I know that Don Quixoteʼs comical stiffness and his nagʼs jolting gait are hanging by invisible threads from two crossed pieces of wood, and that the dust they raise in their travels smells strongly of Spanish tobacco. I know that Sancho Panza isnʼt so heavy that he canʼt be controlled by a one-armed man. And so, for the author of these pages, might the valiant little tailor not be a mere figure of rhetoric, an element of syntax just a little more showoffy and sprightly than the rest, the grammatical agent with a mission to perform new tricks and create new poetic effects? Isnʼt that how we should understand and cherish the brat? Instead of being impressed only by his pratfalls and his recoveries? Applauding as he performs his gymnastic feats, as he strolls over hot coals, as he runs in circles with the tigerʼs tail between his teeth, applaud the music made by the saw against his bones and the wonder of his resurrection, his dance above the abyss on the high wire of his untied shoelace, but refusing to believe in him when heʼs just wiping his nose, when heʼs weeping, when heʼs asking what time it is, when heʼs visited by a dream? No, donʼt listen to me, if youʼd like to invite him to your place to eat wafer cookies, donʼt let me stop you. Inevitably, there comes a moment in my books when I venture to lay out its theory. Itʼs always a little tedious. If anyone else shows up, just nod your head once or twice to feign interest, even as you let your gaze drift over the page, that will be good enough for me.

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I think heʼll love those wafer cookies, Iʼm not absolutely sure, how could I be, but I think, yes, thatʼs just the sort of cookie heʼd be fond of, from what I know of him, and I like to think I do know him, after all, at least a little, though I will grant that he remains for me, for me more than anyone, an opaque block of enigmas and complications, but on that point, all the same, I feel a fair degree of confidence, yes, you can offer him one of those cookies without fear, mind you thatʼs just my opinion, a hunch if you will, to be taken with a grain of salt, but in the end I donʼt see why not wafer cookies, I believe that would logically be among his tastes— although logic, of course, where taste is concerned . . . —but knowing how much he likes marmalade, I donʼt think Iʼm taking too big a risk when I assume wafer cookies too, given that wafer cookies and marmalade are a pure delight, the cookie offering marmalade an interesting alternative to the usual slice of bread, the marmalade compensating for the possibly-a-little-too-dry cookie, but I donʼt want to seem like I know all about wafer cookies either, wafer cookies crumble if you treat them too roughly, but anyway, maybe Iʼm going out on a limb here, but Iʼll just bet you your wafer cookies will be a big hit with him. “Disgusting,” says the valiant little tailor, and he vomits them onto the rug. Or perhaps his character is a doll the author alternately embraces and tortures, dismembering and reassembling it according to his whim, changing the arms for legs, the legs for arms, the head turning up two months later, under the couch, a doll he dresses in a washcloth, in tinfoil, in clothes crudely sewn or knitted or in a made-to-measure generalʼs

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uniform: his tale will remain as breathless as if it came from the mouth of a child holed up in his room, describing for himself alone (but weʼre listening on the other side of the door) the unpredictable adventures into which he throws his favorite toy (and we know itʼs his favorite from the thousand contusions, fractures, rips, and bites whose marks it bears, whereas a brand-new Puss in Boots is resting in peace in its original box). Since the reader is going to find his way through this passage with eyes closed anyway, I might as well give him a few more words not to read, these ones on the subject of digression, which in my soul and my sensibility I maintain to be not a waste of time, not an empty gesture, not the quirk of a capricious, unhinged, or unfocused mind, not a facile refusal to face the obstacle, no, itʼs the only way to tell this story properly, more legitimate than any other, more particularly than the Brothers Grimmʼs mania for efficiency, getting the thing over with in ten pages and then going on to the next one, once upon a time there was a poor man who had twelve children, I call that pretty slapdash work—if the quavering widows had known, Iʼll bet they would have kept their stories to themselves, letting their valiant little hero revel in the wide-open spaces of their long, drawn-out dreams: in those mists, where every now and then he must have run up against some extraneous domestic concern, lay a long string of toppled giants, and his wanderings bore no resemblance to that sprint from one wall of a drawing room to another, with Jacob firing the starting gun, Wilhelm immediately waving the checkered flag, their three other brothers down in the cellar guzzling the new wine, I imagine, then theyʼre off again, once upon a time there was an old man and his wife, once upon a time there was a lazy girl, once upon

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a time there was a king who fell ill, and once upon yet another time there was a penniless peasant who met up with Death—but theyʼve got to run and hurry to the end! Awaiting the start of the race are a woman and her three daughters, a poor woodsman, a princess in a castle, a shepherd boy known to all, a cook by the name of Margot, and many more who will be granted only a handful of pages to experience three volumesʼ worth of adventures. Who is that vagabond racing along like a hare toward his bed? My digressions cling to his trajectory more faithfully. We donʼt know where weʼre going. Thereʼs no hurry, why not stop and take a nice nap in that clearing? Why not swim upstream against that savage torrent, simultaneously countering everyone who thinks all we ever do is follow the path of least resistance? Why not retire to a monastery for a year? Why not take the time to read another good book? Why not walk part of our journey backward? Why not make for the spot the deer weʼve frightened is fleeing toward? Suppose that, finding that stump to my liking, I decided to climb onto it and harangue the masses? Suppose that, once on my podium, I got a sudden urge to raise my voice and demand an end to the consumption of horsemeat? Whoa there! We could also take a break to watch a tree grow, or to wait for the life-altering encounter of that pretty little girl with the fairy or witch—weʼll have to wait to find out—who will transform her into a teenager, or to see the wolfʼs fur whiten at the approach of the first snows. Then weʼd race off again, straight ahead, not deviating for several miles, since every wandering worthy of the name also welcomes a straight line as soon as the path takes a turn. Because, yes, it is possible to wander with a resolute gait.

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But letʼs wait for dark, shall we, and walk on when it gets a bit cooler. Despite an explicit reference to a certain seventeenthcentury Spanish masterpiece, this whole passage is more evocative of the eighteenth-century British novel, which is, you must agree, a very original way of pillaging nineteenthcentury German literature for a twenty-first-century French writer. And with that, very naturally, the circle is completed. After a long night of lithely twisting and turning among the chimneys on the roof, once morning comes the cat goes back to its basket by the hearth, and to its ball, which the cat suspects has also spent those long hours bouncing this way and that, breaking windows, blacking eyes, dancing on spurts of water and on the nose of a seal. But our valiant little tailor looks fresh as a daisy. He struts around the court in his glamorous uniform, belted with the famous belt heʼs wisely chosen to keep wearing, without which in any case this story couldnʼt go on, hobbled by the pair of pants pooled around its ankles. Every fiber of the valiant little tailorʼs being would blow away on the wind like chaff from wheat without that belt around his waist, which also secures the bag into which weʼve randomly dumped a few physical features, a few character traits, a few thoughts, a few songs. Untie the knot and everything crumbles, disintegrates, dissolves. Suddenly nothing in this whole story holds up. The valiant little tailorʼs belt binds the bundle of his bones like firewood. The valiant little tailorʼs belt is a harness, a leash, a lasso. The valiant little tailorʼs belt slips through the loops of 80

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valiant, the loops of little, the loops of tailor, and ties around his belly. The valiant little tailorʼs belt, as it holds up his pants, most particularly holds back his swift, limber legs. The valiant little tailorʼs belt binds him hand and foot. And now the valiant little tailorʼs belt is tightening around his neck. Because the other officers of the royal guard fear him, nursing a hatred and envy that may well put his life in danger. They meet beneath the arcades, in the gardens, in the night, wrapped in capes, and their big hats pulled down over their faces give them strange wading-bird silhouettes: when they lower their heads, the frightened carp plunge into the silt of their basins. They murmur like the rustling leaves, but they speak of other things: I thought I heard the word dagger, which never comes up in the conversation of bay trees and box shrubs. But the conspirators are reluctant to act. They find themselves losing their nerve. If he killed seven with one blow, it might not be pleasant to tangle with him. “Of course, we could attack him from behind, but do you not believe, my dear Baron . . .” “Hush, hush, donʼt say my name!” (Furtive glances left and right.) “Donʼt you think at least one of his seven victims already came up with the cunning scheme of attacking him from behind? That didnʼt stop him from crushing them. This stranger is a man to be feared. Let us beware of him. Let us also dismiss the possibility of poison, which acts slowly and would leave him time to avenge himself.” The situation seems hopeless. 81

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“Not to mention that these endless palavers in the damp night air are hardly the thing for my gout, I must confess, my dear Count . . .” “Quiet, you wretch! No names! No names!” (Their heads duck between their shoulders, their hands pull their hats farther down over their eyes. Quickly they scatter.) Beneath the arcades, in the gardens, in the night, the conspiracy falls apart. In the morning, they try to hock their almost-new capes, their almost-good-as-new masks. The carp emerge from the depths to eat from the hands of the melancholy conspirators. “If we canʼt rid ourselves of the intruder, then, my friends, let us flee.” As one, the officers come before the king. The highestranking and most decorated of those nobles puts one knee to the ground (on a little cushion). Heʼs an old man, his white hair standing vertically from the top of his skull, his beard silvery, straight, and closely trimmed, his cheekbones smooth and glistening, his gaze metallic: then he takes off his helmet to reveal a clean-shaven face tanned by long hours of riding, thick brown hair, jet-black eyes, and he speaks. “Sire,” he says. (But his quavering voice is still the voice of the widow to whom we owe this tale. He clears his throat and continues, gravely.) “We have come to request that Your Majesty give us leave and permission to return to our ancestral lands.” (The king scowls.) “But why do you want to leave your king, you, my doughtiest, my most faithful servants?” “Understand, Sire, we cannot live in the company and under the orders of the psychopathic killer you have en82

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trusted with the command of your armies. Suppose something suddenly made him angry: what would happen to us, and to yourself, Majesty, have you ever thought of that? Nothing can stop a man so mighty and so bloodthirsty. Sooner or later, he will set his eye on your throne.” “Ah! Why did he come here? Why didnʼt they let him go on sleeping? Why did they bring him to me? Why did I name him general? And how to keep you here, my friends? How to send him away?” “Shall I note that down on the agenda of His Majestyʼs Council?” the grand chamberlain inquires. No, thereʼs no need, the king has an idea. He summons the little tailor, whom I simply canʼt bring myself to call a general—my reader, perhaps more respectful of the military hierarchy than I am, can restore him to his rank if he wishes—and challenges the little layabout to prove his mettle by accepting the most perilous of all missions, from which (but this is written in tiny little letters in the contract) he will never return. Should he succeed, the princess will be his, as well as half of the kingdom, neither more nor less. “The half where the lemon trees are?” asks the little tailor. “Yes,” says the king. And the clever little tailor rubs his hands, because although he doesnʼt yet know the princess (sheʼs not bad), heʼs already seen that the lemon trees grow in equal numbers at all four corners of the kingdom, as much on the east as on the west, on the north as on the south. “What do I have to do?” Slay two giants who live in an impenetrable forest not far from the castle, who have been ravaging the land, robbing, raiding, raping, blasting, frying, burning, massacring, 83

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destroying, chopping, crushing, grinding, flaying, scraping, shredding, dissecting, pulverizing, decapitating, drawing, quartering, pummeling, battering, roiling, defrauding, scamming, eviscerating, hammering, dismembering, calumniating, carbonizing, slashing, impaling, soliciting, shearing, tormenting, dispossessing, clawing, biting, slugging, plagiarizing, skewering, assailing, ripping, devouring, pounding, counterfeiting, ransacking, pillaging, sacking, sabotaging, spitting, swearing, decimating, prevaricating, kidnapping, racketeering, soiling, polluting, wrinkling, fracturing, lacerating, twisting, breaking, withering, snapping, humiliating, damaging, trampling, bashing, burping, whipping, tearing, mistreating, slapping, toppling, demolishing, brutalizing, stoning, shooting, cudgeling, bombarding, goring, strangling, smothering, degrading, sullying, scratching, cheating, trafficking, prostituting, grifting, defiling, vandalizing, kicking, obstructing, flooding, pinching, devastating. Everything in their path. “Iʼll take care of them,” the little tailor says coolly. “They also spoil our fruit.” “Iʼll see to it.” “Youʼll have a hundred horsemen with you, along with our finest lancers and archers.” “No need—let them stay and look after their children. What are two foes to one who has killed seven with one blow? I shall fight alone.” Thatʼs ending a chapter with a flourish.

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IV

But it would be inelegant to begin this one by cutting straight to the chase and the promised battle with the two giants. Let us leave our reader pacing and fidgeting at the edge of the woods for just a bit longer. His curiosity wonʼt loose its grip, he wonʼt put down the book, and heʼll wait as long as he has to. Iʼll take advantage of his good will to sing him all the songs in my repertoire, or perhaps to list my little personal troubles one by one: I know Iʼll have his ear. Continually frustrated, his desire to know the outcome will only grow stronger, soon it will be as if his very life depended on the end of a tale whose beginning was completely unknown to him just this morning. Thatʼs the essence of the narrative art, the judicious use of pauses and diversions to artfully arouse and maintain the readerʼs interest. I learned that lesson from the masters. Ah! if you only knew what I have in my right pocket . . . There follows a long, meandering digression that teases and tortures the reader, he wants to know, heʼs not going anywhere, heʼll read whatever you lay out for him in that waiting room so long as he learns the answer in the end, the solution to that mystery is all he cares about anymore. “Iʼm going to have a baby,” his partner tells him.

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“Good night to you too,” the reader answers, his eyes riveted to my book. “The doctor thinks itʼs going to have two heads.” “Anything you like, dear.” Everything in him is bent toward that dénouement, his nerves snap one by one, his heart gives out, heʼll never even see the repentant, sorrowful, shamefaced author discreetly pull a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away his tears and wring out his running nose. So fifteen or twenty years ago tomorrow, I was taking the Paris metro, it was late, the last train of the night. The car was almost empty. I was standing by the doors, the raised fold-down seats behind my knees. I hadnʼt failed to notice the rather beautiful young woman standing in front of me, her hand clasping one of those vertical bars whose name I couldnʼt think of, not column, not pillar, but I was quickly distracted from her by that vain search for the mot juste, which Iʼve been known to pursue on all fours in the sand; and in any case what first caught my eye was less her pretty face—very short black hair, blue eyes, pale skin—than her garb, which Iʼd judged more or less hideous without further dwelling on the question, a matching violet skirt and vest, their color bright or garish, almost episcopal, made even more sinister, as well as exceedingly depressing, by the pallid subway-car lighting. It should be said that my mood was bleak already, I was on my way home from a party that hadnʼt gone well, Iʼd drunk too much wine, after all it was just a violet skirt, the sadness came from somewhere else. A violet skirt would never have demolished me like that all on its own.

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It was just that its beaten-baby color matched my own melancholy too well. I didnʼt need that. I closed my eyes. The train dutifully stopped at every station, but the hour was late, and no one was getting on. Quite the reverse, the few passengers left in our car made their exits one after the other, and in the end I found myself alone with my violet. Though truth to tell I didnʼt realize it until the next station, when the clamorous entrance of three hoodlums—I use that old-lady word deliberately, because an old lady was just what I felt like at the moment, in my baggy overcoat— put a sudden end to our silent tête-à-tête. Tattooed, pierced, mohawked, with the rattail of the braveʼs mustang hanging down their necks, scruffy, filthy, and dressed whatʼs more in military surplus (that touch of olive drab put the finishing touch on the picture of my radiant happiness), they barked and shrieked as they took possession of the car, whose doors closed as serenely as if weʼd just been joined by three popes bearing fruit jellies. The young woman was immediately spotted, surrounded, cornered. The three hoodlums pressed in on her. The old lady in her corner didnʼt move a muscle. The smallest and most turbulent of the Comanches planted himself before the blushing violet, almost close enough to touch her. He lewdly ran his tongue over his lips or stuck his index finger in his mouth and gave it a good, long suck, then pressed it, damp and viscous, to the girlʼs (fuchsia) cheek as she silently backed away. “You know what, youʼre cute . . .” The two other cretins laughed coarsely, poking each other in the ribs like monkeys. What to do?

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Fortunately, I had a little revolver in my right pocket. I clasped the grip and, quick as a flash, drew my weapon. Having forgotten that in reality I had nothing in my pocket but my damp handkerchief. And so the old lady blew her nose, to save face. Then, all the same, I shot a sharp look at the Comanche, who was growing ever more insistent, the livid face and limbs that topped off his faded olive getup clashing shockingly with the lurid violet: the color needed to be turned up on one side and down on the other. If there was nothing more urgent to be done. He was a vampire putting his lips to a trembling cup of blood. Finally he noticed my disapproving stare and turned away from his prey. “Youʼre cute too!” “Thatʼs why we love each other . . .” A look of deep surprise came over the vampireʼs face; for good reason, it had never occurred to him that we might be together. Now, of course, there was nothing terribly courageous in what Iʼd just done, but it did seem to deflate him, and left him unsure of his next move. “And weʼve loved each other for so long, and so deeply,” I added, my voice calm but tinged with an emotion that could just as well have come from the nature of the confession, as if Iʼd perceived neither the tension nor the latent violence of the scene whose protagonists we were and was simply telling a fellow passenger of the beautiful love we shared. In sum, fear served me well: too much assurance would no doubt have lent a challenging or aggressive tone to my voice,

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and would have offended those brutesʼ delicate sensibilities (beneath their thick leather, red meat still throbs). “Heʼs lucky,” he said to Violet, nodding my way. And just then there occurred a little event in my life. “Iʼm lucky too,” answered that lovely young woman, with her blue eyes, the curious cut of her hair revealing a naked, delicate ear. Oh! how that violet outfit suited her! How pretty she was in it! Iʼve always loved violet. Itʼs my favorite color. Just then the train slowed and stopped. This was my station. The Comanchesʼ too, fortunately. Everything was working out perfectly. Almost like we were characters in a story. Only Violet stayed on the train. “Goodbye, mademoiselle.” “Thank you,” she simply answered, lowering her eyes. “What the . . . arenʼt you gonna stay with your woman?” the confused little Comanche asked me on the platform. “I donʼt know the young lady . . . good evening!” And the escalator carried me off in triumph. I could hear them behind me, unbelieving, dumbstruck, dismayed. “Ah, they tricked us, they tricked us . . .” And as I vanished into the night one of them called after me: “You should have stayed with her, she would have put out!” How vulgar! And I walked off, beaming with pride, never looking back.

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With the worm of regret in my heart. She would have put out, for Godʼs sake! The point being that the valiant little tailor isnʼt the only less-than-strapping hero I know. There are of course a few loose ends to that story. What would I have done if the Comanches had turned violent toward Violet? Would I have had the courage to run over and gloriously impale myself on a knife? But in truth thatʼs neither here nor there: although my tactic was subtler, I did indisputably brave the danger of a painful reprisal. But what would I have done if, on reaching my station, the Comanches hadnʼt got off with me? Would I have abandoned Violet to her fate? Staying beside her would have meant finding myself ever farther away from my attic room, in the cold night, and I didnʼt have a sou on me: no way to take a taxi. Perhaps such considerations will seem trivial and misplaced, but as a practical young man continually racked by impulses to come to othersʼ rescue, Iʼm sure they would duly have surfaced in my mind when the moment came to choose. Time for reflection being severely limited in the circumstances, I might well have leaped onto the platform, even if it meant bitterly reproaching myself afterward. All that notwithstanding, I reassure myself with the thought that I was clearly in good form that night, clevernesswise, and would have thought of inviting Violet to come with me, whether by a discreet sign or by gently taking her hand, and then, before the doors closed again, led her to another car, this one populated by inoffensive riders to whom I would discreetly have entrusted her like a child for the rest of the journey.

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In the end, the only question that remains unresolved, the question that still haunts me after all these years, is this: would she really have put out? But while a certain sad sack is still fretting and dithering at the edge of the woods, the little tailor bolts into the trees—with one leap, write the Brothers Grimm, having no doubt seen a squirrel and gotten them confused. Only the author of these lines, even though he has nothing to prove— heʼs also the author of the lines that precede them—lives up to his courageous reputation and bounds into the trees after him. Suddenly . . . A dead branch breaks under my weight! Panic and wild flailing accompany the fall. Farewell, my friends. Youʼll look after Méline, wonʼt you? But just when Iʼm about to crash to earth and break every bone in my body, I realize that the branch was lying on the ground when I stepped on it: that was what saved me. But the crack of the branch has roused the whole forest: boars and hares (in a word, bears) scatter in all directions, and the little tailorʼs eyes shoot daggers at me, yet another unheard-of coup in an age when, let us not forget, firearms are still in the rack reserved for things that havenʼt been invented yet. I answer with a sheepish little smile of apology or helplessness, he can interpret it however he likes, gesturing toward the dry, brittle twigs strewn over the ground. To be sure, that tailor can move through the forest without making a sound, but how to know if that discretion reflects his minuscule weight—whereas Iʼm burdened by 150 pounds of flesh wherever I go, along with a baggage of formidable erudition—or

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his exceptional agility—whereas my feet are more the meditative type, ponderous—or perhaps the fact that he is a chimerical character of pure imagination—whereas I, incontestably, am? am? Yes, thatʼs right, and what a man! Which the valiant little tailor doesnʼt quite seem to appreciate, as he rather frostily requests that I watch where Iʼm putting my clodhoppers. He can go on ahead if he finds my company bothersome. Iʼll follow him from a distance. And a few steps behind me on this narrow forest path, not always spared the whip of the low branches and brambles that I push aside and thoughtlessly let go of as I walk on, my reader persists, more tenacious than I expected, sometimes stumbling over the exposed roots of the pines and larches. The only way to go forward now is bent double, dodging the branches as you go. The undergrowth has turned denser, more tangled. No more does the sunlight pierce the veil of the greenery, except here and there, forcing its way through, like rain slipping its drops one by one through the leaves: lurking in the shadows, behold the opposite of a leopard. And this is why we have two nostrils: one for the scent of the mushroom, the other for the smell of the pine resin. Hey, look ou—— . . . too late! The little tailor stops so abruptly that I canʼt help running into him. And the collisions go on behind me, in chain reaction. We form a very strange scrum. Our brave hero is the first to stand up. He extends one arm, pointing. Read over there!

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One has his hands clasped behind his neck, the otherʼs lie entwined on his belly: the two giants are sleeping, stretched out under a tree whose boughs sway in time as they loudly breathe in and out, a tree that seems, comically, to be the only one in the forest enduring the gusts of a violent storm that is perhaps sparing the others to focus its wrath on this one in hopes of uprooting it. Is it a poplar, a willow? When the giants exhale, its branches rise up, like a flame, like a flail, then sag toward the ground every time they inhale. Oh! I didnʼt used to exclaim all the time like this. I generally managed to restrain myself. There were four of us holding me back. Itʼs just that I suddenly find myself thinking of the nightingale that nearly built its nest in that tree, with a view to laying eggs . . . The flutter of a wing that ended up carrying the bird a little farther along (to that ash tree over there) may not have turned out to reorder the course of this world as people sometimes like to imagine, one consequence leading to another and then another—a specious theory, probably invented by a butterfly collector as a pretext to take his pursuit to the next level, multiplying the firepower and the carnage for the supposed sake of preserving order and balance—but it will at least have saved the birdʼs hatchlings, and itʼs worth noting that one of those hatchlings, much later, its song distracting the sentinel posted outside the front door of the worldʼs new overlord, will give the last surviving resistance fighter a chance to slip into the palace through a halfopen window for the purpose of eviscerating the sleeping tyrant, who will be awakened by the birdʼs irritating chirps just in time to shove the dagger aside and break his chamber pot over the rebelʼs head before slashing his throat with

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a shard and going back to sleep: in the end, not much will have changed. As a sidenote, let us add that the potter appointed to supply the palace with sanitary furnishings will make a tidy sum from this incident, and will thus be able to finance his sonʼs expedition beyond the Arctic Circle to the unspoiled sixth continent, where humankind will find refuge when their homelands, polluted into sterility, will feed them no more. (The earth trembles. A particularly powerful jolt cracks the vault of the heavens. Stars and meteors rain down.) Now, perhaps, we should let the valiant little tailor get on with it. Creeping along, under cover, behind the tree trunks, he approaches the two giants, sometimes bending down to pick up and pocket the white pebbles that the hand of chance has curiously dropped at regular intervals on the forest floor. The two giants are even more gigantic and disproportionate than the one who nonetheless took up all of chapter 2. Their feet are such that they can circle the world without taking a step. When they clamp their thighs around an elephant, it spurts out through its trunk. Let them simply kneel before the king, and his kingdom is in ruins. Best to avoid probing their underwear. But as for their buttocks, does this world really have room for two more hemispheres? And there, newly erected, stand the two tallest, thickest towers your imagination can conceive, whose dimensions your mathematical mind will then multiply by eight.

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With all the worldʼs swallows lined up on the oneʼs shoulders, fortunately there are still the otherʼs shoulders for the swifts. Their arms are so long that they can make themselves a breakfast of penguin-egg omelets with dates without ever getting out of bed. There is nothing too big for their hands to contain, quite simply nothing. They would disappear into their own fists. It would take a lifetime to survey their faces, and another to read the map. Galaxies unknown to our telescopes admire their reflection in the giantsʼ eyes. And hum in their ears. And their noses confiscate those cosmosesʼ scents and perfumes. Long ago, they lost their baby teeth in Carrara. Is that clear enough? Next to them, the little tailor seems like nothing at all. Perhaps heʼs run away? No; pockets filled with pebbles, heʼs nimbly scaling the tree beneath which the two terrors lie snoring. Itʼs time he got some good out of that belt again: he firmly binds himself to the leader branch so he wonʼt fall when the willow bristles or the poplar droops. Giant, tree, pebble: doesnʼt that sound familiar? It would appear that the popular imagination, after the labor of delivering up a giant, had scarcely more strength than a new mother, just enough to rise up on one elbow and look out the window: thereʼs a tree, thereʼs a bird, farther on there are some rocks by the roadside, that will do nicely. Plenty there to weave a story from, all the necessary elements for a simple combinatoric. Sometimes a wolf hap-

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pens by, and is recruited on the spot. The popular imagination has a shepherdessʼs concerns, tormented by three questions alone: Is the wolf prowling nearby? Is my prince on his way? Where did I leave my crook? And, thinking of nothing else, she drives her sheeplike flock along. Behind her eyelids, she dreams of a palace of pink marble. She realizes sheʼs holding her crook in her hand. On they go through the dark, through the snow, the docile animals trotting beside her—who would ever have dreamed of such a thing? Not the shepherdess either. Besides, she has no idea itʼs happening, behind her pink eyelids sheʼs dreaming of the prince who will come and take her away. Who has already come, you poor creature, who saw you from afar and immediately turned to race away, his hair standing on end. While, dreaming and smiling into space, across fields, through woods, over plains, you lead your pack of huge wild wolves with blazing red eyes. Iʼm writing these lines in Siena. Noon is sounding. From my table, looking over the rooftops, I see the bell of a campanile merrily swinging back and forth. Our two little girls, similarly, are all skirts and giggles on the swing set. Why does my heart always delight when I come to this city? The curved facades of the Palazzo Pubblico and the tall buildings around it enclose the square like a shell, beneath the perfect dome of the heavens; the Piazza del Campo is an egg. I head there several times a day, I pause—how wonderful it is to be here—then two quick pecks and I emerge, reborn.

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Iʼll wear the celestial vault on my head like a hat until nightfall. People in the street smile at me without mockery. I believe I might actually end up taking flight, once my wings are strong enough to carry me. A half hour has gone by that way, stolen from my work. Méline is expecting me for lunch. The pasta they have around here! If youʼve ever wondered what a writer in Italy eats, now you know. As a consequence of that absurd curiosity: now the thread of our story is wrapped around my fork. Go on ahead, Iʼll catch up with you. If I remember correctly, I left the little tailor sitting in a tree. Itʼs time to put his valiance to the test. A cow needs a lion nearby to earn the pretty name of antelope. The little tailor canʼt very well be called valiant when heʼs chewing on a green wheat stalk or bathing his road-weary feet in a brookʼs limpid waters. Itʼs no accident that a sensitive ear can hear the faience in vaillance—this adventure must indeed put his fragile person in danger.* The little porcelain tailor sitting in his tree is now looking down on the two sleeping giants: if he falls, thereʼs sure to be breakage. Who can now doubt his valiance? Particularly given that heʼs not going to stop there. He takes a handful of white pebbles from his pocket, then drops them one by one on the forehead, chin, and chest of one of the giants, who, still half asleep, waves his hand to * The two words are near-homophones in French; alas, no such equivalence exists in English.

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chase away the bothersome fly or bee thatʼs disturbing his slumbers. Then the valiant little tailor aims at his cheeks and nose, throwing the stones with more force. This time the giant sits up and give his companion a healthy swat. “Hey! Why are you hitting me, friend?” “I never touched you! You must have been having a nightmare. I know how it is: just last night I dreamed a hummingbird was hovering over my head, and then suddenly it swallowed me whole. I awoke with a start, bathed in sweat, and all the next day I couldnʼt drive the memory from my mind. Do you think there might be some hidden meaning behind such a dream?” “How could I possibly know, when I find my own dreams so opaque? Once our nap is over weʼll see if we canʼt find the answers to our questions in The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. I must have a copy around here somewhere.” But no sooner have they drifted off again than the little tailor, from high atop his tree, hurls a rock—rough is its surface, sharp are its edges—at the second giant, hitting him just below the left eyebrow, leaving a cut that spurts several liters of blood. “What the . . . ? Have you lost your mind? I think Iʼm bleeding . . . Why are you throwing rocks at me?” “Leave me alone and let me sleep. I did no such thing. You must have knocked yourself rolling over in your sleep.” “Do you think there might be a hidden meaning behind such an act of involuntary self-mutilation?” “Weʼll look that up in The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales after our nap.” Succumbing to their fatigue, the two giants go back to sleep. In the willow tree, the little tailor digs through his pocket in search of the biggest pebble, a bifacial hand ax,

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finding it in the poplar tree, taking his aim in the willow, then waiting until heʼs back in the poplar, higher above the ground, to hurl it at the first giant, who this time leaps to his feet, foaming with rage, roaring like a tiger with a megaphone. He seizes his companion by the collar and violently shoves him against the little tailorʼs tree, which bends double from the blow, neither a willow nor a poplar but a flexible hazel tree. The other giant does not intend to let that go unanswered, and he strikes back. Nap time is over. And so, as promised, let us open The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Today adults use such concepts as id, ego, superego, and egoideal to separate our internal experiences and get a better grasp on what they are all about. Unfortunately, in doing so we have lost something which is inherent in the fairy tale: the realization that these externalizations are fictions, useful only for sorting out and comprehending mental processes. When the meek tailor in the Brothers Grimmʼs “The Valiant Little Tailor” manages to subdue two huge giants by making them fight each other, is he not acting as the weak ego does when it plays id against superego and, by neutralizing their opposite energies, gains rational control over these irrational forces? writes Bruno Bettelheim.* Meanwhile, thereʼs a slugfest going on. Theyʼre really whaling on each other. Kid Id versus Superego the Superhero. Idʼs fist flies at Superegoʼs jaw. Superegoʼs knee flies at Idʼs groin. Idʼs leg is a slingshot—snap!— launching his foot into Superegoʼs chest. * From Bruno Bettelheimʼs The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976).

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Superego uproots a chestnut tree and breaks it over Idʼs skull. Id uproots an oak tree and smashes it over Superegoʼs back. Some translators of this tale prefer Brave to Valiant, and theyʼre not wrong. I tremble for the little tailor as he coolly sits at the very top of his tree and serenely surveys the battle heʼs unleashed, encouraging his two protégés with one voice. Do you hear them, braying like dead donkeys? Superego uproots a birch tree and plants it in Idʼs eye. Whereupon Id uproots an ash tree and rams it down Superegoʼs throat. Whereupon Superego uproots an aspen and thrusts it into Idʼs ear. Whereupon Id uproots two larches and screws them up Superegoʼs nose. Here in Siena we often cross paths with a city worker on a delivery tricycle, carrying a little tree in a pot: the Grounds Department for this city without parks, we suppose. Now Id and Superego are bashing each other with baobabs. Of all this worldʼs blunt instruments, a baobab is the bluntest: if it bore walnuts, they would sprout crushed; if it bore olives, weʼd have only the oil; if it bore strawberries, its shirt would never be white. Massive deforestation, twelve football fields every minute. There didnʼt used to be a clearing here.

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Only the valiant little tailorʼs beech tree has miraculously been spared. (I can work still other miracles. Whereʼs my crowd?) Id and Superego are bleeding badly. Their dislocated bones rattle with every move they make. Their dislodged teeth will never again scratch the floorboards. And donʼt count on that ragged flesh to protect them from next winterʼs cold. Id slips on his eyeball and falls flat on his back. Superego hurries to help him never get on his feet again, but clumsily trips over his own intestines and topples in turn. Id and Superego writhe on the ground like bisected worms. Suddenly, all the fight goes out of them. Whatʼs happening? Id is dying of a broken heart. Hilde has left him. Why go on living? Superego is paying for his years of drinking and smoking. He put off quitting too long. Today death has caught up with him. Together, with a sigh thatʼs also a hurricane, the two giants deliver up their innocent souls to God. Henceforth you will find the Kingdom of Heaven in that cloud. The little tailor leaps to earth. He hacks at the corpses with his sword, signing his handiwork. Here he severs an ear, there he slices a thumb into thin rounds, elsewhere he plunges his blade into a breast, his left hand on his hip, executing a flurry of elegant fencing strokes and flourishes, all the more remarkable in that his adversaries both outnumber and outweigh him. Finally, after a series of whirls, he performs his trademark move: he smartly

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lashes his embroidered belt down on the buzzing swarm of flies attracted by the blood—because the fact is that flies will settle for marmalade only if thereʼs no blood or excrement to be had. Mortally wounded, seven dipterans join Id and Superego in the other world. No two ways about it, the little tailorʼs got the magic touch. I myself tried my luck with a kitchen towel on precisely such a swarm: I got two of them the first time, three the second, and two the third. But they havenʼt heard the last of me. The valiant little tailor emerges from the woods and rejoins his horsemen, who are surprised to see him come back looking so fresh and so pink, his hair still neatly combed, his sword red with blood. “All done,” he says simply, as if his victory were a foregone conclusion from the start. “But how can this be?” whinny the horsemen. “You killed them both and youʼre not even hurt?” “Not a scratch. They did their best to defend themselves— have you ever seen the pathetic convulsions of a strangled chicken?—but it will take more than two giants uprooting trees from an ancient forest and swinging them like clubs to impress a man such as I, I who can slay seven with one blow.” But the horsemen donʼt seem to be convinced. That sword of his shed only the blood of the blackberries, they tell themselves. They exhale heavily through their teeth, causing their lips to vibrate, which among them is a sign of deep perplexity and even outright disbelief. Go and see for yourselves, O ye of little faith. But it turns out that the two giants are indeed lying in their own blood, surrounded by evidence of a mighty struggle. And the horsemen, rooted to the spot by stupefaction,

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vigorously lash their tails to chase away the flies briefly distracted by their sweat and manure from the remains rotting on the ground. (It doesnʼt take long in these hot, sunny climes.) And it would be a shame to leave those uprooted trees rotting there, those magnificent oaks, beeches, or chestnuts, when itʼs so easy to chop them into slivers, then dissolve those slivers by boiling them under high pressure with certain additives, a mixture of soda and potassium sulfide or sulfur dioxide, then collect the cellulose thereby isolated in the lower chamber of a boiler along with the appropriate quantity of hemicelluloses, draining away the remaining water, in which the dissolved waste elements of the wood are suspended, and finally convey the paste by a classic system of canalizations to the paper machine, which tirelessly presses, compacts, dries, sizes, and distributes the sheets on which these lines are being printed as we go along, and to be sure it is a rare and remarkable thing for the author to be supplied with paper by the hero of his book, I consider that an advance that doesnʼt simply save time but actually improves the work itself, which grows more coherent, more clearly and sensitively self-aware, and of course the reader isnʼt excluded from that close cooperation of all the storyʼs protagonists, since he holds in his hands, in a form reduced by the acids to its purest state, the very object of the tale of which he becomes no longer a spectator, an onlooker, impotent and inane, but rather a physical actor who himself juggles those beech-tree trunks as if they were dried stalks of grass—with every turn of a page comes the sound of the primeval forestʼs rustling foliage and beating wings, which no literary description or typographical artifice can ever per-

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fectly restitute, so it would have been superfluous to print our story on some artisanal paper as thick as the artisanʼs hand, in whose weave one can see, like watermarks, trapped in the pulp, a worm-eaten tree stump, a nest, an acorn, an edible mushroom, a living jackdaw, and wild boar scat, superfluous and no doubt even tediously redundant. If you feel like riding twenty leagues in the company of a hundred hardened soldiers, in the dust kicked up by the galloping hooves, I urge you to follow the valiant little tailorʼs cavalry to the castle, where heʼs going to seek the promised reward from the king. If not, stay in your chair, and listen instead to the story of Salem al-Ayari. Because of course giants are to be found only in the imaginary realms of the folktale, but noble souls have a right to live in a world proportionally suited to their vigor, their desire, their pride, their courage. I will say no more for the moment, my friends. Youʼll understand later.

The Story of Salem al-Ayari He was a little guy, that Salem al-Ayari. Oh, not tall, not tall at all! A figure of fun. Ha ha, look how tiny! No more visible from close up than from a distance! Just a few inches more and heʼd be a dwarf! He was attacked by a germ? What a brawl! An ideal target for jeering was Salem al-Ayari. The source of endless derision. If you wanted to liven up a dull gathering, all you had to do was toss his name out on the rug.

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And it all started up again, the stinging japes, the sarcasm, the snickering. It pained him, the poor man, because his heart was ardent and he sensed within himself the strength to lift worlds. And then to set them into orbit along carpeted courses, around less mercurial suns. But Salem al-Ayari was weak. Oh! so weak. Beyond all description, sand between wordsʼ fingers. Stunted slipped off his shoulders, runt pooled in folds at his feet. Are you starting to form an image of that diminutive personage? If you are, itʼs still too big. Cut it in half. For Salem, the weight of lead could also be felt in soufflé, in silk. Simply by laying on his hands he could transform a marble into a ridiculous cannonball, impossible to play with. A goldfinchʼs hatchlings would not have found the climate in the Garden of the Hesperides more temperate than the blows his fists rained down. He was a lifelong laughingstock in the village where he first opened his eyes. He was welcomed into this world with a guffaw. All the blood in his veins spurted from that wound. Were the suitcase holding his spare shirt and three handkerchiefs not so heavy, he would long since have gone on his way. Farewell. No two ways about it. He would have taken to the road and searched the big, wide world for a more congenial land—which he would alas

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have found only at the outermost reaches of the most remote expanses of emptiness. Because man is the same on all the seven shores of this world, heʼs hard and heʼs cruel, my friends. And so he stayed. He endured the mockery. His heart did not become embittered, but he preferred to live far from society, and avoided his fellow men. Because human company was made for dogs. He kept to his tiny house on the edge of the village. That too inspired laughter. “Salemʼs got even littler,” people would say. “Now you canʼt see him at all.” And they clutched their sides, they rolled on the ground. They gasped for breath between two hiccups. Their eyes poured out tears more sincere than at their fatherʼs deathbed. For an entire year, Salem al-Ayari never showed himself. Time even began to pass between two jokes at his expense. Fortunately, Abdalomin, the newly arrived fava bean seller, saved the people from boredom and melancholy with his exceedingly long, wide ears. Afflicted with the same design flaw as the ostrichʼs wings, they didnʼt let him fly either. “Hey! Abdalomin! Take a few steps back, will you, thereʼs something I want to whisper in your ear!” And the village recovered its legendary merriment. It was him, Abdalomin, who first heard the banging sound coming from Salem al-Ayariʼs house, quiet in the beginning and then ever louder. The sound of blows being struck with a hammer or club. It went on for weeks, for months. And when one day it stopped, everyone suspected Salem

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had met with some sort of accident: a delegation composed of all the villageʼs inhabitants was expedited to his house. They tried to knock on his door, but the iron knocker was too heavy for anyone to lift. They called his name. “Salem! Salem!” The door creaked on its hinges. Salem appeared on the threshold. Heʼd lost weight. Like heʼd been whittled from a reed. A cry of astonishment burst from every mouth at once. But the stunned villagers werenʼt looking at Salem. What they saw behind him, through him, behind his back was nothing short of extraordinary. “Come in, come in! Welcome to my home.” Virtually filling the entryway was a gigantic anchor. It couldnʼt have weighed less than ten tons. Dropped to the ocean floor, such an anchor would have held back the whitecaps and the flying fish, would have brought down the swell, would have slowed the erosion of the coastlineʼs chalk cliffs. “Oh, youʼre surprised to see that here? Thatʼs my boatʼs little reserve anchor. I carried it home on my back yesterday to polish it up.” Now, Salem al-Ayariʼs village lay far from the ocean, more than twelve moons away, twelve moons and their three hundred fifty-one intermediary suns. Everyone squeezed into his cramped little house to gawk at the anchor. Just then . . . Someone spotted the candlesticks on the sideboard. “Look!”

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There were indeed two candlesticks on the sideboard. But thatʼs something of an understatement. Two carefully wrought candlesticks, tall and thick as two trees. “Pretty, arenʼt they? I like to take them with me on my nighttime strolls around the garden, I can see as plainly as at midday.” The flabbergasted visitors exchanged glances, half perplexed, half alarmed. Their third eyes went on peering in every direction. Just then . . . Someone spotted the table where Salem had clearly been sitting when he heard them calling his name. Heʼd pushed his plate aside, they could still see the remains of a meal beneath his crossed fork and spoon. Calf and sheep femurs, a pyramid of scraps and peels, a banana stem stripped of all its fruit, like a snuffed-out candle. “Oh, excuse me. I didnʼt have time to clear the table. I was just finishing my afternoon snack.” But Salem al-Ayariʼs plate and cutlery could have belonged to a giant. Everything was made of forged iron, heavy as the devil. No one in the village could have handled that knife. That fork. With tableware like that you eat elephant, and then the whale course to follow. With a tumbler like that, you can drain the lake from the lake. Everything in the place was absurdly oversized. Only a titan could have smoked from the pipes hanging in their rack.

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The chairs and stools Salem al-Ayari invited his guests to sit down on figured among his immovable assets. And everyone trembled when they caught sight of his sword, carelessly left leaning against the wall. Suppose he suddenly took it into his head to avenge himself for the many humiliations heʼd endured in the village, suppose the hour of vengeance and retribution had come, who among them could put a stop to the massacre? He seemed as weedy as ever, but everything in the house spoke for him. Even his nail file had a great deal to say. His slightness was nothing more than a disguise, a ruse, a fine skin with mighty muscles flexing beneath it. Unless, of course, this was all magic. A conjecture that brought comfort to no one. But Salem al-Ayari was neither a mage nor a sorcerer. It took all his strength to pick up his tortoiseshell comb in the morning. And he couldnʼt bring a bowl to his lips: he lapped up his milk from a plate. But Salem was a wily one, with a rare talent for trickery. During those months of isolation heʼd taught himself the blacksmithʼs trade. On a moonless night, in secret, heʼd taken delivery of vast quantities of iron, which were unloaded according to his direction and left at various carefully chosen spots in the house. And then, doggedly, with a light hammer and a great deal of patience, Salem had forged—precisely where they stood now—all those objects that had so astonished his visitors. The anchor in the entryway, the candlesticks on the sideboard, the plate on the table, the silverware crossed over the plate, the pipes in the rack, the sword against the wall.

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From that day on, Salem al-Ayariʼs reputation changed, and his fame soon extended beyond the limits of the village. People reverently made way for him as he passed. They plied him with smiles and compliments. The ground at his feet was covered with fainting or crawling sycophants. Many once disdainful women now coveted Salemʼs affections. Many once scornful fathers would have given their eyeteeth to have him as a son-in-law. And a new spite was born in the hearts of those who had no daughters, and in the hearts of those nonexistent daughters a new frustration, the bitterest of all. Salem found himself getting anonymous love letters, found light hands grazing him, perfumed hair brushing him. Delicate feet sought him out under the tables during the dinners offered in his honor, and sometimes worked their way into his trousers and massaged him all the way through to the end. As it happened, the sultanʼs daughter Yosra was of an age to be married. Her father let it be known that he would grant her hand to the man with the most secure and best-defended palace, for the rebel bey Mulay had made a public vow to abduct the princess. Salem al-Ayari put his name forward. The sultan set about inspecting the candidatesʼ abodes. But in every palace he called at he found grounds for complaint. This one was too close to the sea, where Mulay moored his boats. That one was too close to the mountains, where the rebel troops would be hiding. This oneʼs fortifications would crumble with the first assault. The soldiers guarding that one seemed disloyal and easily bribed.

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The sultan lamented. Princess Yosra would never be safe in those castles of straw. That vile dog Mulay would quickly seize her and take her away to his mountain realm. And the sultan didnʼt dare imagine what would become of her then, what outrages would be inflicted on her virginal beauty. He knew all too well how he himself treated his nubile captives. Let us here add a remark of no small importance: Princess Yosra was also deeply in love with the handsome Mulay. The sultan continued his rounds, in vain. No palace could satisfy him. “Porcelain,” he would say as he stood before the thickest walls. And sometimes he had his soldiers demolish them to prove he wasnʼt wrong. “You expect to bring my daughter into this shanty?” he shouted at a prince whoʼd had a triple rampart built around his fortified castle, and deep moats filled with alligators. But his rage reached its peak when he came to Salem alAyariʼs little house. At first, he refused to believe his eyes. How dare this imposter write his name on the list of prospective fiancés? And when Salem appeared on his threshold, the sultan let out a roar like a wild beast, bounding forward to throttle the gnome with his own hands. But then he saw the anchor, and froze in place. Curiosity compelled him to enter the house. Salem said nothing. The sultan saw the table laid for dinner, the candlesticks, the pipes, the chairs. Then the sultan saw the sword.

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“This is the man Iʼve been looking for,” he thought. “No palace will ever be fortified enough to protect Yosra from the assaults of that putrid skunk Mulay and his army of mangy bandits. But no man who owns such a sword could fail to fight them off. My daughter will be safe with him.” “Sheʼs yours,” he said to Salem, who bowed down. The princess let out a little cry and bit her lower lip. A drop of blood stained the sheet. Salem al-Ayari took great pains to hide the truth from his wife. Unaware of his weakness and fearing for her handsome loverʼs life, she found a way to warn Mulay of the risk he would run if he attempted an attack on the house. Not to mention that Mulay had heard tell of Salem, and had no wish to cross him. Terrified, he holed up deep in a cave. Princess Yosra resolved to flee her husbandʼs house. She gave him a thousand caresses, cast him a thousand doe-eyed glances in hopes of convincing him to give her a key. “That way I can go out tomorrow morning without waking you up, and then I can scour the markets to bring you, my lord, the most opulent fabrics, the sweetest honey, the most exquisite almonds, the juiciest fruit, the most aromatic tobacco.” Touched, Salem promised sheʼd have a key the next day. That night, he slipped into the dressing room where the princess kept her jewels. A pair of massive candles on the vanity lit the room. Salem worked until morning with hammer and flame. Having exhausted his supply of iron, he melted down one of the candlesticks to forge Yosraʼs key.

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When she came to join him at dawn in the drawing room she saw it immediately, glinting, and could not hold back a cry of joy that would have inspired suspicion in a husband less trusting than Salem al-Ayari. He threaded a golden chain through the ring of the key lying on the vanity. “From now on you can come and go as you please,” he told his wife as she sat at her mirror, her face aglow with pleasure, and he asked her to lower her head so that he could attach the little chain behind her neck. “The clasp is very fragile, Yosra, let me just put a drop of solder on it.” “That way youʼll be in no danger of losing it,” said Salem, taking his leave of her. But when the princess tried to stand up and run to the door, fly across plains and mountains, and leap joyfully into her belovedʼs arms, the weight of the key held her down on the stool. Here ends the story of Salem al-Ayari, a puny but ingenious blacksmith. (Alas, tomorrow we have to leave Siena.)

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V

That cloud of dust on the horizon is the valiant little tailorʼs cavalry. That dark, imposing form standing out against the sky is the castle. Theyʼre coming closer together. Theyʼll meet before nightfall, each having traveled halfway. In an open cart, the little tailor is bringing four trophies: the giantsʼ eyes, dull blue gelatinous spheres through which the sticky landscape rolls by in slow motion, as if submerged in glue or dampened by a recent shower of mucus—a rather bleak way to look at the world, which might explain the giantsʼ irascible character. But does that mean itʼs a distorted view? It would be risky to say yes. The jellyfish, for instance, every bit as wobbly, translucent, and purplish, is obviously the eye best suited to seeing the ocean. These dirt roads are rain rutted and ill maintained, but the horse needs no pavement to run with a clatter: the paving stones are in its gallop. A crowd gathers in the castleʼs courtyard. The doors are thrown open an hour before the cavalry appears. The thunder of the hooves is allowed in first. The king comes to meet the cart, exchanging a quick glance with the disembodied eyes: mutual dislike, immediate and unshakable. And even if spectacular changes of

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heart have been known to follow an unpromising first encounter, the future bride having spent the whole time disdainfully eyeing the presumptuous cretin who, for his part, is repelled by the harpyʼs grimacing face, no such thing will happen today, for the king orders his soldiers to bury that offal forthwith, “before it stinks up the whole country,” he adds. But his displeasure comes from a very different source, which is the sight of the little tailor safe and sound, not to mention quivering with anticipation, surrounded by a nimbus of applauding flatterers. Now that upstart is going to claim his reward, the princessʼs hand and half the kingdom. “Why not my crown and my chamber pot, while heʼs at it?” (Let us note that it cannot be a coincidence that the king mentally associates these two attributes of his sovereignty, designed on the same model, essentially interchangeable. I too have never been able to see the Siamese monsters displayed on playing cards without reflecting that one of those two heads, no doubt as majestic as the other, is nonetheless an ass. But which one?) And indeed, the little tailor intends to be richly rewarded for his troubles. He ogles the princess, a pretty thing with big, dark eyes, long, silky lashes, a lithe neck holding high her slender, delicate head, four dainty, fragile feet, reddishbrown fur, he wants her as his wife in spite of the ridiculous rumors circulating about her, which he prefers to laugh off, can you believe some people claim she turns into a doe every night? As for half of the kingdom, thatʼs no small thing either, the valiant little tailor is already planning to build an upmarket house on that land, with a gazebo and a neatly trimmed lawn, and a goldfish pond.

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Studies have shown that goldfish preserve a memory in their minds for no more than three seconds, including those that live in glass containers, news which will not fail to arouse a certain anxiety concerning the shelf life of pickles and jams, which are similarly lodged,* but will at the same time allay the potential guilt of the owners of Cyprinidae held captive in those crystal balls where their past and future are instantly intermingled, an immutable, ever-renewed present, a serene eternity where boredom is unknown. A goldfish turns circles in its bowl on the dresser in my childhood bedroom—long before that goldfish, long before it died, I tired of making that same circular gesture with the palm of my hand on the world map sitting next to it, on which a thousand and one times, alone with a fly, I anticipated the battles that would soon pit us against the dipterans in a fight for total and definitive dominion over the world: let me tell you, we still have a long way to go. The goldfish (which is the common name of the golden Carassius, which is the pretentious name of the carp, of which the goldfish is a dwarf variety) could, in its amnesic circumnavigations, easily end up taking me far away from our exciting story. I dream of such an adventureless hero who might perform the very real feat of filling up his days without occupying them—for there is less merit in making it through to nightfall while confronting giants all day, a powerful distraction that leaves little time to experience emptiness, pure time, and repetition, the three abysses that a conscious existence must be able to plumb without flinch* In French, a goldfish bowl is called a bocal, which is also the word for a jar, as of pickles or jam.

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ing: the goldfish is the Cartesian diver who accompanies us in that eventless voyage, he is our only true familiar; in exchange for a daily pinch of plankton, he shows us not only that itʼs possible to live in such absolute absence but also that it might bring you a sort of bliss, a bliss youʼll endeavor to perpetuate with endless re-creations of the figure ∞, following that movement so closely as to become one with it, since the infinity sign is also a picture of a fish—schematic, to be sure, the head and tail left undistinguished, but at the same time perfectly sufficient. Once upon a time there was a goldfish. And the next day? Then too. Of course, the same could be said of monks, for whom each day is exactly like the last. But here is a cloister: ☐. A monkʼs meditations have to reckon with those corners, are forever being interrupted by those walls; little by little they restructure themselves to fit into that box. Itʼs not hard to see how inimical that constraint is to the unbounded, expansive nature of prayer, and how, in such conditions, the monksʼ punctilious souls are formed or deformed: before long thereʼs nothing more for them to do but keep to the program fixed by their orderʼs canon. Their bodies too, as if consumed by panic, their throbbing hearts and minds snagged in the web of their nerves, their bodies break, perpetually shaken by jolts and shudders, limping, twitching, lost. The monksʼ strict observance of rules that should have freed them from any thought of time in fact casts them into the hell of the schedule. From the moment they get up in

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the morning, theyʼre late for every service of the day, or so at least their blood whispers in their ear. The peaceful retreat they were hoping for becomes a space in which all the worldʼs anxieties converge or expand, a battlefield on which pitiless internal conflicts are waged in silence. Impatience is the ruler of the place. An immutable order seems to reign beneath the arcades, in the chapels, in the austere cells and long vaulted rooms of the kitchens, in the libraries, but at the heart of that stillness sits a motor thatʼs gone out of control. It reaches the most fearsome speeds, the most destructive, but still not enough to rip the monastery from its foundations, it hurtles toward its terrified pensioners, who stand hobbled by their robes like the statutes they worship, gripped by madness in their bonds. Which is why most insane asylums are repurposed monasteries. Similarly, the dangerous lunatics who wander the grounds, muttering to themselves, sometimes compulsively gathering to put sugar on fruit jellies or ladle curds into a mold, are Fathers Ambrose, Vincent de Paul, John the Baptist, Francis, Augustine, all of them self-committed upon hearing the voice of God summoning them, having wisely concluded that this is the best place for them. Meanwhile, the goldfish in his bowl has gone around the world twenty more times, heʼs swum the coastline of China, brushed against drifting blue icebergs, passed by a deserted island inhabited by three parakeets, heʼs cruised within sight of all the lands colonized by man, heʼs admired his Norman armoire, his gilded clock, his wedding photo on the mantelpiece, the spines of the books in his library, the water stains on his walls, his unmysterious cat (with its fond-

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ness for lemon, beurre blanc, and Muscadet), heʼs seen all that twenty times before, and in spite of the magnifying effect of the convex glass, heʼs forgotten it all, he starts again from the beginning. The day the valiant little tailor fills the basin in his yard with goldfish (as a water-saving measure: fish swim just as well in fish as in water), I will sit down with him on the stone rim and there weʼll stay, finally at peace, our long wanderings at an end, the big, wide world behind our backs reduced to the narrow path that brought us there. Such serenity! I donʼt want to have legs anymore. But the king tries to wriggle out of his obligation, he ducks and dodges, he refuses to honor the compact and give us what he promised. We sharply protest. We remind him of the terms of the accord. We accuse him of reneging on his word. Perhaps the king is also the villain in this story? We threaten legal action. We implore him (mostly me, actually, the little tailor has fallen into a sullen silence). “Your Majesty, Your Majesty, think of my travails, consider everything I have to endure to earn my pittance, and all the tortuous paths I must travel! Look in your heart: can you really leave me in this slough? Will you not grant the poor poet bed and board? Iʼm not asking for half of your kingdom, unlike this lout”—the spirit of solidarity that once bound the little tailor and me is crumbling, as an attentive reader will already have observed—“all I ask of your munificence is a roof to cover my old head, a fire to warm my old bones. Nor do I, wretched rat that I am, dream of marrying your daughter. I have no such outrageous ambition, unlike the little creep you see beside me. Is that a belt of scalps heʼs tied around his

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waist? Allow me to inform Your Majesty: theyʼre nothing but seven lowly flies. I wonʼt get anywhere near the princess. Iʼm not worthy of kissing the hem of her gown. I will bow down as she passes. She will always find my coat between her foot and the mud. If she has to cross through a swamp, she can walk on my head. “Iʼll gladly swallow the bee that wants to sting her. “My silence will accompany her music everywhere. “Shortened by the thickness of my body, her assassinʼs blade will do her no more harm than her canaryʼs talon. “Let me sing your glory on my lyre! Give me a home. A pile of hay in the castle stable will do nicely. Iʼll gladly eat from your dogsʼ trough, if theyʼll allow me. I will dress in your scarecrowsʼ hand-me-downs. Put me to any use you see fit. “I will bathe your cats with my tongue. “I will spin your flax so fine that spiders will buy thread from us. “Your Majesty, I beseech you, deliver me of this tiresome runt and I will exterminate the moles that wreak havoc on your lawns, I learned a foolproof technique from my grandfather, I once saw it kill a bear.” “First you must capture the unicorn that has been sowing terror and destruction in my forests. Put the halter on her and bring her to me,” says the king. “Iʼll do my best, sire.”

In Which I Attempt to Identify the Unicorn The horse is a mythical animal in which unsuspecting rubes are sometimes made to believe by crooked traders

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who saw off their unicornsʼ horns—those horns being indestructible and difficult to hide, theyʼre easily passed off as narwhal teeth. And the narwhal is a mythical animal in which unsuspecting rubes are sometimes made to believe by crooked ichthyologists who saw off their unicornsʼ horns—those unicorns then being readily passed off as horses. The unicorn was created by sorcery so that gallant knights could joust with their hands in their pockets. Actually, the unicorn is a hippopotamus in disguise, but the costume is so crude that that joker has never managed to make anyone believe in rhinoceroses. Of course unicorns exist: theyʼre the ones who win all the races by a nose. Only a fool could believe in that ridiculous fantasy. Unicorns! How could anyone ever have swallowed such an absurdity? A shepherd must have seen a centaur knocking walnuts from the tree with a pole, and thus are the most improbable legends born. There are no more unicorns than there are butter brochettes.

In Which I Attempt to Seize the Unicorn “If the unicorn exists, than so do I!” shrieks the leprechaun. And the fact is, you canʼt shut him up. 122

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Knowing that the narwhalʼs tusk was once frequently passed off as a unicornʼs horn, we were probably wrong to pay so much attention to that very real and undeniable tusk instead of asking ourselves by what miracle the cetaceanʼs bulbous body could ever have been confused with an equineʼs. Having grown two horns on its forehead, the oryx likely thought it was going to make us forget all about unicorns. And weʼve hardly even noticed. Ground to a fine powder, the horn of a unicorn is a miraculous balm for wounds, notably those caused by a unicorn horn, assuming the horn was ground to a fine powder before the attack. Legend has it that a unicorn need only dip its horn into a pond poisoned by a toadʼs venom to purify the water at once. And indeed, all the animals go there to drink, to bathe, and they find nothing to complain of. Their thirst slaked, their spirits refreshed, they celebrate the marvel with cries and dances. They kneel down before the unicorn, all of them but the toad, of course, who seems a bit put out. “Iʼm the one who deserves all the glory,” he grumbles. “Itʼs all my doing: I didnʼt poison the pond.” And suddenly the unicorn appeared before me. Iʼd so long searched for her in vain. And here she was, trembling, in the middle of the clearing, in the sun. I gently approached. I didnʼt dare believe my eyes. What good fortune had smiled on me, had fulfilled all my desires? Soon I was standing straight in front of her. She didnʼt move. I reached into my bag and took out the blue and red rubber rings I was tired of tossing at the necks of ducks and geese. A unicorn, at long last! 123

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In Which I Inform the King of My Success “Your Majesty, Iʼve done what you asked.” “Where is the animal?” “I tracked the unicorn in your forests for days.” “Where is she?” “I followed her hoofprints on the soft ground of the riverbanks.” “Where is she?” “One night, I saw a phosphorescent hair of her mane glowing in the bushes.” “Where is she?” “Later, I was wrenched from my sleep by her whinny, which is much like a laugh.” “Where is she?” “One morning, as if the creature itself had decided when and where we would meet, she appeared to me.” “Where is she?” “The battle was fierce.” “Where is she?” “Twenty times at least I nearly succumbed.” “Where is she?” “A charging unicorn is a fearsome thing indeed!” “Where is she?” “Finally I got the upper hand.” “Where is she?” “And when I did, I showed no pity.” “Where is the animal?” “I plunged my sword into her body.” “You were supposed to bring her to me, where is she?” “Your soldiers will find the corpse in the forest, just as Iʼve described it, run through by a sword.”

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“I hope for your sake you speak the truth.” “My swordʼs handle is soft and white, like a horseʼs tail. The blade ran straight through the monsterʼs muscles and bowels, then came out between her ears.” That said, I thought it wise to leave the kingdom. I fear that the king didnʼt understand that a thing is indeed captured when it has been described and named. Itʼs precisely the same for a living being: by describing it, I isolate it, I sever the bonds that connect it to the world, I build it a made-to-measure cage. You have to be quick about it, and take care: misunderstandings can have unpleasant consequences. Just because a panther behind bars suddenly resembles a tiger, that doesnʼt mean you should leave the tiger out in the alley. Or else: to confuse the shrimping net and the butterfly net is to catch only wind and water. You can scour the woods all you like in search of the unicorn, sheʼs lying down with her legs beneath her on the fresh litter of my definition. Within reach of her tongue and teeth, a bucket of clear water and a bucket of oats. Good luck making such subtleties understood by a potentate used to hearing his cannons do his thinking for him, a glutton who picks up everything heʼs brought by the drumstick and who cultivates his vines and his flocks on the slopes of his belly. Good luck delivering your little lecture on metaphors into his ear: heʼll name you author-in-residence in his dungeon. Youʼll be served by a full staff of torturers, one for every nerve ending. Torturers, sons of torturers, grandsons of torturers, feared by your terror but skilled in anticipating your every desire. You may also enjoy the company of a skeleton hanging

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on the wall. The efforts that wretch made during his lifetime to free his hands from the iron cuffs will succeed in the end, for God exists, and we die to have our wishes granted. You will be alerted to his deliverance by a quiet rustle, like crumpled paper, which is as close to a clatter as his falling bones will be able to make. The bat will be the lark, the spider the butterfly, the rat will multiply to be at the same time the cow in the meadow, the trusty dog, the cat, the horse, the rabbit, the frog, the deer, and that will be all the nature you get. Not a cloud overhead, yet an endless dripping rain will keep you from slumber. Sometimes you will be visited by a clutch of howling specters. Thanks to them, you will know that night has fallen at some point in the cold and the dark. With hope in your heart, you will scratch at the walls with your fingernails, digging a six-foot-long tunnel through the saltpeter before you finally run up against a solid stone block. Every now and then a filthy hand will open a slot and pass you a crust of bread that will break your teeth more efficiently than that handʼs fist, along with a clay jug holding just enough water to turn it back into mud. I thought it wise to leave the kingdom. I spurred my horse over the dirt roads until nightfall. My black suit was white with dust. To which Méline will attest: “What the hell! Youʼve been writing all day in your pyjamas!” See what Iʼm up against? The valiant little tailor makes for the forest with an ax over his shoulder and a rope around his waist. My solitude and despair leave him unmoved. Heʼs in this thing for him-

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self. A deplorable way to treat me, Iʼm sure weʼll all agree. Sometimes I feel like he sees me as simply a sidekick, a butt of endless ridicule and scorn, the proverb-spouting Sancho Panza to that teenaged Don Quixote. Come to mention it, the glorious act of insecticide that opens his exploits wouldnʼt have been out of place in the epic of the purehearted, dauntless hidalgo. If youʼll recall, the giants he went on to confront did have four wooden wings behind their heads, turning in the wind. Thereʼs no denying it: in the end, “The Valiant Little Tailor” is at best a childish, somewhat inane variation on Cervantesʼs masterpiece, and at worst a drearily uninspired plagiarism. The popular imagination has clearly done some reading. The wellspring that has flowed untamed and unflagging since the dawn of time renews its library card every September. Not that there arenʼt differences. Don Quixote has a head full of illusions but a good and loyal heart. His quest is noble. He has no other ambition than to bring aid and comfort to the afflicted, and by his prowess to conquer the heart of Dulcinea. The little tailor, on the other hand, thinks only of his own tail. O withered widows, with your sunken chests and humped backs, your bony shoulders and sallow faces, your cavernous, dark-circled eyes, in vain will you attempt to arouse his compassion with the sight of you beating your children, your sickly, feeble, fragile children, broken and battered before their time, whom your disgusted country wonʼt know what to do with when sounds the clarion call for the inevitable settling of scores, the little tailor will make no attempt to ease your sorrows, he reserves his valor for causes that will bring him half a kingdom.

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Heʼs a self-centered little swellhead, bursting with vainglory and hungry for riches, he wonʼt make a move to aid the old man lying and groaning in a ditch if that means getting off his horse to help him to his feet, and heʼll trample the poor wretchʼs body with his four ironshod hooves if the ditch lies across his path. Weʼre a long way from the fineness of soul of a Don Quixote, and indeed if I werenʼt here to gingerly take up the story between my thumb and index finger while formulating these judicious maxims for the readerʼs delight and edification, then from the first moments of this journey we would have been mired in such a cesspool of baseness and cruelty that the sewage of our cities would never enter it without pinching its nose and hiking up its skirts. I must also note that the Brothers Grimm, even rowing for all they were worth with their four oars, would never have kept pace with the one-armed Spaniard. How many revisions and rewrites would their text have to undergo to change “The Valiant Little Tailor” into Don Quixote? What a task that would be! But also what a worthy and glorious project! It might take a lifetime, but with patience, trimming here, cutting there, slashing a great deal, adding a ton, making crystal clear everything that was cloaked in vagueness and even in silence, reworking every last sentence, the endeavor may well bear fruit. Thus emended, the little tailorʼs story would become incontestably more compelling, richer in profound meanings that would benefit all humankind, every great book being a mirror that remakes both the world and those who live in it. I could have taken on that task, but the one that fills my days—including when the sun comes tapping on my win128

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dowpane to invite me out for a walk (“The flowers and the birds will be there too,” it promises, “and after a while the river might join us,” to which I answer, “No, sorry, out of the question, go on without me: Iʼve got work to do”)—is every bit as taxing, requiring me to reproduce the story with all the flaws that make it what it is, its clumsy construction, its poverty of imagination and intelligence, its profound stupidity, and to raise it as is to the rank of a major literary work by becoming the author itʼs always been missing. It should be clear, then, that my work here focuses less on this little piece of naïve prose than on the author I want to give it, who must be endowed with superior qualities, first among them the sure hand and infallible judgment necessary to bring such an undertaking to fruition. If we grant that the author—but not the one who makes of his body his hero and invites us to observe his ridiculously brief comings and goings in the limitless space of the picaresque novel—is in fact the principal character of his book— because each of his sentences records the tiniest movements of his sensitive soul—then that author will endeavor tirelessly to refine his discernment, his perception of hidden motives, of invisible analogies and interactions, of precarious architectures, of oblique maneuvers, of private catastrophes, of temporary coalitions, of unspoken intentions and latent threats, in short of all the complex strategies that underlie the general organization of things, which will allow him to give a fuller account of that organization, and his emotions, no longer manipulated by this worldʼs tired old tricks and tics and shticks, but rather rooted in other causes and other injunctions, will reveal the secret world in which our lives actually play out even as our naïve reflexes imprison us in a space of pure convention that has no other reality than the one they confer on it, whose contours and 129

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corners they unconsciously dictate from maps and diagrams drilled into them in the lessons they learned so well. But whatʼs that little forest path up to? Whereʼs it going? Letʼs follow it, weʼll see where it takes us. As usual, Tailor the traveling salesman hasnʼt waited for us. He knows this story already. He doesnʼt need me. Or so he thinks. Heʼs also left his escort at the edge of the woods. Heʼs placing his bets on victories foretold. He lustily sings the silly little refrains he loves (My one pair of undies / ho la li ho la la / has two red holes in its right side*). He knows he has nothing to fear. Everything will go fine and will end even better. The princess will be his wife. It is written. But what the valiant little tailor doesnʼt know is this: the story now has an author. And if thereʼs one thing an author needs, itʼs a healthy disregard for old wivesʼ tales. The elderly widows of Kassel donʼt scare him. And as for the Wildsʼ aged servant Marie, youʼll learn to speak when youʼre spoken to, my girl. Itʼs true that Iʼve made a solemn vow to make only the most necessary improvements to this tale, only those of which I have the clearest picture in my mind, but I could also end up deciding to tell another one, such as, for example, since we now find ourselves deep in the shadowy forest, the story of “Hop Oʼ My Thumb”: the two characters are equally slight and frail, they have the same look about them, and besides, itʼs getting dark. My reader will never notice. The song suddenly falls silent.

* The last line of this little song is a quotation of a very different sort of verse, Rimbaudʼs poem “Le dormeur du val,” which concludes with a glimpse of two bullet holes in the body of a dead soldier.

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The lightʼs going, soon it will be pitch black out here, much to the printerʼs delight: “Now I can use the roller.” The moon appears, then disappears, like a magic lantern, and now all the trees have been felled, theyʼre all lying on the ground—a varnished floor for the dance of their fantastical shadows. So nimbly have I performed my little trick, so deftly have I made the substitution, that Hop Oʼ My Thumb himself is caught unawares. He hasnʼt bothered to leave a trail of pebbles behind him. He turns around: the dark forest has him surrounded. Iʼve got him. (Howls of protest from the runt.) The scene is a department store, present day. A saleslady finally silences the squalling brat with a piece of candy and announces over the intercom: “A little boy dressed in filthy rags is waiting for his hideous stepmother at the customer service desk.” An ogress comes to claim him, stuffing him into her shopping basket among the potatoes and leeks, allʼs well that ends well, the soupʼs as good as done already. To be sure, Iʼve exercised a bit of poetic license on the story as told by Charles Perrault, but nothing near the outrageous liberties taken by the Brothers Grimm, who go so far as to rename the story “Tom Thumb,” as if the original title discommoded them in some way. Their version begins much like “Hans-My-Hedgehog,” for which we should perhaps blame the hesitant or unreliable memories of their doddering lady friends. A peasant and his wife, then, are depressed at their lack of children, whereas Perraultʼs had more than they knew what

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to do with: already the difference is clear. The gauntlet has been thrown down, with no handful of little white pebbles to accompany it. “How could anyone ever complain of having too many children?” Grimm seems to be asking, immediately echoed by Grimm, since those two never miss an opportunity to show off their brotherly harmony. Despairing, the foolhardy wife swears that even a tiny monster no bigger than a thumb would satisfy her longing for motherhood. And thatʼs that: the bean germinates in the damp darkness of her sterile flank. The childlet is lively and smart. Heʼll never grow. He can fit into a horseʼs ear, and thatʼs where he nestles to drive his fatherʼs cart with his voice. One fine day, two carnival workers, surprised to see the riderless horse tranquilly pulling the cart through the woods, are even more surprised when they suddenly hear the invisible driver barking out orders: “Heeyah! heeyah! Giddyup! You worthless old nag, you stubborn old mule, heeyah! heeyah! You broken-down louse, get your carcass in gear or Iʼll make an appointment for you at the glue factory, heeyah! heeyah! you filthy old bag of bones, you mite-riddled pile of meat, you cow, shake your stinking fetlocks, come on, trot, good-for-nothing, try acting like a horse just for once, maybe it will work, heeyah!” The two carnies follow the cart to see whatʼs going on. Thatʼs where things stand when Tom Thumb jumps from the ear of that much put-upon beast of burden and into his fatherʼs outstretched hand; the two strangers immediately offer to buy the minuscule phenomenon from the father. “My son isnʼt for sale,” the father weakly objects, “I love him, I cherish him.” Time to up the ante, the two men understand, also understanding that the transaction will be to their profit, whatever the price: that shrimp will bring in a fortune at fairs

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and public markets. The father proves less venal than we might have expected, but his son urges him to strike a deal with them: “Go on, sell me, Iʼll escape first chance I get,” he murmurs in his ear, “heeyah! giddyup! heeyah! go on, sell me, giddyup, giddyup!” In the end, a fat silver coin seals the deal. One of the carnies sets Tom Thumb on the brim of his hat, and together they head for the city, dreaming of the fabulous sums theyʼll soon be raking in. Claiming he needs to visit the little boysʼ room—leave it to the Brothers Grimm and their coarse sensibilities to bring scatology into the fairy tale—Tom soon asks to get down. “Go ahead and piss on me,” says the carnie, “you wonʼt be the first little bird to dampen my hat.” “Yes, but I need to take a dump,” says the nightingale. They set him down in the grass, and he dives into a shrewʼs den. “Farewell, gentlemen, and Godspeed!” The two carnies claw at the grass in vain: the little rat is safe and sound in that hole. He waits for darkness to fall before he crawls out. His abductors have given up their search. Good thing they didnʼt look up: their cupidity would have hit new heights on spotting Hans-My-Hedgehog perched in his tree. Our last glimpse of them has them striking a deal with the parents of a little girl who weighs seven hundred pounds, with her Siamese twin thrown in. “Now, thereʼs a mouse that wonʼt vanish into the grass,” says one of the carnies. “Your turn to carry,” says the other. For his nightʼs lodging, Tom Thumb slips into an abandoned snail shell, requiring some rather tricky contortions (one touch of realism is enough to make the most improbable fantasy credible: I love literature). There follows an edifying episode of no real interest, very likely invented by the pious blue-hairs of Kassel and dutifully transcribed by Grimm and Grimm. From his hiding

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place, Tom Thumb overhears the conversation of two bandits (should this work be adapted for the stage, these roles could be played by the two carnies, after a costume change) preparing to burgle a rectory, debating the best method of getting through the iron and steel outside to the gold within. Whatʼs the most precious metal? Iron. Because if thereʼs no iron, thereʼs no gold either. Gold is only gold. Iron is gold plus iron. Weʼve got it all wrong from the start. “Tell you what, I can easily wriggle through the bars!” cries a gastropod, much to the thievesʼ surprise. After a while the little fellow shows himself and convinces them to make use of his services: once heʼs in the wealthy priestʼs abode, heʼll hand them whatever they like through the window. And so it is done. But the moment heʼs inside, Tom Thumb shouts at the top of his lungs to alert the maid, setting the thieves to flight. Amen. We would have to wait for the French cinema of the 1950s to see the restoration of a certain code of honor among thieves. Then Tom Thumb goes out into the courtyard, pushes open the stable door. The draft stirs the long white spiderwebs hanging from the beams like bats, which on the contrary are black and donʼt move. Bats dive into sleep headfirst and stay that way. Equally exhausted, Tom Thumb prefers to lie down in the straw. A cow swallows him. He slides on his bottom into the depths of her stomach, which must be fun to try once. But Bossieʼs meal isnʼt over yet. She begins to down enormous quantities of straw. Tom Thumb begins to run out of air and room. “Stop eating hay!

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Stop eating hay, cow!” he cries, but the day when a bovine will obey such orders has not yet been penciled into timeʼs datebook, and indeed even if my prospective eye peers far into the future, I find that day preceded by a titanic, devastating explosion and then an eerie silence. Fortunately, the other thing the local curé demands first thing in the morning is a big mug of nice, creamy milk, so once the maidʼs put her skirts back in place she heads for the stable to milk the cow. As she approaches with the bucket she hears Tom Thumbʼs cries and flees in terror, convinced that some witchery is afoot. The curé orders the demonpossessed animal put to death. Bossieʼs throat is immediately cut, her body dismembered, her entrails thrown onto the manure pile. Tom Thumb labors to free himself, emerges headfirst, imagine the scene, itʼs a second birth, another tiny boy—but just then a hungry wolf comes along and swallows him in one gulp, thank goodness (that he doesnʼt nibble). The wolf is the storytellerʼs faithful dog, his docile companion, vicious with all others, obedient to his master alone, heʼs only following orders when he devours children and grandmothers, by nature heʼs a diffident and retiring creature, the color of dust or snow depending on the season, whose inevitably hollow flanks reverberate with the brisk beat of his genial heart, which leaps like a bellʼs clapper whenever some opportunity for fun arises, a carnivore by physical necessity but more often than we might expect a consumer of acorns and chestnuts and more ants than deer, though he does sometimes put an aged or ill animal out of its misery, and then, beneath the shining moon, he lets out the long mournful cry that should be our cry, should be the cry of any halfway sensitive creature, at the cruelty and brevity and sorrow of life.

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The wolf knows how to formulate and inflect that cry, whereas we humans have knots in our throats: all we can come up with are strangled songs and neckties. But the wolf depicted by the Brothers Grimm is as dumb as a goose. Huddled inside the beastʼs belly, the everresourceful Tom Thumb can do with him as he will. “I know a place where youʼll find all the food you could ask for,” he tells the wolf, “and nothing you wonʼt like.” “Whereʼs that?” salivates the wolf. Tom Thumb gives the animal precise directions to his fatherʼs house, and tells him how to get in (through the basement window, but letʼs wait till dark). In the cellar, the wolf gorges on bacon and sausages. Tom Thumb seems perfectly able to withstand this deluge of chopped meat, he who was so terribly put out to have a bit of hay strewn over him when he was Bossieʼs guest, no, the tale is not made more charming by these little inconsistencies, these amusing contradictions, this slipshod storytelling. Unless—but in that case they should have said so—Tom Thumb swallows the loose meat in turn, rather than being swallowed up in it, and he swells in the wolfʼs belly even more than he once did in his motherʼs: fat bottom, bulging stomach, full cheeks, and vice versa. He looks like one of those Renaissance angels with whom only Leonardo da Vinci did not encumber his canvases, never having managed to solve the enigma of their flight: itʼs hard enough to comprehend with a blackbird or a falcon, but not even the imagination can so much as lift one of those newborn blimps. His appetite sated, the wolf would now like to be on his way. It canʼt be done. Heʼs grown too fat for the basement window, just as Tom Thumb was hoping. He begins to make a tremendous hue and cry in the animalʼs stomach. Awak-

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ened by the din, Tomʼs parents come running. They see the wolf and immediately arm themselves, him with an ax, her with a scythe, charming couple, nicely matched, I donʼt mean to depress my reader but heʼll never know such harmony in his own household. “Iʼll bash his head in,” says the father, “and meanwhile, Mother, you disembowel him.” Thatʼs the secret of a happy marriage: complementarity. She gives a silent nod and clutches the scythe with both hands. This is the—most opportune—moment that Tom Thumb chooses to speak up and be recognized. Great is the emotion in the cellar. Everyone is sniffling, there might be a cold going around. “Heavens be praised! Our child!” and other such exclamations ring out. Even the wolfʼs lower lip seems to be trembling. The second blow finishes him off, his eyes roll out of their sockets and under the sideboard, clawless and fangless amid the dust bunnies. The mother carefully opens the animalʼs stomach with her sewing scissors and discovers her son perfectly fit and very much alive, perhaps just a touch eroded by the animalʼs gastric juices, but since when do you need a pointed nose to get by? They all dance for joy in the cellar. They embrace. Tom Thumb recounts his adventures. His parents listen in delight, covering him with kisses, caresses, and then the brat is led by his remaining ear straight to his room. “Look at this mess! Youʼre going to clean this place up right now!” Now, for the sake of the truth I must say that this abrupt ending is not the dénouement chosen by the Brothers Grimm, who lower the curtain on the heart-tugging reunion scene not without having offered their ragged hero a new set

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of clothes, and then they turn up the lights, or rather turn them down, in the untidy bedroom of the child whose parent has just recited this story, sitting on the edge of the bed, as every night, to accompany the child into sleep and encourage a happy first dream before the inevitable midnight nightmares, the tragedies played out in the tykeʼs head for an audience of one, mommy murdered by a villain, followed by a brusque awakening, the undersheet powerless to stanch the unquellable tears, mommy (who has not been killed by the villain, then) getting up to console the little thing, running her soft, cool hand through the childʼs fine hair, murmuring comforting words, lulling the moppet back to sleep, then staggering back to bed (that brat will be the death of me), vainly seeking the slumber that now escapes her, as every night, the classicism of childrenʼs literature, repetitive, demonstrative, edifying, a central element of the curriculum of childhood, in which everything else also seems to have been written in advance, with the same ink, in which the marvelous and the fantastical themselves are disciplines incorporated into the schooling imposed on children for a period of fifteen years, crowned by a repellent case of acne, in the course of which they admittedly develop a certain ability to get by in their native language (for instance, they can more or less successfully ask for directions) as well as a fine spirit of rebellion, joining together in formidable, uncontrollable hordes who take orders only from advertising agencies. But you can see everything Iʼm writing here more quickly with a single glance out the window. That and a bunch of mopeds, nothing we donʼt all know already. So it seems more than pointless to seed our hypnagogic readings with these subliminal life lessons for the beloved

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little listener who drools on his pillow or so voraciously sucks his thumb that we might wonder how many fingers we might have on our hands if we hadnʼt eaten any in our earliest years as we listened to these inane stories, and what extraordinary abilities we might thereby have deprived ourselves of—Iʼll leave you to imagine everything we would have been able to grasp and hold fast without those mutilations, we could at the very least have pressed down all the piano keys at once instead of having to flit constantly from one to the other. Not to mention that every inserted lesson is inevitably redundant, given the moral system inscribed in the very structure of these tales, these tedious parables that might as well have been filtered through Jesusʼs beard, in which the wicked are always punished and the well-behaved boy is rewarded as if Good and Evil were at every moment the only two forces at work, and as if there were no other way to understand ourselves and the world around us than to organize regular jousts, once every ten minutes or so, between the white knight and the black knight, taking care to position the latter with the sun in his eyes, to remove one leg from his horse, and to saw off his lance. Thus are our lives reduced to that eternal, tiresome confrontation, because weʼve read too many folktales. But perhaps we need only perform a tiny act of sabotage on their implacable machinery—bending the rails a little, twisting the camshafts, warping the gears—to create not a bunch of submissive rule obeyers but free, proud people and revolutionary masses. You donʼt touch a thing, or almost, you just drop in the proverbial grain of sand, insert an apostrophe in the faithfully transcribed text and it contradicts itself: all cant canʼt,

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any wont wonʼt . . . Or you could let homophony work its magic: if water becomes otter, all thatʼs left is an animal lying in a dry riverbed. See how little it takes to hold up the massive rafts of lumber floating down this worldʼs watercourses, and to bring the sawmillsʼ relentless work of destruction grinding to a halt. From what I hear, we still need those forests so we can breathe.

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VI

The valiant little tailor is first in line: he fills his lungs with pure woodland air. The fresh oxygen smells faintly of mushrooms, dead leaves, rotting meat, and unicorn dung. I once knew a very elegant, very charming girl who spent her days with her fists clenched on her knees, her torso bent forward, her face scarlet, her teeth gritted, her brow sweating, exhausting herself in fruitless efforts. There was no choice but to tell her she was a fairy, sheʼd never manage it, she had better things to do. Nature did not grant the unicorn that exemption: its droppings follow it everywhere it goes. Still steaming. The valiant little tailor has no trouble tracking the creature down. A unicorn can be readily distinguished from all other animals by the long, twisted, pointed rostrum growing from the top of its skull, a curious object, and by its luminous, dazzling white coat. Some moons have that same glow, very flattering for the sun as he admires his reflection. Imagine a beautiful trembling unicorn mare. Long, nervous shivers run over her back. Her shapely thighs make you yearn to take a good bite. It would be a pleasure to mate with her. But her lower leg turns scrawny below the knee, just skin and bone, and her eye oozes, she has too many yellow teeth, her

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fat gray tongue has chosen to take up residence in her left nostril. If we can believe the horseflies, that horned beast is livestock like any other: all the snot and rheum you can suck down, free for the taking. Sheʼs certainly not the first cow that ever lost a horn, but none before her ever took such pride in it, adopting that air of superiority, displaying the disdainful gaze that comes with being one of a kind. The five-legged sheep is a phenomenon too. At least he doesnʼt display that inert, useless fifth limb as if it were some magical spur. He should. After all, heʼs the only unicorn there is in this world. Our hero deftly steps to one side and the monster charging at him horn-first ends up stuck in a tree trunk like an arrow or a nail, despite the bas-relief helix on her horn, precisely the same design as a screw, which would rather suggest— suppose for just a moment we stopped talking nonsense on the pretext that this is all just a freewheeling fantasy—that the little tailor must have picked up the unicorn, pressed her to the tree, and imparted a regular rotational motion while maintaining sufficient pressure to drill the horn into the wood: that way the storyteller would produce the desired effect without insulting the exacting craftsmen of the tool-anddie guild. But evidently Iʼm dreaming, even as all the laws of logic and physics are on my side. The little tailor pats the imprisoned mareʼs flanks, chuckling under his breath. She can struggle all she likes. Her

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blond tail whips only her own rump, which is soon striped by red welts, torn and bleeding, you have to wonder if what weʼre watching is actually the punishment meted out to an eleven-year-old schoolgirl guilty of a grammatical slip, and this whole story nothing more than the daydream in which the poor little thing takes refuge to endure the pain. The venerable oak hasnʼt even noticed, unless itʼs serenely ignoring all this trivial to-do. The unicornʼs vain attempts to free herself shake not even the tiniest and tenderest of the oakʼs lobed leaves. That treeʼs been around, itʼs seen a thing or two. Itʼs already celebrated its third centennial. It knew Jean de la Fontaine. Could that man piss! Sometimes a bird perches on her horn as if on a branch: builds a nest, lays eggs, keeps them warm till they hatch, then the whole brood scatters, twittering and squawking. A squirrel sharpens his teeth on her horn, a boa enfolds it, a gibbon swings from it. A sloth hangs upside down from it, by the nails of its hands and feet. And hereʼs the most spectacular thing of all: the sloth drifts off to sleep. Iʼm simply saying whatʼs true. Heʼs the only sleeping beauty there is in this world. The valiant little tailor has picked up the ax in both hands, and now he very slowly raises it over his head. Heʼs going to strike. Strangely, this time, heʼs not using a rag. The animal seems frightened all the same. Sheʼs trembling from head to hoof.

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When I was fifteen years old, I had an air rifle: I well know that feeling of omnipotence. I shot at inanimate targets, tin cans, bottles, at worst the apples in a tree. And then one day I committed an irreparable crime. I want you to believe me. I often joke, but now Iʼm asking you to believe me. Maybe Iʼm writing this book only to unburden myself of my guilt. (Otherwise, why write yet another book?) To make this confession. I killed a woman. Sheʼd gone out for a walk and lost her way. She came through a hedge and found herself in our backyard, at the far end, in the poplar trees. As it happened I was there too, with my rifle. I was amusing myself by shooting at a tin can thrown as high in the air as I could. Sometimes, yes, I hit it. With practice, Iʼd become a fairly good shot, the sharpest gunman west of the Rio Grande (i.e., the Hyrôme, which trickled along just past the yard). Suddenly I caught sight of her. A young woman. She was wearing a pale blue skirt and a jacket or vest of the same color, open over a bright yellow Tshirt, I remember that. I remember it clearly. I remember it all very clearly. I wasnʼt firing to defend the family property against the intruder. I donʼt know why I fired. Because she was a moving, colorful target. Because I had that power. She was seven or eight yards away, she hadnʼt seen me. Her gaze met mine just as I fired. It was only a little flat-nose pellet, but it hit her in the throat. She fell in the grass without a cry. I took a few steps toward her. She was still alive. She lay on her stomach, writhing, her arms spread wide, slapping the ground. I was petrified, numb, overcome by the stupidity of

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what Iʼd just done. I stood there for many long minutes, powerless to think or act. An especially violent spasm flipped her over on her back. Her shirt was stained with blood, I was blind to everything else, everything but that horrible red blot against the yellow. Her breathing grew ever more labored. She was drowning in her own hemorrhaging blood. Her death throes dragged on and on. I didnʼt make a move in her direction. At long last she stiffened: she was dead. I picked up my rifle by the barrel and smashed it against a poplar tree, then threw it into the Rio Grande. Even today I donʼt know if I was simply trying to get rid of the incriminating weapon or if my senseless act had made the thing genuinely loathsome to me. But my heart burned with shame as I stood there before that still body whose life Iʼd stolen. I weep into my hands. I scream into the sky. I vomit into the grass. For at least an hour, I stay there beside the corpse, just as shattered and broken. The punctured, dented tin can is lying not far off, and I find that ridiculous juxtaposition unbearable, even though I canʼt summon the strength to stand up and get rid of it. Finally I manage, I pick up the can, cutting myself in the process, I furiously throw it far away, and that gesture, which Iʼd made a thousand times in my play with that rifle, reminds me of the carefreeness Iʼve now lost forever, the simpleminded innocence I once had without even realizing it, the unalloyed happiness I didnʼt know how to enjoy, preferring to shoot at tin cans, the happiness I didnʼt know how to savor second by second as we must also do, my friends, with our health, my friends who are reading these lines digging your nails into your wrists, your teeth chattering, holding back a sob, we must treat our health the same way, for as long as we have it: we can lose it as quickly as we might lose a hair, and it will never come back.

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I found the strength to bury the body. My father kept his garden tools in a shed. I went off and came back with a spade and a shovel. I dug a very wide, very deep hole, a grave, just next to the body so all I would have to do was push her in, give her a nudge with the spade, without having to touch her, to transport her. Too heavy for me. I covered the grave. I stamped on the dirt to tamp it down. The nettles grew back. I tried to forget. Do some research, my friends who are reading these lines and still refuse to believe me. Look it up, and you will discover that there was indeed an unexplained disappearance in the region in July 1979. The police never troubled me or anyone else. I donʼt know if the statute of limitations has run out by now. Iʼm ready to take responsibility, if I have to, today Iʼm finally ready. I wonʼt try to dodge it anymore. And yet, believe you me, Iʼve already paid the price. Iʼve known my dark nights of the soul. I know how grim the morning can be, how gloomy the afternoon. Have I ever had one moment of happiness since that cursed day? Do I ever know peace or serenity? All I know is anguish, guilt, remorse, insomnia, despair. It wasnʼt a woman, it was a chickadee. Everything else is true. Letʼs not forget, weʼre dealing with a tiny wisp of a fellow here: even brandished at armʼs length over his head, his ax canʼt touch the unicornʼs withers. The valiant little tailor looks around for a stump to climb up on. Weʼre not only in

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a forest, weʼre also in a folktale: he soon finds one. Clambers aboard. Raises his ax vertically, very slowly. Is about to strike. Then realizes the stump heʼs so fearsomely and menacingly perched on is twelve yards away from the unicorn. And simultaneously grasps that a stump is not a stool. “Well, thatʼs a shame! Not even in a fairy tale?” Thatʼs right, my boy, not even in fairy tales. Youʼll have to come up with something else. “Well, as a matter of fact, I see a way: I could begin by chopping off all the animalʼs legs, then it would be closer to the ground.” Not an inch closer, no, you donʼt seem to understand how solid that horn is, and how firmly driven into the wood. Thus amputated, your unicorn would still be stuck in the tree— with you underneath it, gazing up as if to watch the clouds go by. Hey, that one kind of looks like a horse. But the valiant little tailor has bested too many giants to fear the taunts of the one telling his story today. Iʼm glad to say that I have neither a licorice-colored beard nor a tobaccocolored velvet vest nor pipe smoke in my nostrils, nor the bulging belly that smothers the torso of the storyteller as heʼs typically imagined, something of a caricature—a perfect fit with the storyʼs other stock players—whose gesticulations may seem intended to dramatize his tale but far more likely constitute the poor manʼs last desperate struggle as he tries to find something to cling to, a branch, your helping hand, lest he sink like a stone. I donʼt look like that man. But compared to the little tailor Iʼm a giant. Iʼm even quite an athlete, no point in hiding it. To him, my bathtub is

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an Olympic pool. Thatʼs where I sculpt my physique, doing one length on my back every day. Even sitting at my desk, I tower over that pipsqueak head and shoulders. But whatever I write about him, he doesnʼt give a damn. He never reads his reviews. And my reader has eyes only for him. Whoʼs that staring blankly into space? Itʼs the vacant little tailor. Who changes from day to day? Itʼs the variant little tailor. Who has no home of his own? Itʼs the vagrant little tailor. Whoʼs that shouting? Itʼs the vociferant little tailor. Who keeps a weather eye out? Itʼs the vigilant little tailor. Whoʼs the hero? Itʼs the violent little tailor! Heʼs seen his share of storytellers come and go. Theyʼre all dead, just as I will be one day. But not him: heʼs OK, heʼll be fine. Still there, still valiant. Those gentlemen come along one after the other, each casting him in his own way. They play with that little bar of soap, posing as if they were sculpting in marble. Every time, the goal is to produce a definitive version of the adventure. As if. The storyteller is still wondering how to begin, with what, where, and then in one ear he hears the little tailor perched on his shoulder, hailing that fat marmalade merchant. Quick as he can, he catches up with her in the stair148

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way: hereʼs the start of the story, where it begins, with what. Every time, thatʼs how the definitive version begins. The storyteller has as little control over the events as a play-byplay man—perhaps red and sweating, but not part of the game—or as a historian: he shows up after the battle clacking his tongue to imitate the sound of galloping horses, as if his whinnying voice werenʼt enough. Such is the meager extent of the storytellerʼs power: he can embellish a little, lie a little, forget a little. Heʼs a free man. As for the valiant little tailor, heʼs perfectly capable of dealing with an occasional newly invented situation and coming through it to his advantage. Heʼs a solid character, well drawn, ingenuity and trickery are his calling cards. Confronted with an unexpected event, he wonʼt reflexively turn to force, nor will he hide or run away. Heʼll let his essential qualities express themselves spontaneously. Letʼs take an example: if he spies a bear beset by enraged bees, he wonʼt for a moment wonder which side to take. After heʼs made a feast of the honey while the bees are away, heʼll go back to the scene of the battle to strip the bear of its soft coat and sell it. He ties a stone to the end of his rope and throws it as high as he can into the boughs of a tree. Just as he hoped, the rope wraps around a branch. Now the little tailor can easily hoist himself up, with the ax thrust through his belt. Soon heʼs looking down on the bleating unicorn. One blow of the ax succeeds in severing an ear. Missed. Who vacillates? Itʼs the vacillant little tailor. 149

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On the second try the ax connects, slices through the flesh, severs the vertebrae. The unicornʼs blood pours out, all her blood at once, like water from a broken vase. Her white coat is ruined. Her buckling legs will carry her no more, but the animal remains hanging in midair on the axis of its horn. The valiant little tailor goes back to his escort at the edge of the woods. Once again, he refuses all aid. He jumps onto a chariot yoked to two splendid white horses, nimbly grasps the reins, and races alone into the forest. Arriving on the scene of his feat, he maneuvers the chariot to a spot beneath the unicornʼs suspended body. Then, with one blow of his ax, he slices off the tusk flush with the forehead. And there we are. Adventurers will long wander these woods in search of that horn, hoping for fortune or fame. A chivalric order will be founded for the sole purpose of locating that horn. They still hold meetings on the first Sunday of each month. The return to the castle causes a tremendous sensation. The crowd jams the roadsides to hail the triumphal cortege. Everyone wants to see the indestructible unicorn finally defeated, lying in the chariot laboriously pulled by a magnificent, sweat-drenched white horse whose bit drags a pained smile from it every time our hero raises his arms to salute the crowd. The tale goes on this way. Again the king refuses the little tailor the princessʼs hand, he demands a new feat, as it happens a furious boar has been wreaking fearsome damage in the surrounding countryside, the valiant little tailor doesnʼt hesitate to confront it, the idiotic beast runs after him into a chapel that just happens to be there, but the little tailor slips

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out through a narrow opening, quickly circles the building and closes the door on the boar, which is now trapped, the kingʼs hunters have only to fill it with arrows through the windows. Nothing terribly original. One suspects the Grimm Bros. are running a little short on ideas, constrained, itʼs true, let us allow them this excuse, by the telling of the widows of Kassel and their resolve not to misrepresent the popular imagination they claim to be their master. Thatʼs all very well, but this latest episode is entirely superfluous, scarcely distinguishable from the one before: the unicorn has devolved into a boar, captured once again by a side step on the part of the valiant little tailor, but thereʼs no audacity this time, thereʼs no brio. Even the matador acclaimed for his courage and skill, his genius for balletic combat on the sand, his disdainful elegance, his implacable sword, lightning fast, deadly as the fire of God—what aficionado would cross the street to see him do battle with a beef bourguignon in a porcelain arena? Certainly not me, I already thought him grotesque enough facing the Andalusian bull. A little runt puffing out his chest in the presence of a bovine, heʼll swell and swell and then heʼll pop, thereʼs another story we already know the ending to.* With a wild boar on his tally, the valiant little tailor, our magical hero, that lively sprite, that elfin rascal, joins the glorious ranks of the devoted, potbellied regulators of the * See La Fontaineʼs fable “The Frog That Wished to Be as Big as the Ox” or one of its many classical forerunners.

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woodland fauna who, every Saturday in fall, rather than enjoy some sort of amusement after a hard week of work, take up arms to defend our civilization against the invading forces of baby boars. How to deny the vital role hunters play in preserving wildlife? Take the lead out of the ringdove and youʼll see how little is left of that beautiful bird. Humankind might disappear in much the same way were it not for the hunters tending just as carefully to our preservation. Is it not obvious that without those brave rifles the boars would have long since taken over our forests, our fields, but also our cities, pushing ever onward with their obscene snouts? And what would become of our children under the reign of those louts, with their taste for fresh meat? The doe and the woodcock must also be placed in the cross hairs, capable as they are of who knows what barbaric tyrannies: common sense advises us not to linger on that point in our blissful ignorance, but rather to aim true. Without the courageous intervention of a handful of elite snipers, would we not live beneath a sky darkened by chickadees, our nerves destroyed by their tedious chattering, corroding us where we stand in our shoes with their acidic droppings, would we not all be dead already, smothered by that absurd eiderdown? Still, we would be within our rights to bemoan the prosaicness of an episode that runs counter to the dramatic arc of the story, which has up to now offered a succession of ever more astonishing twists and turns, ever more arduous trials for the valiant little tailor, who has already vanquished two giants and a unicorn. What king would be so unenlightened as to order such a hero to capture a wild pig in hopes that the

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vicious beast will overcome his valor, as if this latest challenge, though less perilous than those he has already so effortlessly met, would condemn him to certain death? Yes, we all know what inborn idiots kings are—born to their older sisters and their grandnephews—but really. Itʼs just not serious storytelling. Nor is it particularly fanciful. I strongly suspect that the pious biddies of Kassel invented this episode on the grounds that the tale lacked religious spirit. Unable to imagine anything beyond their own cranium, or to extract from the walnut of their brain any color other than the brown stain smeared on the pews of country churches, they must have laboriously concocted this drab little incident, modeled on the unicorn scene and transported into a chapel of the sort that proliferate deep in any dark forest, everyone knows that, thereʼs hardly room left for the trees. And so the raging, steaming devil is trapped in the house of God. Heʼll soon be filled full of arrows. Heʼll die. The simple, pudgy* little tailor has conquered the dragon of evil. He captured it in the trap of its own temptation by pretending to offer up his tasty soul like a dish of puréed chestnuts. But the boar rips its horrid maw on the spiny husk. It wails like the damned, making better use of the vaulted ceilingʼs resonance than any harmonium ever would. It lies on one side, its legs twitching, its eye rolling from left to right, deep in its socket like the moon at the bottom of a well, twisting the optic nerve tight as it will go, until that frantic eyeball suddenly spins like a top in the other direction, from * Chevillard is fond of quoting himself, and this is an example: those two adjectives (naïf and globuleux in the original) constitute a formula to describe the intrusive hedgehog at the center of his earlier novel Du hérisson.

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right to left. Its ridiculous snout, like an elephant whose foot is its trunk, hits the cold tiles with a minuscule splat. Its disheveled, blood-and-saliva-soaked bristles might well have served as a toothbrush for a family of hyenas. Itʼs all too clear what Dorothea Viehmann and the Hassenpflug sisters are up to here. They didnʼt insert this episode just to add a trophy to the little tailorʼs collection, one of those hairy heads that naturally find their place and their peers on the walls of aristocratic drawing rooms, among the family portraits they objectively resemble—all those stiff, gruff, bushy-browed old uncles are clearly brothers. Rather, our widowsʼ mission is to bring God into this affair before the portrait of the little tailor as an unscrupulous arriviste is finished and solemnly hung, on his wedding night, in the galleries of his castle. Perhaps thereʼs still time to rehabilitate his image, they think, or at least recruit him to the side of the angels. This tale will be read by generations of children, it would be a shame not to seize the opportunity to edify those innocents a little. Godʼs intervention is decisive. Without that providential chapel lying open before him (God never abandons the pure of heart), the monster would have toppled, trampled, and crumpled the little tailor, then gutted him and eaten him raw. Therefore, my child, you must live your life by the teachings of your catechism, and then you will be succored in times of danger, supported in your trials, God will recognize you and cherish you like his own son. But if you stray, even by a hairʼs breadth, you will be brutally disciplined and punished, for your heart will never be hard enough to withstand the wild boarʼs canines.

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How can we criticize these ladies for their ham-handed proselytizing and their indiscreet attempts to rework the tale? They think theyʼre doing the right thing. Theyʼre convinced a story should offer an example, a parable. Weʼre not going to change their minds now. More surprising, and in all honesty more lamentable, is Grimm und Grimmʼs credulity. They swallow the widowsʼ version hook, line, and sinker, and they never suspect any trickery. Further on, weʼll see the valiant little tailor with a slight case of laryngitis, which he remedies by downing two spoonfuls of Wildʼs Syrup, whereupon he immediately goes back to his idiotic song in clear, ringing tones: the aged Marie was most devoted to her master and his profits. Jacob Grimm, I know of only one man as naïve as you, and his name is Wilhelm Grimm. Or else, betraying all your declarations of principle, did you perhaps have a hand in these machinations? No, I canʼt see it. Thereʼs not a trace of dishonesty in you. Your modesty isnʼt feigned, Grimm, Grimm, you saw a horse running and thought youʼd make quicker progress writing with four hands. You traveled all through Hesse, Saxony, Thuringia, to cull your whimsical tales from the mouths of the moribund—their dry lips closed forever on the happilyever-after. You rescued those thousand and one tales the old folk once took with them to their graves, Grimm, Grimm, and the children into their slumbers. You turned your back on your nineteenth-century German bourgeois status. Up to a certain point at least, and for that I offer you my homage, Grimm, Grimm, I salute you, you succeeded in keeping your distance from the bourgeoisie, from Germany, and from the nineteenth century. You struggled to make your way, not

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without a certain grace, beneath those three layers of starch, through the mists of the ambient Romanticism. Pathos and gravitas had locked every exit. The sky hung like lead over your heads, Grimm, Grimm, and the ground beneath your feet was sticky with young Wertherʼs mucous tears. Nothing ever put a dent in your good humor. I would very much like to use the phrase fun-loving here, to see it printed for the first time in history on the subject of nineteenth-century Germany. Because your unshakable good cheer defied that depressing atmosphere, Grimm, Grimm, even if you first had to combat that ponderousness in yourselves, Germany, bourgeoisie, nineteenth century, I see no such triple chin on you, Jacob, nor on you, Wilhelm, I see no such thing in the portrait from the Staatliche Museum. Your faces express a certain seriousness, but that severe mask isnʼt your real face, Iʼm convinced, itʼs a pose for the painter—besides, Jacob, scowling for all heʼs worth, has forgotten to take off his clownish hat, and under the desk Wilhelm is still wearing his gigantic bulge-toed purple shoes (I saw them as I was picking up my eraser). In the course of these pages Iʼve said many cruel things about you, Grimm, Grimm, donʼt take it amiss, I never meant a word of it. Try to understand me, I have to contend with the valiant little tailor all on my own, my brother isnʼt here, busy as he is with noble tasks, heʼs raising his children, I have to do all the work with no one to help me, and I have only two hands, and the left is a blind and deaf servant, he makes a mess of every task heʼs assigned, I keep him on solely out of compassion, in truth I have only one hand, Grimm, Grimm, thereʼs my sad secret, and the only reason, alas, for my resentment when I think of you. In truth, no one admires more than I your rigor, your

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organization—there at least is one trait of your culture you kept, for the good of your project. You never claimed to be the authors of your stories. From the beginning, you erased the preening blowhard that is the author, you dissolved him in your brotherly association. Not once did you try to pass off the marvelous inventions of the popular genius as your own, nor did you try to crown yourself with laurels planted and watered by others. How could I not have felt some spite, Grimm, Grimm, since thatʼs precisely what Iʼve set out to do here? I had to devalue your very honorable work to justify mine, my laborious attempt at appropriation. But the fact is, Grimm, Grimm, our encounter has made me a better person. Inserted or not by the widows of Kassel, the moral message contained in your tales has truly affected me. The icy fist that was clamped over my heart melted at once. I could breathe more freely, more easily. Your goodness entered into me, I overflowed with it. Iʼd felt that only one time before, long ago, in my childhood, one day when Iʼd eaten too much honey. Today I am horrified at my former ambitions. I find them more pathetic than anything else. Like the doubly cursed, doubly afflicted mole, blind beneath the skirt, I came so close to beauty and never saw it. I was bent on blazing my own trail, carving out my own path: it was a rut I went back and forth in a hundred times, scraping my sides, narrow, damp, cold, where no one would ever want to follow me, sunk in the fetid soil among the white worms, the silent fossils, the worn-down coins, the sordid labyrinth of the self, where no one else ever ventures, where I wandered interminably through my own stench, on my own multiplied footprints.

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My trail was fresh, my wallow still warm, my excrement still hot. Iʼd been this way before, that was certain, Iʼd surely catch up with myself in the end—and then what? Once I was tracked down, back in my own company, how would I react? Would I embrace me, or would I slit my throat? Either way, could I stand to take myself in my arms? What, in the end, did I want with myself? What was it that I was hoping to find, that I had and that wasnʼt in my pockets? I donʼt know, and I donʼt even care anymore. What a pointless waste of time! Shame overcomes me when I think of it. Ever since this morning, the same cracked star ornaments my forehead and my mirror. Now my only wish is to make my humble contribution to the collective labor, to be one of the thousand anonymous voices participating in this taleʼs creation. Iʼve got a few little touch-ups in mind, they wouldnʼt do the story any harm. Iʼm going to change my sex, get married, poison my husband, move to Kassel, and give Grimm-Grimm my thoughts on revisions. There are many things that can be improved. For instance, thereʼs an urgent need for a quick update to the kind of exploits the king demands of the valiant little tailor. All this time weʼve been making do with two or three formulas, always the same, you must agree that simply canʼt go on. Boredom threatens. The most patient reader has already decided to sell his copy of the book. The list that follows does not claim to exhaust all the possibilities. In any case, itʼs in the public domain. I hereby grant all storytellers blanket permission to draw on it as they like. It makes me happy to do what I can, free of charge, to aid in the construction of the common work. The popular genius seems as

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if it could use a little of my brainpower. Iʼm here, incognito, I place myself at its service. One hundred new feats and challenges, designed for the use of sovereigns wishing to test the mettle and valor of their daughtersʼ suitors, overaccustomed as they are to battling giants, unicorns, and dragons. Also conceived for the purpose of varying the sadly monotonous trade of the storyteller. 1.

Exterminate the coypu, the potato beetle, and the European catfish, because really, the damage those three do!

2.

Spill water (all water).

3.

Use the power of the wind against the wind to knock

4.

Devise a successful worldwide marketing campaign

the wind out of it. for burning chairs and beds of thorns. 5.

Determine whether it was the white horse or the black horse that won the race in the zebra.

6. 7.

Say the punch line that explains everything. From a grapevine, create an object thatʼs pleasing to the senses and isnʼt wine.

8.

Drown an eel in an elixir of long life.

9.

What is the greatest advance that could be made at the foot of a coconut tree? Resolve that mystery by example: ascend to the apes.

10.

Change the end of the tale of which you are the legendary and paradigmatic hero.

11.

Send the rest of the lion through the burning hoop of its mane.

12.

With a handsaw, carve a poem from the dictionary (subject open).

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13.

Extract the last twelve rainfalls from the sea.

14.

Scientifically prove that the emerald, the ruby, and the sapphire are three beetles.

15.

Paint a full-length portrait of your worst enemy on a mirror.

16.

Imagine eighty-four more new challenges or feats.

17.

Retrieve the platypusʼs antlers from the deer.

18.

Serve your guests something other than lizard, the inevitable lizard, on the dishes that ornament your walls.

19.

Sculpt a hand out of soap.

20.

Create a useful object using a peach, a file, a scarf, and the tooth of a timber wolf.

21.

Turn a lake inside out.

22.

Aim your arrow at your bow.

23.

Snow.

24.

Resuscitate a chickadee thatʼs been dead for twentythree years.

25.

Play a game of osselets using your own carpals and metacarpals.*

26.

Find a better use for your boots and hat than putting them on your feet and head.

27.

Reconcile a gull and a crow so perfectly that they can no longer be distinguished from an everyday couple of magpies.

28.

Set the Alps into the Pyrenees (only one way to go

29.

Subtract a dwarf from a giant.

about this, and only one way theyʼll fit).

* Osselets is a game a bit like jacks. The Romans played it with sheep knuckles; French schoolchildren play it with metal representations of those knuckles.

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30.

Disgust a vulture.

31.

Perm the urchins.

32.

Without breaking anything, take the sand back out of glass.

33.

Solve the following riddle: thanks to what wonder can you reach the middle of a ladder while sparing yourself the tedious exertion of climbing its rungs? (Answer: a step stool.)

34.

Simultaneously die of old age and something else.

35.

Train parrots to argue the opposite of everything

36.

Pick an earthwormʼs pockets.

37.

Wave your arm in such a way that it can be seen from

they hear.

every point of the earth. 38.

Without freeing the bird, remove the cube of sky that is also enclosed in the cage.

39.

Stand facing a full set of cook pots. On the left-hand side, add ever more pots, ever smaller, until the very notion of a cook pot disappears; on right-hand side, add ever more pots, ever larger, up to the one that contains the entire world.

40.

Extract all the acidity from a lemon with a pair of

41.

Live a rich, full life in propane.

42.

Locate and reattach the upper jaw of a staircase.

43.

With one single set of black pieces, defeat all

fireplace tongs.

the white pieces attacking at once from all the chessboards in the world. 44.

Lay the first egg of a shabracked (and crested) gourlette.

45.

Set things to rights (for example: the apricot is a delectable fruit, but it doesnʼt live up to its promise as

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a bivalve mollusk; between its lobes, then, resettle the yielding clam, at present painfully compressed and chafed by its calcareous shell). 46.

Make a stack of all the worldʼs deserts.

47.

Using your body as a barrier, defend the queen against the ravages of age.

48.

Find another name for cats, supplanting the current word within three days.

49.

Shield the clouds from the spattering rain.

50.

Add a new element to the bullfighterʼs routine: with a skimmer, remove the foam from the lips of the charging beast.

51.

The philosopherʼs stone being a naïve fairy tale, devise a one-way treadmill from lead to gold.

52.

Stuff three hundred living piranhas with your bare hands; serve with a little tune played on the flute.

53.

Dress all animals in suede.

54.

Drive a nail with the opposite of a hammer.

55.

Brush your bones.

56.

Melt a candle by blowing on it.

57.

Put the sideboard in the sideboard, then put that sideboard in the sideboard drawer.

58.

Wrap a ballerina in the string of a top.

59.

Using an eraser, wipe out the enemy, his castle, his army.

60.

Before an assembly of eminent entomologists, produce the set of plushy little pyjamas that will convince them that nocturnal moths are in fact the same thing as diurnal butterflies.

61.

Show that the bladeless knife whose handle is missing is in reality a pedestal-free birdbath with no basin.

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62.

Braid together all your muscles until you have only one, but what a muscle! The boa constrictorʼs.

63.

If it is indeed true that the sweet, pale princess—or even Méline herself—was created from clay, then what excrement was used for the warty toad? Resolve that mystery.

64.

Beat the dead man until he gets back on his feet.

65.

Start growing again.

66.

How to explain the high cost of crocodile shoes, given that animalʼs tendency to gape while alive? Resolve that mystery.

67.

Make yourself indispensable in an ant colony (you have one week).

68.

Stitch together the two sides of the horizon.

69.

Make the blackness of ebony a trifle more understated.

70.

Add a whale.

71.

Forge a kite.

72.

Cook a rabbit pâté without killing the animal.

73.

Extract the column of emptiness that plugs up a

74.

Build an impregnable wall of separation between

75.

Reverse the syntactical structures of two languages

76.

On an ice floe, find purple, silk, and thirteen street

77.

The eyes being our clearest-sighted organs, install a

dry well. crickets and the rest of the world. with neither side noticing. names. corrective lens outside the glasses frames to improve the rest of the bodyʼs vision, which is only so-so. 78.

Disguise yourself as an oak tree every day for at least a century.

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79.

Train an elephant to stand upright on its hind legs and wear a hat, and then quickly ask that debonair man in the street how one might go about lifting a one-ton load.

80.

Allow the Middle Ages to enjoy the most recent technological advances.

81.

Onto a guitar, which could put them to good use, graft the idle arms of a chair.

82.

Derive silence from the combination of a drumroll and a braying ass.

83.

Given that neither a newbornʼs nor a corpseʼs smile is an actual smile but in both cases merely a random rictus, a grimace, prove that happiness is an illusion and that there is in reality not one single valid reason for feeling good about anything ever.

84.

Rescue from obscurity a rat thatʼs been dead for ten centuries.

85.

Throw a pitchfork farther than any javelin, thereby winning the first four places in the competition.

86. 87.

Rival the influence of the moon on the tides. Draw up blueprints for a new turtle shell, with a little plot for growing lettuce.

88.

Sweet-talk a horse until it stops turning its back on its rider.

89.

Discover the seven most incredible unknown facts in the history of the world, and relate them to us in seven accounts written in a language so beautiful it will fascinate us more than the facts themselves.

90.

Bring the two hemispheres one yard closer together.

91.

When the day comes that bees also gather flour, we will find a complete snack awaiting us in hollow tree trunks. See to it.

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92.

Saddle a wave.

93.

Hurry, find the lid to Mount Etna.

94.

Cast your shadow on the sun.

95.

Quench the thirst of sand.

96.

Citing the botanical sciences as a foundation for your thesis, which you will then support with examples drawn from poetry, show that the rose is only a variety of lettuce on a pin.

97.

Look at your own naked body through the keyhole.

98.

Waterproof fire.

99.

Introduce the notion of chocolate into political debate.

100. Reinvent the wheel.

“Does reading moral stories build character?” the psychologist Darcia Narvaez asks herself in a recent issue of Educational Psychology Review, and she answers no. It would be an illusion to think otherwise. Too many factors intervene, muddying the supposed clarity of the message that the author believes heʼs slipped into his fable. Everything depends on the readerʼs dispositions, his personal values, the logical framework that governs his thinking. The moral signification of a given text is thus inevitably blurred; worse yet, the ambiguity can sometimes be so grave that it will serve the cause opposite to the cause our subtle pedagogue claimed to defend and illustrate. Future cannibalistic murderers and devout members of the parish of crime and lust slowly drift off to sleep every night, sucking their thumbs, to the sound of one of his disguised sermons. Though intended to arouse pure compassion, a depiction of human despair will bring only delight to the sadist, the bully, who will on the other hand be outraged by the ogreʼs

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defeat and take to the streets with a lighter to avenge him by roasting the first chubby-cheeked child he comes across. Havenʼt holy scriptures always justified the bloodiest butchery? One wouldnʼt be at all surprised to find them singing the praises of salami. Thereʼs no torture the torturer canʼt caption with a verse from Holy Writ. Has he misunderstood those writings, or are the holes in his mask in fact the best glasses for reading them? It seems we canʼt be sure of anything in that domain. And the same goes for edifying stories and fairy tales. Every reader is obtuse in his own way. The human brain is not lined with photographic paper. Whatever the rigor, the precision, the many precautions employed by the author to be intelligible, his pretty fluting voice is lost in the waxy, winding auricular conduits of his listeners, comes to them slowed down, distorted, the voice of a drunkard or a madman marred by stridencies, by gurgles, now muted, now roaring: itʼs very simple, you canʼt understand half of what heʼs saying. Grimmgrimmʼs shared endeavor to set me back on the straight and narrow was thus doomed from the start. If I seemed to be wavering there for a moment, it was purely an act, solely for the sake of robbing them of that success now. My halo was cut out from a sheet of paper. My soul has remained gray and vague. Itʼs all you can see in the fog. Through that mist, can you now dimly make out my sinister silhouette, always on the hunt for a chubby-cheeked child? I have the world rolled up in a ball under my paw, says the cat. But sharper than the catʼs claw is the nib of the fountain pen. 166

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VII

Francis of Assisi himself would have thrown up his hands— his delicate stomach being unused to meat—so clearly there was nothing the valiant little tailor could do to save my soul, nor could his exemplary life make me ashamed of my own dissolution. I would gladly have made him wicked, were he not wicked already, even more than the many-faceted eye of God that spins beneath a drop ceiling. He brazenly lies to everyone he meets, he bests his foes with ignoble ruses and takes pride in it, heʼs so full of himself that he finds his own mouth inadequate for singing his praises and leaps into the storytellerʼs, taking advantage of a yawn or a laugh (the former being the egg of the latter). And so, desperately seeking some way to dislodge him, people find themselves forming palatals, labials, and dentals, just as they would do if they had a wasp in their mouths, those are the only moves the tongue knows. On the other hand, the kingʼs insistence on breaking his promises does justify the most underhanded tactics. No one who deals with that two-faced, treacherous potentate need waste one moment worrying about playing fair. Have I described him? Nothing to it: heʼs a man whose face is all beard. Only the fine blue-green arabesques of the veins on

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his rotund porcelain body would have required any work on my part. Wasted effort too, purely a labor of love for the art, since no nude scene is planned for him in this story: I preferred to cover him with all the brocades, velvets, silks, and ermines that cover kings in the world of the fairy tale, as the reader can observe for himself, just run your hand over those fabrics. The man can hardly breathe under all that cloth. Oh, I didnʼt skimp! Iʼm a valiant little tailor myself. I will long since have been recognized behind my heroʼs features. Such a lovable character! A natural victim pointed out by the implacable index that vibrates between the placid thumb and the indifferent middle finger and is even now poking him in the eye, he turns his weaknesses into strengths, he triumphantly counterattacks, his eye is not his eye but his mouth sucking on his eye, and with one chomp his jaws sever the finger of the jeerer, who will never frighten him again with his little fist. Everyone submits to a king in his own way. Myself, I crawl before mine. I kneel at his feet. Carefully, gently, I place his crown on his head. Seventy pounds of gold and gemstones. Itʼs as good as a solid blow from behind with a club: for eleven nights, all the owls of his forests will feed their young with the shreds of his brain hanging from the branches, a very wholesome food, a nice change from the inevitable field mouse, with seven times more protein by weight than the shrew. So imagine the many advantages this confers on the latter two, the common field mouse and the shrew, and the improvement it brings to their harsh existence as prey of the pastures. In the end, that monarch is a fairly ami-

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able monarch, magnanimous and munificent, concerned for his subjects, one of those enlightened sovereigns historians will dub the Father of the People or the Good-Hearted Tub of Lard. I was lucky. And so, for my part, I live amicably with my king. Itʼs true that I have to wash his feet with my tongue, but afterward I spit out his twitching toes on the buzzardʼs hunting grounds. I open my pink mouth lined with tender mucous membranes to satisfy his burning desire, but that mouthful will go to the falcons circling over his gardens. I imagine the valiant little tailor too treats his king just as one should. More than once Iʼve been tempted to disparage the valor of his feats, and Iʼm sorry for it. Now that anyone can go to the moon whenever they feel like it and new roads can be carved through the mountains with a butter knife, we no longer greet the capture of a wild boar with hurrahs and celebrations—at most, we might still let out a few barks—nor line the road from the forest to the castle with two cheering hedgerows of arms, legs, and heads every time our hero has some piece of game in his bag, right? And wouldnʼt it be cleverer—and thus more heroic, as the little tailor understands that word—to make a salad of all the acorns, seeds, beans, pits, pods, catkins, and nuts that, had they sprouted, would have created the dark forest where unicorns, giants, and boars would inevitably have sprung up in turn and gone on to wreak such terrible damage, as this story has amply proved? Personally, thatʼs the only food Iʼll touch. We would have only to replace the marmalade vendor with a grain merchant to spare ourselves many sorrows and disappointments.

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Itʼs morning. The little tailor hails the fat lady from his window and without haggling buys two servings of grain, which he douses with fresh, wholesome milk, thatʼs a complete breakfast, perfectly balanced, and whatʼs more it doesnʼt draw flies—end of story. As if that were still possible now. The flies are here. They wonʼt let me alone. Sometimes they graze my face or nudge my cheek like our blind, illshaven grandmothersʼ kisses. How many are there? Too many to count, thatʼs for sure, unless in fact thereʼs only one. Such as our eyes are configured, we can count only the dead ones. “Seven with one blow! What a feat!” I used to think—and then I snickered at myself: thatʼs also Snow Whiteʼs score! But those days are gone. Now my sarcasm sticks in my throat, nothing comes out but a sickening creak, like an old gate never opened by the curmudgeonly loner who lives behind it. Henceforth, I consider the valiant little tailorʼs blow an astonishing triumph, and the most remarkable of all his exploits. Just try it for yourself. As for me, just one single fly makes me ridiculous. One fly in my bedroom, and I launch into an embarrassing display of all the impatience, childish rage, and impotence I have in me. My whole false persona—elegant, disdainful, far above such things and everything else, detached, versed in or up on the loftiest Eastern philosophies and ostensibly prepared to greet death itself with a suave, superior smile, to see it as a trivial incident, scarcely worth my attention—in no more time than it takes seven flies to die, that whole persona cracks up and falls to pitiful pieces simply because a fly has flown into my bedroom.

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“Omm,” buzzes the fly, and Zen goes out the window. In truth, my unshakable serenity can tolerate only the rose-colored glow of a summer sunset, thatʼs the lesson I learn from the fly, thatʼs what it teaches me about myself. The tiniest annoyance shatters my intellectual and psychological defenses, like a fly, a wild boar in the forest of my nerves. One fly and Iʼm undone. But the fact is they often come after me in bunches. Those tickling, biting damsels can dress in hairy suits to do their work, no doubt trying to allay suspicion, Iʼm not taken in, I know itʼs them running over my forehead, over my ear, sometimes over my lip. Besides, gorillas donʼt do so many loop-de-loops before they attack. Also, theyʼre easy to hear when they beat their breasts with their fists. Theyʼre bigger, more socially organized. Beyond that, let us confess, the differences grow slight, visible only to a specialistʼs eye. Though I donʼt believe Iʼve ever long mistaken one for the other. Not that Iʼm a complete novice in the field of natural history. These questions interest me. Iʼve done a lot of reading. And furthermore, Iʼm fairly observant. Go bug somebody else, Musca domestica, I know itʼs you! This time the king has run out of arguments. Bristling with arrows, the wild boar lies dead before him. Thereʼs nothing but nightingales in his forests now. Heʼs going to have to keep his promise. He presses the valiant little tailor to his breast, calling him “my son” and quietly asking himself what stops him

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from squeezing the life out of that runt—maybe, he answers himself, the memory of his victorious battles with the giants as well as the troubling words stitched on his belt. He can feel the little birdʼs frail skeleton beneath his fat paws, he canʼt help thinking that matchstick frame wouldnʼt stand up to a little added pressure from his hand, no doubt he could easily crush it in the viselike grip of his thumb and index finger, but the fear of terrible reprisals holds him back. For his part, the little tailor would very much like to extract himself from this embrace. Heʼs not afraid, but the king stinks like a corpse. Because the kings of fairy tales—you have to spend a little time with both kinds to know this—smell even worse than historical kings. They donʼt even take the famous annual bath that the latter submit to for the sake of tradition. They grow old beneath their fur as would the dead animal whose place theyʼve taken, every fold of their fat bodies is moist and mossy, inhabited by colonies of silverfish and centipedes, their beards are a complex tissue of bloody drool and dried sauces, incrusted with scales, bone splinters, and feathers—sometimes, deep in that cesspit, the eye of a deer or pike can be seen glistening. But kings wolf down as much food as they do only because theyʼve got a whole kingdom of starving masses to sate. The valiant little tailorʼs face is still buried in the bearded monarchʼs armpit. The only scent discernible amid the choking fetor is the rancid butter his doctor applies as a salve to soothe the blimpʼs glorious bedsores: signs, like so many wounds incurred on the castle ramparts, of his ardor and his adamant refusal to do anything but eat, drink, and sleep. “Tomorrow Iʼll give you my daughter and half of my kingdom. Weʼll eat and drink. And for now, my boy, let us sleep.”

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A bit less valiant than usual, the little tailor staggers to his room and collapses on his bed, arms outstretched. Once the blood has stopped imparting its color, human skin is as green as a carp. At least we will have learned that. Iʼm clearly not very good at writing hearty-embrace scenes. Ever since I undertook this tale, and as if they wanted to prevent it at all costs, the flies have not left me a momentʼs peace. Hooray for winter, which rids us of them, and who cares about its rigors, no polar bear will ever be as bothersome as a single fly. But no, there must be ten or twelve of them in the room where Iʼm writing this, each one doubled or tripled and multiplied still further by all the others, now distracting my eye with vertiginous aerobatics and displays of the antipodistʼs art, now dive-bombing their target: art, civilization, the innocent, defenseless humanity that I here intrepidly represent. When by some miracle I catch one on the wing, itʼs a handful of buzz or a fistful of goo, itʼs disgusting, I open my fingers and let it go on its way. A fly running over my blank page reaches the bottom and tells me, “There we are, all filled up!”* How am I supposed to do any serious work in these conditions? Long live the spider who traps flies with its magician scarves, then sinks its suckers into their abdomens, drinking down the fly mush, the fly paste, the fly glue that fills them and forms the foundation of their ugly little obnoxious beings. * The French refer to dense handwriting as pattes de mouche—“fly feet” (cf. the English “hen scratches”).

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If only that same spider would drain me of my bitter essence, drink my bilious blood down with one gulp, along with the stagnant interstitial lymph I sink into feet first, inexorably mired, swallowed up, if only that spiderʼs purifying acidic secretions could dissolve the invasive “I” who swells beneath my skin and suffocates me, if only the creature could devour the twenty-five feet of entrails that trip up my every great leap forward, if only that spider could lighten the heavy body that encumbers and paralyzes me. I canʼt face it anymore, finding myself every morning stuck in that thing. Nothing is more wearying than always occupying the same place in this big, wide world. I may not be much of an adventurer, but Iʼd gladly get out a little all the same, if only a few yards to my right or my left, to see how things look from over there. My flesh clenches over my bones, itʼs all hands, all fingers, consolidating its grip. Or is it the bone thrust into my flesh thatʼs immobilizing me, a swallowed cross, a crucifixion thatʼs also an impalement? In any case, I canʼt get three steps away from it, I canʼt even stick out a thumb a few paces distant from this corpse on which the flies are already gathering—and people are foolish enough to believe the dead manʼs beard is still growing. But then his jaws too begin to move again under the bristles. Look, heʼs chewing! But I mustnʼt forget to recount the nuptial festivities. Plenty of material there for choice bits of prose dressed up in pheasant feathers and served with their snout. We begin with a look around the kitchens, where the

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pâtés, the truffle terrines, and the aspics are being lovingly prepared, where whole animals are roasting on a spit, their heads pulled back over their spines as if to keep an eye on the pursuing dogs. Donʼt worry, the dangerʼs past. Pots and pans and busy hands have been enlisted by the hundreds. Thereʼs no way we can actually see them at work, of course, so I invite you to look at the following verbs, which is, after all, as much as our pact calls for: peel, pluck, scale, shell, skin, gut, slice, chop, stuff, garnish, tie, bard, lard. Sauté, brown, poach, grill, simmer, sear. Every color has a mortar and a copper pot to make its sauce in. Drizzle. The head chef, a mitered giant, roars out commands from the heavens. Suddenly a hail of coarse salt forces everyone to shelter under the tables. The wine casks were tapped three days ago. Wine has been flowing into pewter jugs without letup ever since. Even at night, by the glow of the candles. The fish lying in the oval serving dishes take care to show their good side. That last sentence has vexed the cook, who turns his bream over: the other sideʼs the same. The meats are in hell. Mmm, it smells good in here. “If you love me, follow me” is the writerʼs device.* Weʼre now entering the cake construction zone. Please be so good

* The writer thus parrots the fourteenth-century King Philippe VI, who supposedly spoke those words—Qui mʼaime me suive—on his coronation.

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as to put on a hard hat: some of these edifices are a little unsteady. We live in a hard and austere age. The clash of arms is always to be heard in the background. The wolves are always hungry for men. The cold is bigger than the known world, and we have only one log to keep it at bay—is that the fire crackling, or is that the cold again, cackling at us? We sit shivering by the fireplace. But all the creamy goodness there is to be found in this world—this world beaten like a war drum by the armiesʼ heavy hooves, under an azureless sky home only to vultures— is right here in these basins, these cups, these churns, stirred by wooden spoons, kneaded by the pastry chefsʼ hands, pink and plump and happy as fish in the water, and we might almost weep to see that thereʼs quite enough to stuff the thousands of little pastry puffs piled up and bound together with caramel to make a pièce montée that is today the highest point in the kingdom, and which I wonʼt long resist giving a good, hard kick—because such is my demon that I canʼt be caught with sugar either—and thatʼs that, the whole thingʼs lying on the ground, youʼll have to start over. Until that moment, the pastry cooks took me for an unschooled but eager apprentice. Now they stare at me in dismay. I flee, leaving my footprints behind me in the flour. Later Iʼm guilty of nothing more than a careless mistake: I have to hurry to press an a into each of my trts before I put them in the oven. The apples have been polished, the pears burnished, all the cherriesʼ nails painted, the strawberries given a close shave, the peaches smoothed, the figs massaged, the bananas masturbated, the apricots gently spanked, the oranges pinched to bring the blood to their cheeks, then with 176

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a sharp blow I imprinted the trace of my fist in the quince, since thatʼs how theyʼre picked—nor is it by chance that the plums come only in all the colors of the bruise. The compotiers are filled with fruits that look good enough to be half eaten already. (Which makes them not particularly appetizing, actually.) A pile of plates goes by on two trotting legs, shapely calves, pretty ankles. Ah, the marvelous universe of the fairy tale! You do whatever you like and whatever you have time for, personally I want to know where that strange creature might lead me. Her gait is a little unsteady. Ideally she would be running. We clatter along into the reception rooms where the banquet tables have been laid out. Sooner or later, in this context, the word ewer will have to be used, thatʼs all I know. A sort of little jug, a precious carafe, I believe. Howʼs this, Iʼll put two of them on every table and then we can forget about it. Yoked one to the next, the tables march through the rooms. You can see them shrinking in the distance. I had to describe them that way for the sake of perspective, but itʼs only an optical illusion: in truth theyʼre equally wide and tall from one end to the other, and covered with white cloths. Cloths that would not be so white if they knew what was awaiting them. Very clearly, theyʼve never been used. Or maybe once, for angels who dined on white bread, discussing the seven transparencies of the soul. And the whole thing as flower filled as a garden. With pathways wide enough to drive a carriage between the banks of gladioli, roses, and orchids. The dishes sparkle, especially the word chalice. 177

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The silverware is pure gold. The porcelain is so fine I thought I could see my blood circulating through it. I casually start setting places. Then I light the candles in their sticks. The glass chandeliers do what they can to scintillate, waiting for the power outage thatʼs affected this sector ever since the Fiat lux to be at long last detected and fixed. Finally the queen appears. Sheʼs a sovereign of lard, flab flab flab. Colorless eyes, lips, and hair, Iʼm not going to ruin myself painting her. Sparse words, unclear and banal. A gemstone necklace lies flat against her breast as in a display case, guarded by her poor fat toothless bulldog head. Madame is served. Now we can all sit down. Is it my enticing invitation thatʼs drawn all these flies? Or are they trying to get in the way of this story? Itʼs certainly true that the tale doesnʼt portray them in a very positive light, as all the while it exalts the heroism of the little tailor, the legendary diptera killer, loathed by all their species. From another point of view, though, that initial massacre remains his one great claim to glory, and the flies could justifiably take as much pride in that as he does, since it makes them seem such redoubtable foes: vanquish those flies, even if youʼre nothing more than a simple tailor, and a kingʼs destiny can be yours. I mean this sincerely: if I were a fly, I wouldnʼt be at all unhappy that this story shows me to be as terrifying and fearsome as a genuine unicorn. Here I am, a filthy, buzzing, horror-footed fly, zooming from the sewer to the sandwich by way of the cheese shop and the cemetery, combining all their effluvia, dragging my feet (six of them, mind you) wherever I land, sheltering all 178

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the vilest microbes under my membranous wing, my beloved offspring, I generally inspire repulsion or irritation, people chase me away with a scornful backhand like an insistent, vest-clinging beggar, or else they trap me with garlands of sticky paper disloyally sprinkled with sugar, enticing and twisted as a sales pitch—“Just you have a taste of this corpse, and then weʼll compare notes”—or else they crush me with the little swatter specially conceived for the purpose of exterminating my species, which, with its slender handle and its meshwork head, might make one think of a delicate butterfly net but which is more precisely wielded like a hammer, because the collector cares nothing for the preservation of our complex little chitinous bodies, our fuzzy corslets, the rainbow-hued stained glass of our wings, on the contrary, the arm that strikes us swings exactly as it would swing in a boxing ring, spring-loaded with all its muscles, it wants nothing from us but the sight of us flattened against the wall—trophies no sooner bagged than hung— even if that means the arm will subsequently have to move up and down to repaint the kitchen, such is the unenviable life my fellows and I have to endure, and now here I am portrayed as the equal of the most beautiful beast in the bestiary, the unicorn, a creature the Creator himself lacked the confidence to design, leaving that dream to Humankind. (Out of pure perversity, God picked up the last herbivore to emerge from his workshop and stretched out its neck to a tremendous length, to put as much distance as possible between its teeth and its food.) Amid a great din of voices, the guests take their places at the tables. I say guests to distinguish them from the flies, which are 179

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also there, and are also very loud, though they werenʼt invited. So hereʼs a little code we can use, you and I: when I say guests, youʼll know that Iʼm talking about the lords, princes, knights, and fine ladies, even if the whole glittering crowd is shamelessly stuffing their faces. Letʼs pretend to forget about the flies for a moment. For example: I greet the one thatʼs just landed on my nose with stony indifference. Hey, why do they have a statue of me here? As for the valiant little tailor, heʼs sitting to the right of the queen, in the center. Facing them, we have the king and his daughter. A dazzling prefiguration of the standard petit bourgeois seating plan. A few ancestors have been arranged on either side, depicting with clinical precision the progressive stages of decrepitude. At the far end of the chain, a particularly dilapidated great-aunt whoʼs been drooling alarmingly for the past few days has in fact just expelled one last bubble of spit, her airy, iridescent soul, and is gently sinking down in her seat. I think Iʼm the only one whoʼs noticed. She would have slid under the table, but her rather strong chin—a family trait, judging by the chins of many uncles and cousins and even the young princess herself—was braked by her plate. Letʼs leave her that way for now, since no one seems to care. Theyʼre cheerily downing the first bites of the meal. And soon smeared with grease and sauce. The reader will spare me a most unrewarding chore if he agrees to summon up in his mind all the descriptions of lavish feasts heʼs read in other writersʼ books.

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The fly finally leaves my nose for the dead womanʼs. Greener pastures. There are at least ten of them now, all gathering around her. About time. Belches and bursts of laughter. Songs are sung, quips and japes fly across the table, the wine spills from the glasses, just as youʼve read in other writersʼ books. Now theyʼre not even bothering to lay out the beasts in the dishes. They grab them along with the fire thatʼs cooking them. Thrushes, quails, woodcocks, and pigeons are swallowed whole, with their heads and their bones, with the sky. The guestsʼ uvulas are an extra canine tooth. They pat their bellies, groaning with pleasure. Then a tap on the back to cough up a long sturgeon bone—listen to those smacks!—and what you end up spitting out is your own spine. They pour the wine down their throats, generously serving their collars and doublets at the same time; the terrified serving girls are tipped bare bottom over the knees of the dead-drunk senior executives, but you already know all that. A misshapen jester makes a comical face whenever a guest tosses him a crust of bread or rind of ham. This life is torture for him, because his heart is timid and pure, but when he finds himself blushing a little amid the taunts and the jeers, the crowd sees only an eggplant swelling in the middle of his face, and the laughter doubles. A troubadour plucks at his lute till the blood begins to flow, or his viol, Iʼll check, you canʼt hear him anyway. A juggler . . . Thereʼs a bear chained to its tamer. You know all that.

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And it goes on. Several days have passed. Suckling pigs are still being slaughtered in the kitchens. The chickens are requested to lay eggs. Then their throats are slashed. Every gluttonʼs gut is glutted. What voracity! And now Iʼm not talking only about the guests. No knives or forks Flies Donʼt stand on ceremony Maybe theyʼre simply trying to live up to their new reputation? Arenʼt they the real heroes of this story, doesnʼt it all come from them? Without the flies, wouldnʼt the little tailor now be laboring to patch up the seat of my breeches, worn down by an excess of work (my profession is hard on fibers, textile fibers first of all, then skin fibers, nerve fibers, muscle fibers—in short, it grinds you down to your bones), instead of lapping up whatʼs left in the bottom of a sauceboat? It was the flies that made this whole saga possible, and theyʼre not going to let it be forgotten. Nor will they agree to simply withdraw from the narrative. In vast numbers, they wheel around and force their way in. Itʼs a raid, an assault, an attack, an attempt to take over. They wonʼt let the writer work; they disarm him. At the same time, they parasitize his tale as they might the eye of a heifer, they barge into the plot. A banquet, a corpse: everything was in place for their return to center stage. Out in the castle courtyard, the horses yoked to the carriages stamp impatiently. The flies came here with them. Those big balls of manure are their eggs.

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Thereʼs only one way to say it: the flies are attacking the castle on horseback. They would have crushed themselves against the rampart of my vigilance; instead, they relied on a ruse, like the Greeks outside Troy. It was I myself who unwittingly brought them back into the story. The green fly is here, and the blue fly, the stable fly, the housefly, the fruit fly, the horsefly, and all their mischievous flylets. Their presence eclipses the valiant little tailor, now largely forgotten. But Iʼm keeping my eye on him. Heʼs left the table just once, to transform an arrow slit into a urinal. That feat was soon discovered in the moat, where the flies had gathered. No doubt thatʼs where they came in, seven hundred with one blow. My little hero isnʼt quite the man he was. Heʼs eaten and drunk more at this banquet than he has in his whole life. Now heʼs wondering if heʼll be up to servicing his young wife as expected. His legendary vigor is beginning to abandon him. He feels as heavy as wet cloth. Overindulgence in spirits. My tailor is a limp rag, and Iʼm not much better. I stayed up too late dancing with the flies. Gradually we drift off. The little tailor falls asleep with his head on his plate. Lacking a place setting, I have to rest mine in the crook of my arm. The last thing we see before our eyelids close is the neglected princessʼs scowling face. A beautiful woman, what a pity not to be in any shape to . . . The mists of sleep hide her from our gaze; briefly floating before us, there remain only the little dots of black taffeta the young bride has elegantly stuck to her cheekbone and the corner of her mouth. Time to sober up.

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A glorious dawn breaks over the valiant little tailorʼs kingdom. Tranchepie Brook wends its way through the meadows in double time despite the blazing sun, babbling the news of the young kingʼs accession far and wide. In its haste, it even topples the dam the beavers have just finished (ribbon cutting postponed, youʼll get a new ticket in the mail). Mont Borgne, a fearsome chaos of black stones with razor-sharp edges, also known as the Mountain of No Mercy, seems to have backed away to the horizon, shrinking accordingly. That would be a nice place to take the kids for a walk, pity itʼs so far away. All the animals join in the celebrations, apart from the sulking beavers. The wolf and the sheep sign a truce. The rabbits tirelessly turn somersaults, like in a rotisserie. The molehills erupt, shooting out chortling little moles who do two or three aerial flips before plunging headfirst underground. The giddy flies fill the air, swapping places, never leaving a gap. Iʼm just going to open a window to see if I canʼt get rid of a few of them. For a moment I thought Iʼd succeeded: one by one I saw them silhouetted against the rectangle of sky, then grow larger, oddly, as they flew away. Twice as many came in. And yet there still seems to be plenty of food for the feathered insectivores outside. They whistle, hoot, caw, churr, chatter, chirp, squawk, coo, warble, pipe, cackle, jabber, peep. I could go on leafing through ornithology books forever, but for Godʼs sake, I have a life to live. The nightingale sings. To celebrate the royal wedding with all the others, a male with a soot-black coat crushes the throat of a little lamb and

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offers it up as a feast for his wolflets. Just as I thought: that truce was a unilateral decision on the part of the sheep. The countryside quivers in delight. The trees gently sway in the perfumed breeze, and literature is made from sentences like that. Every green sprig of meadow grass has dug deep and sprung for a little flower. Will the new king measure up to his subjectsʼ high hopes? First order of business: a massive tax increase. He levies new fees and surcharges on the precarious income of the kingdomʼs freelance artisans. Bled dry, the peasant must cede two measures of wheat to the tax collector for every one heʼs allowed to sell. For every litter of eight piglets, six go to the king. All his subjects are expected to send half their children to serve at the castle: the sons are conscripted into the army and the daughters shut away in the kitchens and laundries. The prettiest ones are first sent straight to the sovereign, and then, for the delight of his eyes, raped by their fathers or brothers or a phalanx of meritorious mercenaries. The sickly and the deformed serve as targets for his archers-in-training. Heʼs a good king. Poets celebrate his magnanimity and munificence. Heʼs nicknamed the Friend of the Lowly, Prince Caring, the Gentle Zephyr. Under his reign, the country enjoys an unrivaled period of peace and prosperity, scarcely troubled by five chronic and particularly savage conflicts with the five bordering countries. The king unsparingly encourages the development of the arts. The author of the present work, for instance, was awarded a substantial grant to aid in the completion of this project.

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The treasury also finances the construction of churches and cathedrals, primarily to offer architects, sculptors, and painters the opportunity to exercise their meticulous talents. If in addition to that these temples turn out to be perfect prisons, to maintain the numbed population in servitude with no need for jailors or cooks, why not build more of them? So many more walls offered up to the frescoistʼs brush, and so many more rose windows to be ornamented with magnificent stained glass (even if, concerning the creation of the latter, we know better today how the master glaziers worked: first they laid out great sheets of glass all around the scaffolding, then they waited for a mason or roofer to fall; the resulting shards, colored with all sorts of bodily humors, were then carefully set into a lead framework, with a pearl of saliva and a blue eye). Or would it be better to stick with Grimmgrimm and concern ourselves solely with our valiant little manʼs marital troubles? The young queen gave herself to him without pleasure. Let us note that the ladʼs experience in this domain is essentially nil. Apart from a pleasingly plump marmalade seller fondled long ago in his attic room, heʼs scarcely come near a woman, and even that one conquest does not seem entirely indisputable. I wouldnʼt be surprised if he was exaggerating a bit, just to make himself look big. Accustomed to the expert caresses of her spiritual advisor, the princess endured his maladroit assaults unmoved. Then the valiant little tailor rolled over on his side with a bestial groan and went to sleep. He snores. The queen gen-

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tly massages her breasts, so roughly kneaded by that lout. A hand slips between her thighs, just like a real man. That sharp little cry youʼve just heard was her. The snoring stops, as if sheʼd given a shrill whistle. That does the trick. The little tailor has turned off his engine. He rolls down the slope of his dream. Now heʼs caught in a deep pit of sand whose walls subside beneath his feet when he tries to scale them. He misses his old helicopter. He digs. He knows the only way out is to tunnel through the bottom. He misses his old steam shovel. He pushes the sand up over the rim of the hole. Sometimes two huge orangutan hands replace his. Itʼs much faster that way. Then theyʼre two miserable pierced turkey feet. A slowworm, he petulantly breaks his glass body against the blade of the spade he doesnʼt have.* Still, heʼs making progress. Heʼs in deeper every minute. Already he can make out a vague hum of activity coming from the other side, and he finds a new strength. He digs with the paws of a dog. The sand flies in everyoneʼs eyes. Sometimes that sand is something else. Sometimes itʼs the queenʼs hair. Sometimes itʼs water, fire, and yet, in those very metamorphoses, it remains sand, grainy and ever shifting. It is that same powder, as conducive to collapses as nitrocellulose, that makes up the concrete and glass of our dwellings: donʼt forget to install a stout deadlock on your front door. * A slowworm (orvet) is a legless lizard, sometimes called a serpent de verre (glass snake) because it can shed its tail when attacked.

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The valiant little tailor has reached the bottom. On the other side, the hum is growing clearer. He tosses a few more handfuls of sand out of the hole, and suddenly he falls through the bottom. He lands heavily on his stomach: a hard blow. He knows this place. Itʼs the floor. Stunned, the little tailor picks himself up. Heʼs back home in his workshop. The familiar flies are making their usual sound. He goes to his basin and splashes water on his face. What stupid things dreams are. You canʼt even sleep in peace. He goes back to his work, back to the time-honored motions of his trade, rounded, angular, precise, like the very goods they produce. Heʼs picked up a piece of work in progress from his basket, an old pair of breeches waiting to be patched. With a smile, he sews a fine piece of strong fabric to the bottom. So that clown will never go through it again. As he works, the little tailor lets his mind wander. He remembers his months of apprenticeship in the workshop of a slave-driving boss who threw out his orders in a gruff voice and spiced them with threats he didnʼt hesitate to carry out. Hereʼs how he would have talked to him today (the little tailor swells his lungs and shouts as loud as he can): “Sew up those pants, lad, and mind what youʼre doing or Iʼll box your ears with my yardstick!” The dull hum of the flies falls silent. Wrenched from her sleep, the queen eyes her husband with horror. Now she understands. Theyʼve married her to a man of the lowest rank, a simple laborer, an enfant naturel (like the dung-beetle larva or the baby rat) of the cobbler of Gaveloup and a round-heeled 188

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farm girl. Forced at age six to earn his own pittance, her now-husband slept in a coal sack under his bossesʼ stairs, scraping by on all manner of hand-mangling work until he finally picked up the delicate needle that is at the same time nail and hammer and went into business as a tailor in an attic. And that bastard has defiled her. He writhed over her in his big hobnail boots. He spattered his muddy semen all over her velvets and tapestries. She might at this very moment be conceiving the degenerate fruit of their unnatural union. Everyone knows these poor folk are exceptionally fertile. Their ejaculate teems with tadpole-sized gametes that lash their tails as they make their way through the fragile tunnels of a womanʼs body, laying waste to everything as they pass by, leaving in their wake a ruined world, desolate, blood drenched, then throwing themselves into a savage brawl that finally determines the victor, the meanest and vilest of the lot, already equipped with claws and teeth, who shreds his rivals to pieces and guarantees his lineage by the final rape of the fearful ovule, which is left ravaged beyond all hope of repair. These brutesʼ coarse female companions, fed on the same grain as they, no doubt have a body built to withstand such things, such brutal couplings, such monstrous conceptions, they have the wooden womb they need. “But me?” thinks the queen, laying one hand on her white belly. And even now itʼs tugging at her, poking at her, she can feel it, the carnage has begun. She goes and weeps into the old manʼs beard. She tells him all. Sheʼs so unhappy, so unhappy. He consoles her. He reassures her, there, there. He has his nice animal smell. 189

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His fingers play with his little girlʼs curls, just as they did long ago. Heʼs enormous, colossal. He takes the situation firmly in hand. “Weʼll deal with this double quick, donʼt you worry.” A simple plan is devised. Tonight the young queen will take care not to lock the bedroom door. She will then lie down beside her husband. If the latter proves to be in an amorous mood, sheʼll claim sheʼs not feeling well and will tolerate only a chaste kiss of her rings, such as a queen can receive from her humblest subject without debasing herself. After which her lapdogʼs pink tongue cleans the stone and the setting. Once the imposter is asleep, the soldiers of the kingʼs private guard, lying in wait behind the door, will creep into the room, seize him, and bind him securely. A boat moored in the port will be standing by, ready to cast off. With the chained prisoner locked belowdecks, it will set sail for the tempest-tossed reefs and rocks of the coastal islands. The crew of lepers and chlorotics to whom the king promised an annual income for their wives and an officership for their sons—poor wretches, and what else? a daily dish of ground ortolan for their dogs?—will steer the ship straight toward the shoals. “Do you hear, my daughter, do you hear the fearsome crack of the hull?” Then it will run aground on the sandy beach at the bottom of the ocean that the sunʼs rays are too short to light up, where the sailorsʼ rotted flesh will be pecked at by eyeless fish while pallid octopi locked in a mortal embrace fight over the little ladʼs choicest morsels, his firm, pink limbs, his succulent organs, his sickly-sweet brain, his virgin liver, his valiant heart.

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Blissful, the queen skips, sings, claps her hands, the trills of her fresh, girlish laughter delight the entire castle from dungeon to turret, and her kisses clap in her aged fatherʼs beard like the wing of the ringdove pursued by the falcon when it dives into a providential shelter of greenery. But the kingʼs equerry has heard all. Is he a purehearted man, repelled by the villainy of this plot? Or does he harbor some resentment against his masters, some long-deferred dream of vengeance? Vengeance (in a shaky little hand), a hunger that satisfies only itself and can digest nothing else, neither the wine of forgetting nor the sweet dessert of forgiveness, a dish best eaten cold, says the proverb through chattering teeth—has chance finally placed in the equerryʼs hand a knife capable of butchering that mammoth in its block of ice? More than anything, it would seem that the old man has taken a liking to the little tailor. Perhaps he was born in the same dark back alley and glimpsed it from some clue invisible to all others—that imperceptible limp might have evoked in his memory the uneven paving stones over which his own tentative foot long sought an untroubled path—or perhaps he simply appreciates that beardless kingʼs humble ways. He immediately runs to him with the details of the plot. “Iʼll give those visitors a good welcome, donʼt you worry,” says the valiant little tailor. Night falls. Everything goes just as planned, except that the groom is only pretending to be asleep beside his treacherous wife. When he suddenly hears a noise behind the bedroom door, he cries out in a menacing voice, “Patch those breeches, boy, and be careful about it or youʼll be sorry you

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were born! I can kill seven with one blow! Giants fall dead whenever I want them to, I plant unicorns in trees like penknives, and I deliver furious boars up to God himself in the highest heavens! Know that I fear nothing and no one, and particularly not the people whispering like women behind my door!” But theyʼre not there anymore. Theyʼve left the castle, squirming through the walls, running quicker than if the Devil himself were on their heels. Those black dots over there, on the hills, is that them already? Thatʼs them. Soon they reach the horizon and dive over the side, into the abyss. The valiant little tailor has fallen asleep. The shivering queen nestles against his side. Tomorrow heʼll ask the old king for his scepter, his crown, and his beard.

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Epilogue

And so the work is done. I am now the author of The Valiant Little Tailor. In the newfound silence, a bit of reflection would be in order. The murmuring flies wonʼt allow it. What to make of that? Are they questioning my entirely justified claim of responsibility? Or else, present around me all through my narration, do they believe I was simply their devoted secretary, writing under their dictation, and that this book is theirs? They land on the table before me, suddenly at peace, satisfied. That latter hypothesis seems to suit them. And now I suppose theyʼre going to lay their eggs between my fingers, in the fold of my elbow? Iʼve rolled up these pages in my fist. Get back, friends, Iʼm going to strike, here it comes! one two three four five six seven eight

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ÉRIC CHEVILLARD was born in 1964 in La Roche-surYon. He published his first novel, Mourir mʼenrhume, in 1987; he has since published some twenty novels, short fiction, a long series of book reviews in the newspaper Le Monde, and a daily blog (Lʼautofictif). His work has been translated into eleven languages worldwide; seven of his novels have appeared in English, notably The Crab Nebula (translated by Jordan Stump), Palafox (translated by Wyatt Mason), Prehistoric Times (translated by Alyson Waters), and most recently The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster (translated by Chris Clarke). He was awarded the Prix Fénéon for his novel La nébuleuse du crabe, the Prix Wepler for Le vaillant petit tailleur, and in 2014 the Prix Alexandre Vialatte, a prize intended to acknowledge writing of exceptional elegance and wit, for the entirety of his work. J OR DA N S T UMP is a professor of French at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln; he is the author, most recently, of The Other Book, on Raymond Queneauʼs novel Le chiendent, and the translator of thirty-some works of (mostly) contemporary French fiction, by authors such as Marie Redonnet, Scholastique Mukasonga, and Honoré de Balzac. His translation of Marie NDiayeʼs novel The Cheffe won the National Translation Prize for Prose from the American Literary Translatorsʼ Association in 2020. He has translated four other novels by Éric Chevillard, most recently The Author and Me.

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