Fiction France

Fiction France 

A selection of French contemporary fiction to be read and translated 

no 12 MarcH 2013

twenty new 

French fiction 

titles to be read 

and translated

How can you take part 

in fiction france? 

A selection of 16 to 20 titles is compiled in 

cooperation with the Institut français, the staff 

in the foreign rights departments of the French 

publishing houses and the staff of the book offices 

in London, New York and Berlin—French Ministry 

of Foreign Affairs. 

what are the selection criteria? 

• The book must be French-language fiction 

(novel, short story, narration). 

• Recent or forthcoming publication (maximum 

of 6 months before the publication of Fiction France). 

How should work be submitted? 

• The publishers should submit the book/draft/ 

manuscript. They will themselves have selected 

an extract of 10,000 characters. 

• Every entry should be accompanied by 

a commentary, a biographical note and 

the bibliography of the author (maximum 

of 1,500 characters). 

• Two printed examples of every proposed work 

will be sent to the Institut français. 

foreword 

Twice a year, Fiction France publishes 20 excerpts—in French and 

English – of the most talked about novels and short stories from France’s 

contemporary literary scene. 

So far, since the first edition, more than 200 authors have been 

presented. In addition to encouraging foreign rights sales, the magazine 

has created an opportunity for publishers, authors and translators to 

meet, interact and forge long-lasting relations. 

For this 12th edition we present 20 titles—of which there are 6 debut 

novels and a collection of short stories—inviting you to travel in 

time and space, from Paris to Port-au-Prince, from Vladivostok to 

Hanoi, passing through Senegal, Morocco and Hungary. You will 

meet, indiscriminately, Eugène Delacroix, members of the Comédie- 

Française during the Occupation, an American female opera singer 

from the 1920’s—or a group of Russian anarchist artists in a more than 

contemporary Saint Petersburg … 

We will for each title provide you with the good reasons for discovering 

and reading the featured books. You will also find on page 114 the list of 

titles presented in the previous Fiction France editions—including those 

for which foreign rights have been acquired. 

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with the respective Foreign 

Rights Assistants, whose contact details can be found in the summary 

and on the introductory page for each text, by simply clicking on the 

email addresses. 

Finally, the big project for 2013: Fiction France takes on a new look and 

drops its old paper format for a 100% digital diffusion. 

An entirely recast version will be launched later in the year. 

To be continued … 

The Institut français is France’s new 

international agency for cultural policy 

affiliated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

Fiction France is disseminated free of charge 

through the French cultural network 

to its partners and to book industry 

professionals around the world. 

Fiction France is available on line 

at www.institutfrancais.com. 

3

4 

contents 

p. 8 p. 13 

Catherine Bessonart 

And if, at Notre- 

Dame, by night … 

Publisher: Éd. de l’Aube 

Date of Publication: January 2013 

Foreign Rights Manager: 

Manon Viard 

manon@editionsdelaube.com 

Number of Pages: 288 

Translation: Louise Lalaurie 

lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com 

p. 18 p. 24 

Fanny Chiarello 

Carlotta Delmont’s 

Weakness 

Publisher: Éd. de l’Olivier 

Date of Publication: February 2013 


Violaine Faucon 

vfaucon@editionsdelolivier.fr 


Translation: Catherine Spencer 

catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk 

Bernard Bonnelle 

At the Belles 

Abyssines 

Publisher: La Table Ronde 



Anna Vateva 

a.vateva@editionslatableronde.fr 


Translation: Melanie Florence 

melaniejflorence@googlemail.com 

Frédéric Ciriez 

Melo 

Publisher: Verticales 



Anne-Solange Noble 

anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr 


Translation: Vineet Lal 

vineet_lal@hotmail.com

p. 29 p. 35 p. 40 

Franck Courtès 

Authorisation to 

Participate in Running 

Competitions... 

and Other Escapades 

Publisher: JC Lattès 



Eva Bredin, ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr 


Translation: Shaun Whiteside 

shaun.whiteside1@btinternet.com 

Christian Garcin 

Vladivostok Nights 

Publisher: Stock 



Fabienne Roussel 

froussel@editions-stock.fr 


Translation: Sue Rose 

suerosepoet@googlemail.com 

Solange Delhomme 

Crossings 

Publisher: Denoël 



Judith Becqueriaux 

judith.becqueriaux@denoel.fr 


Translation: Sophie Leighton 

s.leighton@clara.co.uk 

p. 45 p. 51 p. 56 

Yanick Lahens 

Guillaume 

and Nathalie 

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser 

Date of Publication: April 2013 


Joschi Guitton 

jguitton@swediteur.com 


Translation: Trista Selous 

trista.selous@btinternet.com 

Émilie Frèche 

Two Strangers 

Publisher: Actes Sud 



Claire Teeuwissen 

c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr 


Translation: Adriana Hunter 

adriana@hunter157.freeserve.co.uk 

Arthur Larrue 

Going to War 

Publisher: Allia 



Marjorie Ribant 

allia@editions-allia.com 


Translation: Paul Buck and Catherine Petit 

paul@paulbuck.co.uk 

5

p. 62 p. 67 p. 72 

Kettly Mars 

At the Frontiers 

of Thirst 

Publisher: Mercure de France 



Geneviève Lebrun-Taugourdeau 

genevieve.lebrun-taugourdeau 

@mercure.fr 


Translation: Sophie Lewis 

sophie_l@fastmail.fm 

Hoai Huong Nguyen 

Soft Shadows 

Publisher: Viviane Hamy 



Maylis Vauterin 

maylis.vauterin@viviane-hamy.fr 


Translation: Ros Schwartz 

schwartz@btinternet.com 

6 

Éric Marty 

The Chinese Girl’s 

Heart 

Publisher: Éd. du Seuil 



Martine Heissat 

martineheissat@seuil.com 


Translation: Annette David 

annettedavid99@gmail.com 

p. 77 p. 82 p. 87 

Caroline Pochon 

The Second Wife 

Publisher: Buchet/Chastel 



Christine Legrand 

christine.legrand@libella.fr 


Translation: Georgina Collins 

glcollins@hotmail.co.uk 

Patrick-Olivier Meyer 

Muscle and Flesh 

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy 



Patricia Roussel 

proussel@calmann-levy.fr 


Translation: John Fletcher 

j.w.j.Fletcher@kent.ac.uk 

Raphaëlle Riol 

Amazons 

Publisher: Le Rouergue 



Brigitte Reydel 

brigitte.reydel@lerouergue.com 


Transaltion: Josephine Bacon 

bacon@langservice.com

p. 93 p. 98 

Isabelle Stibbe 

Bérénice 34-44 

Publisher: Serge Safran Éditeur 



Marie Sorlot et Marie-Pierre Garro 

right@pierreastier.com 


Translation: Clémence Sebag 

clemencesebag@gmail.com 

p. 103 p. 108 

Philippe Vilain 

The Unfaithful Wife 

Publisher: Grasset & Fasquelle 



Heidi Warneke 

hwarneke@grasset.fr 


Translation: Ian Monk 

ian.monk@wanadoo.fr 

Michelle Tourneur 

Death by Beauty 

Publisher: Fayard 



Carole Saudejaud 

csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr 


Translation: Imogen Forster 

imogen.forster@talktalk.net 

Alice Zeniter 

Gloomy Sunday 

Publisher: Albin Michel 



Solène Chabanais 

solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr 


Translation: Naomi Colmer 

nay.colmer@gmail.com 

7


And if, 

at Notre-Dame, 

by night … 

8 

Publisher: Éd. de l’Aube 


Foreign Rights Manager: Manon Viard 

manon@editionsdelaube.com 


Translation: Louise Lalaurie 

lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com 

The first in a promising new series, ‘And if, at Notre-Dame, by night …’ 

is a classic Paris crime novel, transporting the reader to the heart 

of one of the world’s most fantastical, fantasized cities. 

‘The plot and characters are utterly gripping, Bessonart’s style is wonderfully fluent, 

and the intrigue brilliantly sustained. I’m sure it will fly off our tables […] There’s a 

flavour of Fred Vargas [ …] Bessonart’s novel joins that distinguished pedigree of offbeat, 

sensitive, richly allusive, ruthlessly effective crime writing.’ Librairie Le Lézard Amoureux 

BiograpHy Catherine Bessonart lives in Montmartre. A graduate of Paris’s Cours Florent drama school, 

she writes for stage and television. And if, at Notre-Dame, by night … is her first novel. The next volumes 

in the series are currently being written, the second and third Bompard novels are already plotted. 

© Christine Mestre/Éd. de l’Aube

Women. Statues. A child’s doll. All found 

decapitated. Leading the investigation, 

Commissaire Bompard senses a connection. 

Between the decapitations, and his own story. 

Loud and clear, his cop’s instinct tells him not 

to trust to appearances, but to follow his own 

intuition. Bompard is convinced only he can 

disentangle the facts. A hunch confirmed when 

his ex-wife Mathilde disappears suddenly. 

This is a classic, fast-paced police thriller 

centred on a hero the reader will want to get 

to know a great deal better. A spell-binding 

first novel. 

6 

Bompard’s gut churned the next morning. Looking for the cause, and determined 

to ignore the evidence of the Côtes du Rhône, his suspicion fell naturally 

on the prawns. 

‘Perhaps they weren’t fresh.’ 

‘I’m sorry?’ 

On closer inspection, his chief didn’t look too fresh, either. His complexion 

had the green hue usually associated with the morning after an official visit. 

‘Are you listening to me, Bompard?’ 

Of course Bompard was listening. The Chief ’s account was familiar 

enough: the Mayor had called, closely followed by the Interior Minister 

(actually, his Private Secretary, but that was enough). The Culture Minister 

had called in person to share his keen sense of shock, and the former Culture 

Minister, not wanting to be left out, had unhesitatingly shared his own sense 

of shock, which was every bit as keen as that of his successor. 

Bompard didn’t relish being called to order, but unlike Louvel, his division 

chief, he didn’t feel particularly affected by the present, admittedly testing, 

circumstances. While Louvel gulped back a palmful of arnica granules, recommended 

by his homeopath in the event of a fall, and similarly indicated 

for cases of wounded pride, Bompard thought back to the old joke wheeled 

out by his analyst, in the throes of his divorce. He pictured himself sitting 

opposite Braumann in his consulting room. He had tried lying prone on the 

9

10 

couch, under the benevolent gaze of this otherwise somewhat austere man, 

but the recumbent pose had provoked a string of associations that would have 

kept him in analysis indefinitely. Ever the pragmatist, he had opted for a short 

series of face-to-face consultations—the kind reimbursed by Our Lady of 

the Social Security—helping him to digest the unpalatable fact of Mathilde’s 

departure while not bankrupting himself in the process. During one of their 

sessions, Braumann had dispensed profound wisdom in the form of a riddle. 

‘What’s the difference between being affected and being involved?’ 

Bompard realised he was staring blankly into space—not the most advantageous 

expression in his Chief ’s presence—and hastily consigned the memory to 

the back of his mind. Braumann’s cultivated, intelligent tones called him back: 

‘Have you ever eaten a ham omelette? Well, the chicken was involved, but 

the pig was affected.’ 

Bompard had not immediately spotted the link between his analyst’s contribution, 

and what had passed between them up until then, but he appreciated 

its subtlety all the same. Only later, when his relationship with Mathilde had 

stabilised, did he allow himself to speculate that Braumann’s riddle had been 

calculated to illuminate the pain of their divorce, the affliction of separation, 

and the torture of alimony. 

The Commissaire glanced sympathetically at his division chief and congratulated 

himself that in the affair of the decapitated statues, his was the least 

thankless of their two roles. 

He decided not to share this new burden of stress with his men. Something 

had to justify the difference in their salaries. Keeping it to himself showed a 

touch of class, too, he thought. 

In his office, Bompard reviewed plans for the investigation with his two 

lieutenants. Mathieu Piquet-Lamotte, known to everyone at headquarters 

as Grenelle (in honour of La Motte-Picquet Grenelle metro station in the 15 th 

arrondissement) would pursue a promising line on acrobats likely to turn a 

blind eye to the nature of the task, and agree to tackle the west face of Notre- 

Dame, stone-cutting gear at the ready. Frédéric Machnel—known to all as 

Mach’ Schnell! (HQ really was a bottomless pit of wit)—would investigate a 

select cohort of fifty or so international billionaire collectors capable of ordering 

such an operation. Machnel was a file fiend, a dogged compiler of dossiers 

on any and every subject. He fell to his task with zealous glee. 

Bompard decided to parry the attack of the prawns with a walk home along 

the quaysides of the Seine. 

On the great open square in front of Notre-Dame, the uniforms had spent 

the night guarding those statues still in possession of their heads. Nine had 

been decapitated and Bompard wondered if the number nine was significant, 

or if the head-cutters had been disturbed as they went about their business. And 

while it had always seemed ridiculous to him to post a team of cops on the spot

where a crime had already been committed—as if to hammer home the police’s 

sorry lack of foresight and intuition—he had to admit, this case was an exception. 

No one at headquarters, least of all him, was prepared to risk seeing a full 

parade of headless Notre-Dame statues splashed across the newspapers, with 

the inevitable subs’ field day: ‘Off with their heads … But who’s for the chop?’ 

This was a damage limitation exercise in the truest sense. 

At first, Bompard did not recognise Thomas’s gaunt figure. Deep in thought, 

he paced distractedly towards the spot where the painter stood. The image on 

the easel stopped him dead in his tracks. Nine decapitated statues filled the 

space of the canvas, plain and unadorned like a biometric photograph. A single, 

imaginative touch: the nine severed necks were streaked with blood. In the 

hyper-realist painting, the livid scarlet dog-collars ringing the black-and-white 

sculptures were highly disturbing. 

Only now did Bompard identify Thomas. 

‘Photographic realism is it, then, Tom?’ he asked. 

‘A very good day to you, Commissaire. Mea culpa! Today, I am straying from 

the path, looking ahead, as it were.’ 

‘Looking ahead …’ 

‘Distancing myself from my habitual style. What you see is far removed 

from my usual work. But sometimes one is swept along by events, a chance 

encounter ...’ 

‘Well, don’t get too far ahead of yourself,’ Bompard cut him short. ‘And stay 

close to home, I’ll be needing a word with you soon enough.’ He headed for the 

riverfront. 

Bompard struggled to pinpoint why he found the young artist so excessively 

irritating. Thomas was seeking inspiration on his private patch, the free range 

of his investigation. The pleasure of his quayside walk soured. 

‘Damn him.’ 

He turned up the collar of his raincoat, thrust his balled fists deep into his pockets 

and set off along the stone quayside, determined to follow the river for as 

long as it took. He found himself right at the edge of the cobbled walkway. 

Anyone who missed their footing here risked toppling straight into the water. 

‘Christian! Stop—you’ll fall in!’ 

Mathilde used to worry about him. He had liked that. He wondered if his 

mother had worried about him when he was a boy, doing reckless, dangerous, 

boyish things. No doubt she had, but he would never know. A thick, white veil 

shrouded the first eight years of his life, and he had chosen not to lift it. 

‘Stop being so silly! Over here!’ 

He turned, with a boyish air that few ever saw. But the solitary, hard-bitten 

adult quickly stepped forward once more. No one was calling out to him. No 

one feared for his safety. Nostalgia could play cruel tricks. 


And if, at Notre- 

Dame, by night … 

11

12 

Bompard walked on. Anne Sylvestre, the lilting, haunting voice of the Sixties, 

went with him. T’en souviens-tu la Seine? Mathilde’s favourite record was 

a love-song to the great river: its waters were the colour of deep, blue-grey 

eyes, said the lyrics. A constant companion for the lonely souls drawn to its 

quaysides from the black heart of the city, a dancing lover in a sparkling, silken 

gown, speaking of distant seas, and golden beaches, restoring faith, turning 

sorrow to joy. 

Mathilde always complained about his discarded socks. But she had walked 

out, leaving her world scattered everywhere, and Anne Sylvestre’s song in his 

heart. Like a foreign body, a graft he could no longer tear free. 

Bompard turned for home, and the solace of a vintage malt. 

7 

At 4 a.m., Bompard’s mobile ringtone was a painful reminder of the succession 

of whiskies that had sent him to sleep. 

He cleared his throat two or three times, swore he would stop drinking, and 

answered. 

Grenelle’s confused horror-struck tones rasped in his ear. Bompard cut 

the call. Gave himself five seconds to come up with three good reasons why he 

should carry on in this job. ‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.’ The 

phrase found its way to the front of his mind. He repeated it three times over 

and got to his feet. 

He crossed the city, oblivious, on auto pilot. 

The victim’s body was ice cold. So was he. But the woman was headless, 

while his own head pounded fit to burst. Bompard stared at the corpse at his 

feet, mutilated, frozen, as if in surprise, naked, and coated now in a delicate, 

whitish sheen. 

The spectacle of the decapitated body left him badly shaken. Cover her face … 

He couldn’t even do that. Couldn’t close the dead woman’s eyes. 

After the neck, what Bompard adored most in a woman’s body were her 

wrists. He bent down to the unknown victim, brushing his fingertips over the 

veins that pulsed no more, and gave a silent promise that justice would indeed 

be done. He stared at her pose for a long time, saying nothing, wondering why 

the woman’s right arm was folded up and back, as if she had been tried to slide it 

under the back of her head. He didn’t like that.

© DR/La Table Ronde 


At the Belles 

Abyssines 

Publisher: La Table Ronde 


Foreign Rights Manager: Anna Vateva 

a.vateva@editionslatableronde.fr 


Translation: Melanie Florence 

melaniejflorence@googlemail.com 

A quest in the form of an investigation, set against the backdrop of France’s ‘phoney war’ 

in Africa during the 1940s. Striking characters, crushed by the weight of their destiny 

or galvanized by a spirit of rebellion. An exciting and fascinating read. 

BiograpHy Bernard Bonnelle was born in Paris in 1961. As a naval officer from 1986 to 2002, he served 

aboard several warships, sailing from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, by way of the Pacific and Indian 

Oceans. Since 2002 he has pursued his career in administration. Bernard Bonnelle currently lives 

in Poitiers. At the Belles Abyssines is his second novel. 

puBlications Les Huiles, Michel de Maule (2011) 

13

14 

Alban doesn’t hold with convention; Pierre 

is more circumspect. When they strike up a 

friendship in the Paris metro, no one can predict 

that several years later, once they are both 

naval officers, they will travel the world aboard 

the Jeanne d’Arc, nor that their friendship 

will endure beyond death. 

At the end of the summer of 1939, Alban 

is found dead in his cabin on the Étoile-du-Sud, 

the patrol ship he commanded, at Djibouti, 

where the Indian Ocean meets the Red Sea. 

Appointed his successor, Pierre arrives in 

a city under siege where the threat of war 

7 

is imminent. He who knew his friend better 

than anyone refuses to believe the whispers 

in colonial society: unable to face leading a 

dangerous mission, Alban has chosen to commit 

suicide instead. 

In his search for a truth which must not be 

told, Pierre will have to follow the path taken 

by Alban. As he tracks down the clues, he will 

meet all sorts of people: diehards and cowards, 

the ambitious and the rebellious, the cynical 

and the resigned: all, however, are haunted 

by the memory of an elusive female figure. 

Djibouti is not an African town, but a French town in Africa. 

The white wings of the newspapers unfurling on café terraces; the shadows 

of the tall trees imitating planes and chestnuts, the light filtering through them 

as if at Vic-Fezensac, Castéra-Verduzan or Villeneuve-Loubet; the small-town 

intrigues conducted behind louvred shutters throwing slivers of sunlight on to 

the drinks tray; the chimes of the town hall peacefully sounding the hours after 

the sudden lowing of ships leaving port and the call of the muezzin wavering in 

the night; the colonials have recreated their familiar little world in its entirety 

there, to ward off the silence of the Somalis wrapped in their mystery, and the 

anguish of the arid expanses, pebbles stretching as far as the eye can see, the 

emaciated goats, the unrelenting heat. 

A pale line was visible on the horizon, between the sea and the sky, equally 

drained of colour. As the Sagittaire drew nearer, the port came into focus with 

its cranes, coal sheds, and one or two large ships at the quayside, among the 

dhows tied to each other in pairs. We were due to come alongside in the early 

evening. A sudden squall complicated the manoeuvre: despite the efforts of the 

two harbour tugs, it was as if the quayside were pushing the steamer away. Just 

before nightfall, success was in sight, and they were about to throw the hawsers, 

but the water was too choppy. The waves slammed against the quayside, 

sending white-topped billows right on to the fo’c’sle of the Sagittaire. There was 

a risk of damage. We had to go back and wait, tossed about in the darkness,

on the black waters of the basin. The passengers had at least learned a new 

word to put in their letters home: the khamsin, the desert wind, full of scorching 

sand, had us in its grip. Towards ten at night it dropped suddenly and at last the 

steamer was able to dock. 

Near to the berth where the Sagittaire had come in, attempts were underway 

to load the holds of a small cargo boat with a herd of camels, unsteady on their 

feet and skittish from the khamsin. As soon as the gangway was in position, the 

passengers, impatient to come ashore, poured out among the animals which 

Danikil dockers were urging on with loud cries and sticks. In the light from the 

car headlamps, baggage was spreading over the quayside, where it was seized 

on immediately by Somali children who offered their services to carry or watch 

over it, or guide passengers to their waiting cars. Dangling from the hoist of 

a crane, a camel revolved slowly, braying with terror above our heads before 

it was swallowed up by the hold. A woman’s cry rang out; a lad had climbed 

right to the top of the derrick of the Sagittaire. He was crouching atop the cargo 

boom, seemingly indifferent to the risk of losing his balance and plummeting 

on to the concrete thirty feet below. With considerable pride at being the centre 

of attention, he waved merrily at the crowd before sliding down the rope and 

diving into the sea just at the moment a policeman in shorts was about to grab 

hold of him. 

‘Are you Lieutenant Pierre Jouhannaud—the new Captain of the Étoile-du-Sud?’ 

The face of the person addressing me in this way was hidden by the dark. 

I made out bushy eyebrows and the outline of a nose, above a thick moustache. 

A flash of light revealed the look in his eyes, burning with fever. Bent 

and lopsided, the figure was bizarrely dressed in a Russian peasant smock over 

a sailor’s tunic and a pair of shorts which were much too big. 

‘The commander asked me to drive you into town.’ 

The Russian peasant indicated a small, ancient Citroën parked underneath 

the overhang of a shed. I was concerned about my trunk, but he assured me 

I would need only my suitcase—without offering to carry it, though. With 

enormous respect, however, as if it were a question of the Holy Sacrament, he 

vouchsafed to me a sealed envelope, divulging in conspiratorial tones that it 

was a personal communication from Captain Marquin, the chief of the Navy 

in French Somaliland. Having cranked the motor into life, he slipped behind 

the wheel and flung open the door on my side to invite me to get in. 

In an attempt to strike up conversation, I asked my driver to introduce 

himself, and received one word in reply: “Potemkine”. Sensing that my curiosity 

was not quite satisfied, he went on in a pronounced Russian accent: 

“Potemkine, of the Étoile-du-Sud.” He gave a nod in the direction of a ship at 

the quayside, amid a flotilla of dhows. Lying low in the water, she was much 

smaller than I had imagined. Only the two modest canons visible at the bow 

and stern gave her anything of the appearance of a warship. 


At the Belles 

Abyssines 

15

16 

‘The Étoile-du-Sud’. 

The Citroën gave a jolt. Potemkine swerved to avoid an emaciated dog 

which had suddenly appeared in our headlamps. As I had not yet assumed my 

command, it would not have been fitting for me to spend the night on board. 

Before she should disappear behind the dark bulk of a warehouse, I turned to 

look at what was to be my ship—but which was for me at this moment primarily 

the tomb of Alban de Perthes, or at least the place where he had spent his 

last months and met with an unexplained death. I said the name of my friend 

aloud, and my driver leapt in with ‘The poor Captain.’ 

The words could have been an expression of pity, but the squint smile 

which accompanied them lent the word ‘poor’ a colouring of sheer contempt. 

Potemkine was starting to annoy me. Abandoning my attempts at conversation, 

I turned towards the darkness. The harbour was giving way now to an 

indistinct expanse of rough land, with the dark outlines of occasional dwelling 

places, spindly bushes and open fires surrounded by shadowy figures swathed 

in loose robes or with just a piece of cloth tied round their waists. Our car 

turned into a broad avenue lined with palm trees and we arrived in the town. 

Most of the buildings were of the same design: neat blocks set squarely on 

whitewashed pillars, behind which was a gallery housing booths with closed 

shutters, perhaps a makeshift affair with a canvas roof. On the upper storey, 

beneath the terrace, large Moorish-style openings, filled by louvred shutters, 

echoed the rhythm of the arcades at street level. Crossing the sunlit square, the 

Citroën turned into a part of town where the architecture was plainer, with no 

arcades or galleries. 

My driver pulled up outside a small three-storey block. A signboard on the 

corner of the frontage told us that we were at the Hôtel Chic de la Mer Rouge— 

proprietors: Apostolides Frères. Slamming the car door behind me, I went into 

the hotel, leaving Potemkine to see to my luggage. While I waited for someone 

to come and attend to me, I opened the envelope from the Commander of the 

Navy: it was a special order giving the arrangements for my taking up command. 

The ceremony was to take place the following morning at 10, after I had 

paid him an official visit in full summer dress uniform. I had done well to pack 

my sabre and white gloves in my suitcase, since my trunk would stay on board 

the Sagittaire until Potemkine was of a mind to collect it. 

The hotel seemed sunk in a deep sleep. No receptionist was forthcoming. 

I went back outside to share my concerns with Potemkine. The street was 

empty. The car had gone, along with its driver and my suitcase. I found myself 

alone, in a strange place, ready to collapse with exhaustion, and my belongings 

were goodness knows where. 

Steps sounded in the lobby. A person appeared, tying the cord of his dressing 

gown round his ample girth. He announced sullenly that I was in the

presence of Spiridon Apostolides himself, the proprietor of the hotel. I gave 

him to understand that I did not much care who he was and his hotel did not 

impress me; all I wanted was to be shown to my room without delay. His eyes 

grew wide with surprise. He went behind the reception desk to check the 

register. 

‘There’s no reservation in your name. And nothing for the Navy. Just when 

we’re fully booked, as well. What rotten luck! Potemkine, you say? Ah, now I’m 

beginning to see … He came by last week but didn’t say anything about your 

arrival. I bet that scoundrel’s slipped off to the Belles Abyssines. I’ll get someone 

to drive you there.’ 


At the Belles 

Abyssines 

17


Carlotta Delmont’s 

Weakness 

18 

Publisher: Éd. de l’Olivier 


Foreign Rights Manager: Violaine Faucon 

vfaucon@editionsdelolivier.fr 


Translation: Catherine Spencer 

catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk 

“Carlotta Delmont’s Weakness” is set in the Roaring Twenties 

and takes us from New York to Paris in the wake of our mysterious diva heroine. 

A new voice in French literature 

“Fanny Chiarello’s language and imagery are brilliantly inventive”, Les Inrockuptibles 

BiograpHy Fanny Chiarello was born in 1974 and lives in Lille. She has published short stories, works 

for young people and poetry collections. Carlotta Delmont’s Weakness is her second novel. 

puBlications L’éternité n’est pas si longue, Éditions de l’Olivier (repub. Points, 2013) 

© Patrice Normand/Éd. de l’Olivier

My beloved Gabriel 

In April 1927, after the brilliant success of 

her first Parisian Norma, Carlotta Delmont 

disappeared. Fugue, suicide or kidnapping? 

For two weeks, the police, press, public and 

friends of the American singer wonder what 

has happened to her—until she reappears and 

their questions then centre on the reasons for 

her disappearance. Where was she all that 

time? And with whom? Carlotta was the subject 

of so much commentary and theorising that, 

much to her dislike, she became a living legend 

subjected to the scrutiny and the demands of 

the public at large. She would pay dearly for her 

moment of weakness and, just like her favourite 

heroines, would have to sacrifice part of herself 

for her freedom. 

Paris, 14th April 1927. 

When this letter reaches you, I shall doubtless be on the train headed for Milan, 

even further away from you. As you will have already read in the press, I am 

completely recovered. My voice no longer bears the slightest trace of that 

terrible cold that almost silenced me and which forced me to let a Parisian 

understudy take over for four evenings. I would rather have broken a wrist than 

had a sore throat, for it deprived me of the one thing that consoles me about 

not being with you. Those several days of enforced silence plunged me into a 

profound state of distress, to the point where I began to fear the day my vocal 

chords give up the ghost once and for all—what will I do then? 

For five long days, cosily ensconced in my suite’s Louis XV furniture, I wandered 

miserably among the gilt-edged doors and the Old Masters, feeling as 

cumbersome and useless as a bag of laundry … I wasn’t so much moping for 

those missed appointments with the Palais Garnier as for the glimpse I had 

had of what it would be like when only a thread remained of my vocal chords. 

I know no happiness can last forever in a life destined to come to an end—all 

the more reason to extract every last drop of enjoyment from the opportunity 

of incarnating, one after the other, these fearsome or wonderful women to 

whom I give voice, before nature exerts its toll and condemns me to singing 

nothing but mezzo-soprano roles. 

19

20 

For the moment, I rejoice that I can forget such dark thoughts by taking 

simple refuge in singing. I was right, you see, to refuse to speak for almost a 

week. If Ida claimed I was being affected, it is because her life does not depend 

on her vocal chords. It would, however, be most ungracious to complain about 

her for she took perfect care of me during those few days of dereliction. She 

even transformed this unfortunate circumstance into the opportunity for a 

great and beautiful adventure: would you believe, she got it into her head to 

have me read works of literature and by dint of persuasion, I plunged into quite 

obscure titles. 

I raised my eyes to heaven at prose and rolled them even higher at the 

very notion of poetry but to my astonishment, a long poem that she read me 

resonated with me in the most curious way. Can you believe that? A chambermaid 

sharing her love of poetry—I mean the kind one reads—with her prima 

donna of a mistress? The only poetry I knew was that of life, the one that Mimi 

describes so well in La Bohème: 

Mi piaccion quelle cose 

che han si dolce malia, 

che parlano d’amor, di primavere, 

che parlano di sogni et di chimere, 

quelle cose che hanno me poesia. 

Lei m’intende ? 

But I digress again. It wasn’t Mimi I wanted to praise but T.S.Eliot, whose 

poem Ida read to me. If I talk about it to you, it’s not to convert you as well 

but because I have some good news to tell you. Do you remember the piece 

for voice and orchestra that I commissioned from Samson Blacksmith nearly 

two years ago? Samson wanted me to choose the text and I had no idea of what 

to use. Over time, I almost forgot the project, so insurmountable did the task 

seem to me. I had to find, among the literary works of the millennium, the 

golden nugget to which nothing needed to be added and nothing taken away. 

You know how lazy a reader I am; I would give up before even opening a book. 

And here, during that week, the pearl was miraculously being offered up to 

me through the intermediary of the enigmatic Ida. It is What the Thunder Said, 

an extract from a long poem entitled The Waste Land. No sooner had I finished 

the last page than I sent a wire to Samson in New York for him to get hold of 

the book and ask Mr Eliot for permission to adapt it. The text was published 

five years ago and it may not yet have been put to music. I hope not, with all 

my heart. You know how much I long to create a role, or else a lyrical piece of 

some scope. 

You must be thinking that I seem very cheerful for someone who said they 

were overwhelmed by sinister revelations. It’s because writing to you almost 

makes me feel as if I’m close to you and nothing is more reassuring to me. You 

are sitting at my table, in the bar at the Ritz, drinking the same tea as me, and

we are chatting gaily, following no particular subject but simply following our 

thoughts wherever they take us. Or mine, rather, since I still haven’t had a reply 

to my previous letter and so I cannot comment on it. I don’t hold it against you. 

Such a long silence is unlike you, particularly when I have such a need to feel 

protected, and so I suppose you must be extremely busy. 

Would you like me to tell you a bit about Paris? So many friends had 

described it to us in such glowing colours that I was very surprised to be prey 

to such suffocating melancholy here. My indisposition and my fear of silence 

are not the only explanations for this lassitude; there is something more nebulous. 

I should not talk to you about it, so as not to cause you worry, but I have 

never been able to hide things from you. If I had to hide the slightest thing 

from you, I would feel so alone that I would go mad. Such thoughts sometimes 

overwhelm me, here, and a thousand others that are just as strange and 

uncustomary. Perhaps it is normal, so far from our home and from all I know. 

The city of Paris in itself is rather beautiful, even though everything there 

is very old, narrow and winding. That is part of its charm. Since my recovery, 

I get up very early to walk around, alone or with Ida. Some mornings, the city 

can barely be made out under a greyish tint, with the Seine and its banks, lined 

with book-sellers, and Notre Dame in the background like the spectre of a 

gothic castle hanging over the water; everything I look at seems unreal and 

ashen in texture. The silvery water calls to me. If I jumped over the parapet, the 

water would swallow me up without a sound, wrapping around me like fog. On 

other days, however, I cross the Jardin du Luxembourg under a cloudless sky, 

the buds on the trees standing out against the azure blue with magical clarity, 

the luminous air filled with the sound and odour of a morning at the dawn of 

creation, and yet I still feel that strange solitude weighing down on my chest. 

I watch young, elegant couples strolling but I am unable to share their happiness. 

At first I thought my despondency was because the city lent itself to love 

and you were so far away, so that it was a sheer waste to walk there without an 

arm to lean on or another pair of eyes to embrace the unfamiliar landscapes 

around me. Yet what oppresses me is not so much lack or solitude as a nostalgic 

longing, for what I do not know. All this must seem very confused to you but 

I cannot tell you more precisely exactly what was happening within me. 

I am speaking to you a lot about solitude but in fact I have done nothing but 

go out since my recovery and I quickly made up for lost time in terms of society 

life, which has provided a rather agreeable diversion to my recent moroseness; 

with the French, one does not get bored. My general opinion of them has barely 

changed since my last letter. In the main they are exuberant people, so undisciplined 

that they apparently need to challenge the established order to make 

themselves feel alive. They are also less puritan than our compatriots. 

However, I do not believe they are truly free. Their lives are compartmentalised 

and their enthusiasms hierarchical. That is why we are playing Norma and 


Carlotta 

Delmont’s 

Weakness 

21

22 

not Tosca, which local critics value barely higher than a Christmas carol. What 

is more, Parisian newspapers would never advertise an opera or a symphony in 

their entertainments section as the New York Timesdoes, for in their eyes these 

forms of artare superior to others. A Frenchman will not go and listen to Norma 

one evening and go and see Skeleton Dude in Barnum’s Circus the next, as we 

would, or if he did he would keep quiet about it. And I have trouble imagining 

French housewives going crazy about both Caruso and Al Jonson as ours do. 

I don’t see why one should compare Swanee to Rigolettoor what Swanee takes 

away from Rigoletto but that’s the way it is. Perhaps I exaggerate slightly: not 

all intellectuals here despise popular shows. They might sometimes mix with 

the riff-raff at a cabaret and wildly applaud a singer there although that does 

not stop them heaping the most degrading names on her. 

When I was a girl, my mother liked to tell me certain stories that I took for 

legends. I thought at the time that she was trying to give me a disturbing image 

of the Old World. She told me how European newspapers had commented on 

the most popular musical events of her time and particularly their astonishment 

the day Anton Seidl conducted a Wagner opera on Coney Island for 25 

cents a seat: in their eyes, that was like taking one’s wife to tea with a lady of 

the night. She also told me of their horrified clamour when Richard Strauss 

had played his works on the fourth floor of Wanamaker’s. It was unacceptable 

for a German composer to play in a big store: he had to play in Carnegie Hall, 

at the risk of being unable to accommodate the masses crowding to hear the 

maestro. After two weeks in Paris, I am inclined to give credence to such tales. 

For all that, I have met some endearing people here who are, to say the least, 

interesting. Artists of all disciplines who came of their own accord to greet me 

in my hotel or who introduced me to society women holding salons. Winnaretta 

Singer, Princess de Polignac, was one, an American lover of the arts, 

particularly music. I sang at her home as soon as I was better, accompanied on 

the piano by a local composer, whose name would mean nothing to you, who 

writes refreshingly simple pieces. 

But I’ve told you about everything except performances to come. It’s 

because, for my part, everything looks good. The first will be held tonight; I’ve 

been given a good press—indeed, I’m barely used to such a unanimously warm 

welcome. I have to acknowledge that France is particularly hospitable: I am 

received everywhere with all the consideration usually reserved for crowned 

heads. What is more, nobody here is expecting some superhuman effort from 

me. I resumed rehearsals five days ago already, Sunday included, and I am 

not tired, at least not physically. In Milan it will be different because I have to 

alternate roles with quite different ranges, which risks spoiling my voice and 

exhausting me and so I am taking advantage of this respite, as far as my affliction 

allows.

I so look forward to clasping you to me and feeling how much you protect 

me from everything. I hope I will soon get your next letter, which is so overdue. 

I am not reproaching you; I know how time races by and that it comes 

between us just as much as space. In exactly the same measure. Three thousand 

six hundred miles are nothing more than time, for you are always as present in 

my heart, while it takes six days sailing to be in your arms again. 

I have to leave you now, my precious Gabriel. Ida tells me it is high time to 

be leaving for the Palais Garnier where tonight I shall sing my first Parisian 

Norma. Think of me at that special moment. I kiss this letter. 

Your 

Carlotta 


Carlotta 

Delmont’s 

Weakness 

23


Melo 

24 

Publisher: Verticales 



Anne-Solange Noble 

anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr 


Translation: Vineet Lal 

vineet_lal@hotmail.com 

“Reading ‘Melo’ after ‘Des néons sous la mer’ leaves you in no doubt. Frédéric Ciriez ought 

to be designated an endangered species, alongside our great proletarian writers—the 

likes of Queneau, Calet and Pérec. Authors whose work echoes the world of the common 

man, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, getting right under his skin.” Transfuge 

“The characters in ‘Melo’ are charged with energy, lighting up a dreamlike Paris 

with the charm of their hopeless naivety. An African dandy, a Chinese trinket-peddler: 

such wonderful protagonists!” Elle 

One of this year’s top releases. 

BiograpHy Frédéric Ciriez was born in Paimpol, Brittany, in 1971 and studied arts and linguistics in Brest 

and Rennes. Following a number of literary collaborations he published his first novel in 2008. A novella, 

Femmes fumigènes, appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française (nrf) in April 2010. 

puBlications Des néons sous la mer, Verticales, 2008 (republished by Gallimard in the “Folio” collection 

in 2010). 

© Catherine Hélie/Verticales

In Mélo Frédéric Ciriez explores the streets 

of Paris and its inner suburbs, focusing his 

point of view on three characters whose lives 

are not quite the norm: a forty-something 

suicide victim, a dandyish refuse lorry driver 

and a girl who sells lighters door-to-door. 

Written in the first and third person, this urban 

panorama is framed as a triptych (“Transfixion”, 

“Transformation” and “Transaction”), with each 

part linked to the others either overtly or via 

more subtle allusions. 

The Suicide Victim, the Dandy and the 

Street Hawker each trace, in their own way, 

the outlines of a Baroque altarpiece, or a 

Just by the Château d’Eau metro I tuck into some grilled corn and gaze at 

the cobs sizzling on the street vendor’s brazier. He’s an Indian in a flowery 

shirt. The smoke rises straight up in the air, like in church when I was a kid, 

and I think to myself: this is the most laid-back grill in Paris, even if it reeks of 

petrol. It’s buzzing here in the rush hour. I gnaw at my food in peace, admiring 

the waves of blue-nailed women ebbing and flowing from the Afro hairdressers 

or the Sunshine clothing store, its frontage covered in bits of broken mirror. 

I admire these women as much as I despise the dozens of layabouts dressed 

like out-of-work R&B stars, prattling away and herding customers into the 

local beauty salons. They ought to give all those horrible men a scratch now and 

then, or execute one of them to set an example, and form a militia to enforce 

the law, screaming: bugger off Joseph, and take your style with you! 

I lean back against the metro railings, looking south. My vehicle’s doubleparked, 

facing north, with two attractive dark-haired men keeping a watchful 

eye. I see a man in a tracksuit reflected in my metallic toecaps. Poor guy … 

I hope he’s thinking: I’d give anything to have a pair of those! Well, nice try, mate, 

but that’s not quite how things work in the civilized world. Shoes like mine 

are what it takes to be Parfait every day, and you won’t find any round here, or 

if you did they’d be plastic and certainly not ones you could afford … so you’d 

better get back to betting on the horses at that Chinese place over there! Maybe 

he’s a junkie, or he’s gay and trying to come on to me. But since everyone looks 

like they’re putting on an act, not least myself, it’s far from easy knowing who’s 

who, and who this guy is. Sometimes I think: I could have been an actor too, 

and not just some badly-shaven bit-part player like my cousin Désiré, warbling 

away at pavement cafés as he waits for the phone to ring. I’m still ravenously 

hungry. I hand another five-euro note to the Indian roasting in the sun. 

modern-day vanitas, and highlight one crucial 

question: what exactly is the fire that consumes 

us all? The answer lies in the title: Mélo, the 

melodrama of life. 

Here are three individuals excluded by 

society, whom even the most naturalistic 

authors would be hard pressed to portray. 

Through evocative language, rich in originality 

and imagery, Frédéric Ciriez demonstrates 

his skill in documenting what lurks below 

the surface of everyday life, along with the 

anti-heroes that inhabit the blind spots of 

our existence. 

25

26 

The beast purrs into life. Three hundred horsepower under the bonnet in front 

of the Fair & White Center, “the world leader in beauty products for dark, olive 

and mixed complexions”. The boys are at the back, on the footboard. It’s as hot 

as the tropics, a bit of fresh air won’t do them any harm. The steering wheel 

is red-hot. I slip on my micro-perforated gloves. First gear, very gently. The 

prototype wrenches itself from the molten earth. 

Boulevard de Strasbourg at 30km/h: a herd of cars crawling towards the 

Gare de l’Est. I tower above my surroundings and the smog. The sun’s heat 

is piercing; even the car bodies seem to be on fire, as do their seats for those 

women driving in their summer outfits with bare thighs. Today my crew are 

wearing their spring uniform: green T-shirts and yellow overalls under a highvisibility 

en471 chrome harness—it’s those new High Environmental Quality 

standards, you need to know them off by heart. They cling to the support rail, 

neck thrown back, forehead facing the sky. I light a Dunhill and crank the aircon 

up a notch. 

This week I could have had a stronger team, but that’s life, and to be honest 

I’ve had worse in the past. On the left of the lorry I’ve got Bébère, a Kabyle 

who’s a bit on the flabby side. On the right there’s Sydney, a Malian, a social 

climber. He’s the one I don’t trust. I’ve always been wary of the Malian mafia 

when it comes to the city’s refuse collection, and the same with the Senegalese—all 

those West Africans who’ve never been to school and don’t have any 

scruples. The liquid waste slopping around in the depths of the truck appears 

on the monitor by the steering wheel. It’s disgusting. I look away and stare 

straight ahead at the city passing by. 

We park on Boulevard de Strasbourg in front of a kfc swarming with people. 

My men demolish a mountain of rubbish bags that have been piling up in the 

restaurant’s bins. A place that’s been exterminating chickens “Since 1939”. 

Sydney grabs the bags in twos. Bébère does them one by one. I’ve always known 

the Berber was a slacker and the other guy a show-off. Sometimes they get into 

fights, which I hate: after all, I’m charged with ensuring the team’s physical 

well-being. As if to prove the point … Sydney launches one of the bags as high 

as he can into the air, waits for it to land, head-butts it into the lorry, and then 

taunts Bébère who’s a bit older and stockier. Sydney, I’ve told you before not to 

do that in public, ’cos there’s folks that can see you and might complain to the council! 

Maybe it’s his ear protectors or he’s avoiding communication, but he doesn’t 

give a damn for what I say and carries on provoking a terrified Bébère. I wonder 

how he keeps his cool; if it were me I’d chuck Sydney into the waste chute and 

push the button. The people who make up our teams back at the office have 

no idea. 

Having got rid of all those chickens, the pair of them turn to a broken 

wheelie bin and begin to drag it. They struggle to wedge it onto the teeth of the

hoist; then the bin rises and empties in one move. Bébère stares with lifeless 

eyes; I’ve told him not to smoke joints anymore when on duty. My co-workers 

empty the last bins, give me a little wave, grab the support rail and we’re off 

again. 

The corner of Boulevard de Strasbourg and Rue de La Fidélité. Given this heat, 

you’d think you were in Brazza. I watch my guys, their mouths open and faces 

plastered with dirt, and realise I’ve no wish to be back in their shoes. Paris is 

filthy and full of bins. I rummage around the glove compartment and spray 

myself with some Antaeus by Chanel. And you never used to see so many rats 

before. Whatever the head honchos of the city might say, there’s more and 

more of them on the streets; we’ll soon need to set up a quality mark just for 

the Parisian rat. This afternoon the critters are out and about with the tourists; 

they’ve no hang-ups whatsoever, scampering around between the bins, 

totally green thanks to my Pilot Ray-Bans. There goes Sydney, dashing off to 

try and kill one with his heel. Missed … I’ve promised him dinner on me if he 

manages to exterminate ten in one day. He’s been trying for six months and 

he’ll never make it. His best tally is four. Sydney, try a bit harder and I’ll treat you 

to a kfc! He’s annoyed and shakes his fist at me. Bébère has his revenge. I turn 

into Rue de La Fidélité. Not everyone could live up to that street name. Come 

on, Dream Team Derichebourg, we’re hitting the high spots now, then I’m off to empty 

the truck and you’ll get your break! 

We pass the Lumières de l’Est lighting store and stop in front of a restaurant 

that’s named after the street; they hold musical evenings in their basement 

club. I’ve never been there myself, but apparently it’s really chic, and I guess it 

would be a great spot to strut my stuff. Why not even rent it one day, to create 

a bit of a buzz? It’s central and could raise my profile. The bins outside this 

place are always clean. That’s rare these days. The management has respect 

for its customers. I know because wherever I go on my rounds I see restaurants 

with bins chock-full of frozen food packaging outside their front door, 

which tells me they’re treating their guests like pigs. A little man in a white 

shirt and a bow tie comes out and greets my guys as he throws some rubbish 

into the truck himself. We set off once more. We go down the street and stop 

in front of Les Délices d’Afrique, an Ivorian restaurant. It used to be a Kabyle 

bistrot. Our team would drop by for a beer from time to time; then it changed 

hands and we didn’t like the atmosphere. I know the current owners really 

well, especially her. I’m double-parked. Rosalie, the boss, moves her lips in 

slow motion. Despite the racket from the lorry I can make her out: “Hello 

Parfait, you smooth talker …” I raise my finger to my lips and give her a little 

wave, y’know, nice and subtle, so her man doesn’t spot me outside the Hôtel 

de Londres et du Brésil. 


Melo 

27

28 

We’re about to turn into Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, a global melting-pot 

of a street. We pass the Swinging Londress brasserie. I turn to Bébère: D’you 

know what Londress means? Get it right and I’ll swap places with you … He answers 

smugly: It’s the capital of England! I reply: Wrong, it’s a brand of cigar. This used to 

be a tobacconist’s, it’s about time you stopped chewing that African Makla and spitting 

all over the place! 

[…] 

I notice a Chinese girl on rollerskates flogging trinkets in front of the newsagent’s. 

I slam on the brakes. “Hey you there, get in!” She shrugs and looks at 

me, unsure whether my intentions are good or bad. “Yes, you there, get in and 

show me what you’ve got!”, and I snap my fingers at the basket of goods on her 

belly. That does the trick … She scrambles onto the footboard and shows me 

her stuff. She’s got rings, key chains, fluorescent bits and bobs for kids and a 

sweet little pair of breasts under her black tank top, but what I’m really after 

is a lighter. “Briquet? Lighter?” She gazes at me all doe-eyed, but she hasn’t a 

clue what I’m saying. “Briquet, click-click, lighter?” I show her my packet of 

Dunhills and my broken Bic lighter. Got it, the penny drops. She gabbles two or 

three words in French, but all I pick up is: “Yes … just for you … very cheap …”; 

then she ferrets around in her basket and pulls out her tackiest lighters, along 

with some novelty ones like lipsticks and mini-flashlights … “How much?” 

The girl points to the tacky lighters and holds up her thumb, then points to the 

novelty ones and lifts up two fingers. I can see her pretty little wild butterfly face 

through my Ray-Bans, and I think to myself that it can’t be easy peddling stuff 

on skates every day when you don’t speak the local lingo. 

I ponder for a moment, then point to the novelty lighters and raise my 

thumb saying: “One euro, OK? I’ll take it for one euro, OK?” She responds 

by starting to shake her head again, but gently this time, from right to left, 

like an eel, as if she wants to haggle. Then she looks at me without saying a 

word, expectantly, with a crafty little gleam in her eyes … This girl certainly 

knows how to bargain. Since I’m fed up with the dashboard lighter that only 

works half the time, I blurt out “OK, OK” and choose a lighter shaped like 

a lipstick. She shakes her head in delight, chuckling as she tries to say something, 

but I don’t understand Chinese. Then she shrugs, holds out her thumb 

and I hear her say: “Bèn dàn, many grateful you very kind sir …” I give her two 

euros and tell her to keep the change. She seizes the coin and races off on her 

skates, flexing her buttocks in her black jeans. Clearly she’s heading down to 

the Boulevards, trying her luck at pavement cafés along the way. Then she disappears 

round the corner and I’m left with a fake lipstick in my hand.

© Jérôme Bonnet/JC Lattès 


Authorisation to 

Participate in Running 


and Other Escapades 

Publisher: JC Lattès 


Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin 

ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr 


Translation: Shaun Whiteside 

shaun.whiteside1@btinternet.com 

A very charming style, funny stories, sometimes savage, 

but always full of humanity, exploring the private dramas of affluent France. 

Franck Courtès’s heroes are all ages. 

Childhood and adolescence are important elements. 

The author works for the television programme 

La Grande Librairie and for Lire magazine. 

BiograpHy “One of my obsessions since my schooldays was to work alone, to spend my evenings alone 

in my bedroom and then, as soon as I could, to set off on my own for the countryside. With my militant 

humanist parents, it wasn’t easy to act the hermit. I was being brought up a bee, I saw myself as a butterfly. 

It started like this: with a moped, at the age of fourteen. All the stories I later told in my photographs, 

and today in my writings, came from that, from a quest for the total, perfect freedom that a simple 

escapade in the countryside could bring me. Me, a child of fourteen, far from sturdy, unleashed on the 

main road for seventy-five miles, overtaken by lorries, freezing, with a joy verging on hysteria. No other 

journey has ever made such a powerful impression as that one. But I have a lot of travelling with my job 

as a photographer. I took pictures of people, celebrities. I have enjoyed issuing instructions to a Prime 

Minister or a famous actor. Aside from my commissions, for years I kept a photographic diary. It was 

photography that taught me to listen. Today, I write and make up stories, drawing on simple things 

around me, to which I enjoy giving a wider resonance, more sensitive, dramatic or amusing. As I write, 

I shift the fates of my characters, and I sill surprise myself by laughing or crying. I was born in Paris in 

1964. I still live there, but I’m doing ok.” 

Authorisation to Participate in Running Competitions... and Other Escapades is Franck Courtès’ first short story 

collection. 

29

30 

Friends from country houses, a young man 

facing up to his cowardice, a divorced father 

who signs up for a television game show to win 

over his children, a young woman sacrificing 

everything to run the marathon, a Parisian 

bourgeois bohemian contemplating the world 

in a Japanese restaurant. 

In the course of these short stories, from 

the heart of the city to the heart of the country, 

Franck Courtès unspools the thin thread of 

our lives. He speaks masterfully of those private, 

silent earthquakes that topple each of his 

heroes and make them so fragile. 

Authorisation to participate in running competitions 

1 

Things went pretty well for her with that young doctor on rue Botzaris. Her 

reflexes were good, her blood pressure excellent. Such stamina, such energy 

were rare in a forty-six-year-old woman. Such nerves, a more hardened doctor 

might have added. 

She had to flex her knees thirty times to check her heart rate recovery. 

She performed the thirty flexes at full speed without leaning on the couch. 

The doctor barely had time to sit back down at his desk. Puzzled, he considered 

her for a moment. She was keen to impress him, too. 

Christine Juve got her breath back as discreetly as possible, gulping air in 

silence, purple in the face. 

Dr Ladoze came back over to her and checked her pulse. They both 

remained silence, looking at the little screen of the device. She peered at the 

young doctor out of the corner of her eye. 

‘And also, that’s not my best time ever.’ 

The young man smiled: ‘It isn’t a competition, madam.’ 

Her pulse quickly resumed a normal rhythm. 

‘Very good,’ he said at last. 

Christine promised to add on a bit of distance when she told Patrick, her 

husband. This young man didn’t realise.

As he asked his questions, she felt as if she were sitting an exam. It was about 

being granted ‘authorisation to participate in running competitions’, as they 

put it. A medical certificate allowing her to take part in her first marathon. 

Open sesame. 

Reading the registration form on the internet, the formalities had irritated 

her. She had phoned up to confirm that the certificate was in fact compulsory. 

Now, at the doctor’s, she derived a certain pride from this. Authorisation from 

a doctor impressed her friends and family. 

Twenty-three euros later, Christine was standing on the pavement with the certificate 

in her pocket. She went home, swiftly crossing the Buttes-Chaumont, 

furtively making sure that men were looking at her. 

She called Patrick straight away, without even taking the time to undress. 

Her hands were shaking as she recited the numbers of her medical results to 

herself like a mantra. 

Patrick picked up. He was in a hurry, she could feel as much and it annoyed 

her. Had he forgotten how significant her appointment was? She heard the 

unpleasant click of his computer keys. He was doing two things at once 

‘Patrick, are you listening to me?’ 

‘Yes, darling, but can’t you tell me all that this evening?’ 

She hung up and hated him for a moment. 

She thought again of her lie in Dr Ladoze’s surgery. She hadn’t told him 

everything. 

Christine put her coat on a hanger and hung it in the cupboard. She took off 

her shoes, placed a shoe-tree in each and put them back in their box. Then she 

went to the bathroom, splashed her face with cold water and changed. Dressed 

in tracksuit bottoms and a tee-shirt that was too short for her, she made herself 

a green tea in silence. 

The memory of her lie weighed heavily upon her. 

The young doctor had asked her questions about her athletic habits, he 

wanted to know how many training sessions she had per week. 

‘Every day!’ she had announced. 

‘And how many times per session?’ 

‘About an hour, but two or three at the weekend.’ 

‘Every day? Are you preparing for the Olympics or something?’ 

‘No, for a marathon,’ Christine said, irritated. 

He must be lumbered all day with the halt, the lame, with smokers and skivers 

and the overweight and all kinds of human flotsam and jetsam. Let him 

keep his sarcasm for them. 

She said nothing of the pain and boredom that she felt during her long sessions. 

She said nothing of the diarrhoea that forced her, after an hour and a half 


Authorisation 

to Participate 

in Running 


and Other 

Escapades 

31

32 

of running, to disappear into a forest when she was lucky enough to find one. 

‘You don’t smoke?’ 

‘No,’ she said, staring at the floor. 

‘What’s your alcohol consumption like?’ 

How she hated that medical language! Alcohol consumption had a whiff of 

guilt, of cops about it. 

‘I have a drink from time to time, like everyone, with food.’ 

She felt boiling blood gushing into her ears. She was lying. 

Thomas Ladoze was glad to get it over with. With spring approaching, he 

issued a dozen of these certificates a week. He hadn’t studied medicine to issue 

permission to the affluent to go and hurt themselves. 

He signed, stamped, held out the certificate and pocketed his remuneration. 

Christine Juve considered the sheet of paper as if it were a diploma. 

2 

She pulled a face at the pungent taste of the green tea. A glass of wine would 

have been more welcome. Christine mentally added up the calories. If she 

drank a glass, she would have to compensate by depriving herself of lunch. But 

with the marathon three months off, there was no question of skipping a meal. 

With a sinking feeling, she controlled herself and went on sipping her tea. 

Christine didn’t feel like an alcoholic, it was just that she couldn’t face certain 

situations without alcohol. A distinction that doctors were in her view 

incapable of understanding. 

Even as a teenager, her nerves had kept her from going out with her friends 

in the evening. Her mother, a beautiful woman of implacable authority, had, 

with an excess of reprimands, stripped her of all her self-confidence. Soon 

alcohol had become a lifeline. 

One day a sensible boy who wanted to kiss her told her he thought she was 

beautiful. It was a revelation. More than love, compliments became her question. 

But her obsession with being liked, for want of success, brought her 

nothing but suffering. 

Rather than entrusting her soul to a shrink, she paid attention to her body, 

and more importantly to her clothing. 

She moulted several times a season, and was careful never to miss the sales. 

A new coat was enough for her to be reborn. She felt like someone else, better, 

definitely more beautiful. 

Alas, very often, she was the only one aware of her transformation. Arriving 

at a dinner party, for example, she did not achieve the effect she was hoping for. 

Her friends placed less importance on outward appearance. Stripped of her 

armour at the cloakroom, her only refuge lay in drunkenness.

The first few minutes before a drink were torture. Christine tended to say 

anything at all when she was asked a question. She could, in her desire to be 

in tune with everybody, contradict herself at any time. She doled out flattery, 

expecting compliments in return. 

Sometimes she led men to believe that she was falling in love. That won her 

their sympathy at least. 

And when nothing worked, she stayed silent, stuck in her unease, hating 

herself. 

The opening of the bottle wounded the moment of her release, the good 

times had arrived. For a moment she forgot her mediocrity. 

Once the glass was in her hand, a mechanism was set in motion. Christine 

took care not to drink too quickly, to take maximum advantage of the euphoric 

effect of the first mouthful. She made it a point of honour that no one should 

notice her terrible pleasure. 

Alcohol spread its sweet warmth through her blood, blew in each of her 

limbs like a spring breeze. Her brain became calmer, freeing itself gradually 

from all responsibility. 

She was reconciled with her surroundings, with the people around her, with 

the whole of humanity; but most of all with herself. 

It always ended the same way. Christine thought she was being funny and 

gay when she was just making a fool of herself. Patrick, her husband, always 

pointed this out just as she felt most liberated. 

Christine didn’t have words harsh enough to tell him he was nothing but a 

killjoy. He would regret it. 

Patrick knew who would regret what the following day. 

3 

When her mother went into hospital, Christine was alarmed by her metamorphosis. 

Her mother could no longer feed herself normally. Sweets accumulated 

in the drawer of her bedside table. It took Christine a long time to stop trying 

to feed her. On the day of her death, she couldn’t bring herself to look at her 

mother’s remains, they now bore so little resemblance to her. She had become 

dreadfully thin. Christine stepped backwards in the room and bumped into 

the nurse, apologised and said there must have been a mistake. Patrick picked 

her up in the car park and wrapped her in his arms, where she could finally cry. 

‘She’s better off where she is,’ he said. 

The formula. 

‘Shut up,’ she whispered, lifting her head. 

And she stopped crying after that. 

Christine took up running three days later. She had been running for a year 


Authorisation 

to Participate 

in Running 


and Other 

Escapades 

33

34 

now. She had learned from magazines, from the internet. Because yes, you can 

indeed learn how to run. 

Today, she was subjecting herself to a training regime worthy of a professional. 

But her belly was protesting against such an effort. 

Christine disappeared into a forest or a field of maize for a few minutes 

around about the eighteenth kilometre. What she left behind her was so revolting 

that she couldn’t imagine it having been inside her only a few minutes 

previously. 

She conscientiously recorded everything in a notebook. Her times, her distances, 

but also her moods and sensations while training. Then she did sums 

and made comparisons. It gave her encouragement. 

The programme was very strict, the objective rather high. She had been 

warned. She imagined covering the forty-two kilometres and two hundred and 

fifty metres in three hours and ten minutes. Or an average of thirteen point 

three kilometres an hour. Rather than being discouraged, she took heart from 

the doubts of experienced runners. Her success would bring praise raining 

down upon her. 

Soon nothing was more important in her eyes than that objective. 

She abandoned the laundry, the housework and the homework of her children, 

who naturally didn’t complain. Patrick hesitated between admiration, 

encouragement and worry. Most importantly, he was often absent during this 

time. An increased work-load kept him late at the office. 

The only thing that Christine didn’t sacrifice was shopping. Food was at 

the very heart of her preparation. She had to measure things, to take great care 

what she ate. She hunted down fat and sugar, and the children’s snacks regularly 

ended up in the bin so that she could avoid temptation. 

She had to lose weight in order to run better. To increase lightness and limit 

the risk of injury. She dreamed of seeing that cumbersome body melting away, 

the last obstacle to her flight, her ecstasy. 

She neglected her husband, too. She set off early to go running in the cold 

and rain. They no longer saw much of each other. 

She gleaned advice from specialist magazines. The covers showed healthy 

young people. She scoured each picture for reflections of her fantasy. Men and 

women blurring in a single fleshly ideal. 

Christine discovered that the hardest thing about a marathon was the 

preparation.

© Franck Ferville/Denoël 


Crossings 

Publisher: Denoël 



Judith Becqueriaux 

judith.becqueriaux@denoel.fr 


Translation: Sophie Leighton 

s.leighton@clara.co.uk 

Sustained by an elegant and precise writing style, ‘Crossings’ analyses the power 

of feelings and the toll that they take in a poetic and vivid language that gives 

rise to some breathtaking seascapes. 

BiograpHy Solange Delhomme was born near Paris in 1964. She grew up in Normandy, then returned 

to Paris to study at the Haute École des Sciences Politiques. She loves Japanese literature, and she enjoys 

both watercolour painting and surfing. She lives and works in Paris. Crossings is her first novel. 

35

36 

When her grandmother dies, Clara discovers 

some private notebooks and letters that 

belonged to her mother, Marie, whom she 

never knew and who, she believes, ran away 

shortly after she was born. Reading these 

lines suddenly shatters silences, secrets and 

absences that go back many years. Clara 

discovers a father she no longer recognises, 

an abandoned mother and a grandmother 

devastated by an unhappy love affair. She 

seeks refuge in her wind-beaten seaside house 

that seems to resonate with her own turmoil. 

It is there, perhaps, that she will be able to find 

the strength slowly to return to life and to love, 

and to escape her family’s destiny. 

In this first novel, sustained by a unique 

narrative construction, the characters cross 

paths without ever truly finding each other. 

Across three generations of women for whom 

love has been an obstacle to experiencing 

or even accepting their motherhood, there is 

an issue of transmission. But also the question 

of choice or fate. To be saved or destroyed. 

The narrow, bare room is stifling in spite of the cold, its white walls glistening 

softly in the night, with a section of starless sky and the sea roaring in the 

distance. On the bed, her eyes wide open in the dark, Clara lies motionless. 

Her slender, outstretched body, its frame visible under her skin that is still 

silky despite the passage of time, shows a tension in its fragility, the strength 

of the working sketch. Her thoughts are leading her away. She lets herself drift, 

unable to escape from what has so tormented her for so long, those moments 

wasted in attempts, endeavours and hope followed by flight. Since everything 

has failed, she is forgetting herself in the illusion of the past returning to life. 

In the dark, the sea approaches, swells and rolls against the house, then slides 

alongside her, lifts her and retreats, pulling her back with it. Clara closes her 

eyes. 

Later, her train of thought deposits her in the dreary light of dawn just as the 

tide leaves a timber on the pebbles. She wakes, her thoughts as scattered as 

her hair, feeling drained, spun about by a terrible passing whirlwind, impaled 

by the sensation, a blade, the resurgent of the memory. The thought vanishes 

again, instantly elusive. It leaves on her the impression of a disaster that has 

already happened, been buried and then suddenly revealed, so quickly that it 

can only be imperfectly remembered. Clara recognises the fear but she cannot 

find its source. What took place is experienced in an instant, its trace rediscovered 

in her, then lost again. Suffering does not bring anything useful. As day 

breaks, everything is already beginning over again and as the light begins to 

cross the edge of the bed, Clara takes a decision.

It’s simple; it won’t take very long. To cease moving, let go completely and slide 

along the slope already carved out, then simplify further, become a smaller 

presence, purge and free the skeleton, every fibre tensed. She rests on the bed, 

in this room, between the walls that will gradually close in and eventually suffocate 

her. Waiting for her body to understand and adjust, she lets her thoughts 

permeate her, presenting her with a sequence of images from the past, retracing 

the journey, searching, growing restless, then struggling, getting tired and 

finally lost. So perhaps, before madness can overwhelm her completely, something 

will be born in her. After the storm, calm; after the turbulence, silence 

and peace. Either the wild creatures will be tamed or they will have devoured 

her. In the stillness of morning, the sea breeze. 

I look up at your face. Your serious, solemn face, set at an angle, gazing down at me. 

Not a smile, not a word. A long gaze. A ponderous truth. I cannot escape it. You move 

closer, you give me a kiss, a kiss as light as a cloud, a morning kiss, a kiss that says hello. 

Your lips placed tenderly and cheerfully on mine. It is a caress, it is a dream; it lingers, 

I cannot forget it. It is a dream. 

At first there was a scarcely audible hum, then a brief whistling. A few minutes 

later, no sooner had they cleared their plates from the meal-table than 

it had started again and continued without stopping. It had become a harsh 

grating noise that oscillated and intensified from one moment to the next and 

rolled up between the mast and the shrouds; all the metal parts of the boat had 

also started to clink and whistle, along with the other boats, and this had been 

going on for over an hour. The noise signalled an oncoming wind, even more, 

a storm. Everyone who heard it knew. They felt their napes and backs growing 

tenser and heavier under the pressure of a worry that mounted as this rose, 

with the gusts shaking the badly folded sails on the decks and the sea breaking 

against the sides of the wet boats there. Short, sharp waves were jumping and 

running amok like lunatics. Dusk was falling, a dark threat hanging over the 

sea washed white by the turbulent weather. 

Her father had said there was no reason to be afraid. He laughed and teased 

her, mimicking the blowing gusts, coming up to whistle into her ear. He had 

had a bit to drink. The clumsiness that made him bump against the recessed 

areas of the kitchen, the card table and the steps at the entrance was not only 

due to the swaying of the boat. When it was time for the weather report, Clara 

had watched from her berth as he sat down and switched on the radio. She had 

straightened up to hear the rapid voice better as it issued the forecast. There was 

no storm warning for them and the depression would pass them by— it would 

just be a fairly strong gale and a choppy sea. Her father had turned round to 

her, exclaiming, ‘You see! There’s nothing to worry about; I’ve known it far 


Crossings 

37

38 

worse than this, I assure you!’. Her eyes level with the port-hole, she could see 

the waves rushing up to her and, on the current that formed her horizon, a few 

lights from the island that were blinking and seemed to be slowly drowning. 

There was no place left for them at the port, only this uncertain mooring; there 

was a risk they would be searching all night long. Pierre had decided to leave. 

Clara had sunk down into the narrow bunk, curled up in her sleeping bag, huddled 

and still nothing in her could escape these feelings inside her that came 

from the world outside: the rolling and pitching of the boat, the waves breaking 

over the hull a few centimetres away from her, the intensifying vibrations and 

the racket, as the wind howled and the mast whistled to the biting crackle of 

the sails, the sheets that scraped and screeched, and the rapid footsteps, a halfstumbling 

run with sudden stops, slips and her father’s curses on the deck. The 

narrow berth held her in place but the boat was moving forward with sudden 

jolts and bumps. The world was nothing but noises. Water everywhere. And 

then, amid all this din, an unexpected stop, a dull roar. The list had suddenly 

worsened. Everything unsecured in the cabin tumbled down in a staggering 

crash. Clara stayed wedged into the berth, clinging to the edge, stifling a cry. 

The door to the deck fell completely open on Pierre, with a blast of rain and 

ice-cold air. His face was twisted by the strain, his dark eyes all but disappearing 

under his brows between the deep furrows, his long hair drenched. He looked 

like a drowned man. Without a word or a look in her direction, he had sat down 

heavily, head in his hands, shaken by sobbing. They had remained that way for 

a long time, he dripping on the steps and she upright in her berth, with the boat 

leaning at a bizarre angle, absurd, trapped in the violence of the impact and the 

damp, cold and chaos of the upturned cabin. The boat had hit some shallows; 

Pierre had been powerless to prevent it. Incapable. No means of escape. They 

could only wait for help in the hope that the boat would stay afloat. That night, 

Clara had realised that it was not the storm, nor the raging currents that ran 

through the sea, nor the rocks that had finally stopped them that had frightened 

her. It was him—his anger and his panic, and his dangerous weakness 

that had almost killed them. 

She was ten years old. Her life with Pierre had begun when her mother had left 

several years earlier, leaving the two of them talking together in a Paris flat. 

She was unable to miss what had happened before that—the life shared by all 

three of them and her parents’ history, perhaps once having been in love— 

because she had no memory or notion of it. Pierre never mentioned it; there 

was nothing to be said about it. There was not a single photo or object in the 

flat; everything had disappeared. As if none of it had ever happened. She only 

knew that she was called Marie and that there had been a before and an after. In

her dreams, a dark-haired woman would often appear, her back turned, leaning 

over a table, writing, with some black notebooks piled up around her; she could 

never get any closer despite her efforts and her outstretched arms. At the end 

of the dream, a drawer would open in the table, swallowing up the notebooks 

and the woman. Clara awoke with a strange sensation in her mouth, as if a 

delicious sweet had been taken from her before she had even had time to taste 

it, a film on her lips. 

After their semi-drowning incident, nothing more had been said about boats. 

The night had felt interminable, with silence reigning in the devastated cabin, 

as the rain and the gusts continued to howl outside before slowly beginning 

to subside. They had not moved, nor slept, physically and mentally numbed, 

clinging on as best they could in the sloping boat. There had been no words 

uttered, nor any comforting gesture, as each lay alone at either end of the cabin. 

He had offered no explanations, and she had asked no questions. The lifeboat 

had found them and brought them back to land the following morning. Their 

boat had proved extremely difficult to tow. It was damaged and Pierre had got 

rid of it. Afterwards, he had never spoken of it again, ashamed of what had 

happened and his own carelessness and weakness. They had returned to Paris, 

each with some bruises, he with some cuts on his hands, and a new discord 

between them. 

Day by day, her father cast a slightly longer shadow over her. After that night 

in the boat, when she had realised that it was his own panic that had taken 

them on to the reef, she had kept her distance from him. Silence had engulfed 

them even more. They had continued to be gripped by fear; he in his powerless 

rage, she in her forlorn disappointment. Life had resumed its journeying 

between the Paris flat and the cold, weather-beaten seaside house. This was 

Pierre’s childhood house in a village that stretched along the coast. The low, 

grey houses faced on to the large beach, the steely horizon, the islands and 

foreign lands. This was where he had learnt all there was to know about the sea, 

fishing, boats, the winds and the tides. He had left it all behind in order to come 

to study in Paris. He had stayed there. His parents had long since died; the 

house was only inhabited at weekends and during holidays. They came there 

whenever they could; they did not sleep well there. 


Crossings 

39


Two Strangers 

40 

Publisher: Actes Sud 



Claire Teeuwissen 

c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr 


Translation: Adriana Hunter 

adriana@hunter157.freeserve.co.uk 

The portrait of a family trapped in their own private torment that has been 

left unspoken and unresolved for too long, ‘Two Strangers’ is a novel about 

a separation and an impossible but essential reunion. 

A journey across time with its own inexorable momentum, full of evasive elliptical 

detail, and of memories and emotions illuminated with acerbic humour, 

total lucidity and an indefatigable longing for justice. 

BiograpHy Émilie Frèche joined Actes Sud in 2010. Her first novels were published by Ramsay and then 

Anne Carrière. She has written two non-fiction works about the death of Ilan Halimi: La Mort d’un pote 

(Panama, 2006) and 24 jours: la vérité sur la mort d’Ilan Halimi, co-written with Ruth Halimi (Seuil, 2009). 

She has also written two books for children: Un jour qui n’existe pas (Actes Sud Junior, 2012) and Un petit 

garcon tout lisse (Actes Sud Junior, 2013), as well as a novella, Les Collectionneurs, published by Éditions 

du Moteur (a company she herself set up in 2010) and currently being adapted for the big screen by 

Récifilms. Her last two novels have also both been adapted for film and are currently in production. 

Two strangers is her sixth novel. 

puBlications Her recent novels include: Chouquette, Actes Sud 2010 (J’ai lu edition 2013); Le Film de Jacky 

Cukier, Anne Carrière, 2006 (new edition in the “Babel” collection, Actes Sud, 2013): and Le Sourire de 

l’ange, Ramsay 2004. 

© Maurice Rougemont/Opale/Actes Sud

Élise has not seen her father for seven years. 

He lives in Morocco, barely knows Élise’s 

husband and doesn’t know her children at all, 

while she knows nothing of his life. Father and 

daughter have fallen out so many times, hurting 

each other and inflicting petty humiliations on 

each other, that in the end they no longer even 

speak the same language: they have become 

two strangers. 

My father frequently compared himself to François Mitterand. Not that he 

particularly admired this left-wing figure, but he had an absolute fascination 

for power, and the Head of State was its supreme incarnation. So, like him, he 

wore a red scarf, collected mistresses, had his own napkin ring at Chez Lulu, 

red Machiavelli’s The Prince and had a Labrador called Adriatic, identical in 

every way to Baltic, the President’s famous dog. It was only with this animal 

that my father was ever truly kind. And reliably even tempered. He loved that 

dog, venerated her. Every evening he went through the routine that a trainer had 

taught him: lie doooooown, staaaaand up, your paaaaaaw, give me your paw, come 

on, give me your paw, give daddy your paw, who’s daddy’s favourite girly girl? The dog 

would then put her paw in my father’s hand, she would roll over and then sit 

up on her rear end like a circus animal, and this earned her the right to lick her 

master’s face with her slimy wet tongue, it was the ultimate reward. 

For a long time I viewed my father’s neurotic relationship with this animal as 

tangible proof that he was mad. But as I grew up I realised most dog owners 

behaved like him. These people could insult their wives, mistreat their children 

and be pigs to their friends, but they were always absolutely lovely to their dogs. 

Because dogs have the unique trait of being both servile and loving. You just 

have to know how to train them. If they’re well trained, dogs obey unquestioningly. 

They accept teasing, privation and contempt. Some children do too, but 

when children grow up they then resent you and walk out—not dogs. Dogs 

And yet when Élise receives an improbable 

telephone call from her father, summoning her 

to see him, she obeys the domestic tyrant’s 

orders as if responding to an age-old reflex, 

even though her own household is falling apart. 

She takes her ancient Renault 5—her only 

legacy from her beloved mother—and heads 

for Marrakech. 

41

42 

stay. To the very end. Because dogs don’t do resentment. Because they know 

no shame. You can insult them and five minutes later there they are again, huddled 

against your leg, licking your hands … It’s a buzz, isn’t it? When you have a 

dog it’s impossible not to abuse that power. It would take too much effort. Too 

much humanity. Ever since I grasped this fact, I’ve always been wary of people 

who have dogs. I mean, for instance, there’s no way I could have a relationship 

with a man who had a poodle, or even a tiny little chihuahua. 

No, I just couldn’t. 

Simon, on the other hand, had a cat when we met. A little grey cat who was 

quite shy, he was called Woody. This particular cat hated being stroked, never 

listened to a thing you said and could vanish for days on end with no sign of life. 

He was afraid of everything. Very nervous, neurotic even, and spectacularly 

selfish. There wasn’t actually any point in that cat at all, but Simon loved it. 

Yes, Simon loved that stupid bloody cat and didn’t ask for anything in return— 

that’s how all of us should love, and I think deep down this was something 

else I found attractive about him. If he’d loved a dog instead of that cat, things 

would have been different; if he’d loved a dog I’m sure we wouldn’t have had 

children together. 

* 

Tom and Leo are nine and seven. The big one has no memories of his grandfather, 

the little one’s never even met him. When my father called three days ago, 

Tom used the word somebody to describe him. He said Mum, there’s somebody 

on the phone for you, and I didn’t imagine for one moment that it would be 

my father. I often think about him, though. Lots of images conjure memories 

of him for me, lots of smells too, and situations, but until that call, I always 

thought of him as you would someone who’d died, in the past tense. I couldn’t 

persuade myself that he was still there, that he was trundling on in his own way 

somewhere in the world, that he was still eating, sleeping, loving and breathing 

even though we never saw each other. Perhaps it was my way of not completely 

hating him, because we don’t hate the dead, we just forget them. 

So my father’s back. He’s been resuscitated in a way, and he only had to say one 

word, just one, for me to recognise him. His voice had exactly the same weight 

of authority as it used to, the same icy, intransigent tone which made my brother 

and me call him Adolf, Tito, Pol Pot or Benito. I felt like hanging up on the spot. 

Saying he’d got the wrong number. My mother’s no longer with us and my brother’s 

always on the other side of the world climbing some mountain so, all on my 

own there, I didn’t feel I had the strength to face up to him. Why was he calling 

me after seven years’ silence? To say what? What did he want from me? What had

I done now? I didn’t get around to asking. I let him talk, it was very brief. 

“Élise,” he said, “I need to see you, I’m in Marrakech, I’ll expect you before 

the end of the month.” 

And he hung up. 

I rushed through the boys’ bath, supper and bedtime story that evening, then 

hopped straight into a taxi and broke the promise I’d made to my husband 

to leave him alone. I knew it was a mistake. He could use it against me later, 

but there was no way I could keep news like this to myself: my father had just 

called me after seven years without making contact, he wanted to see me, he 

was expecting me at his house in Marrakech before the end of the month, it 

was momentous news, unfathomable even, it was completely unbelievable news 

given who we were dealing with and the relationship I had with him, I really 

had to offload it onto someone the way characters in cartoons hand on a piece 

of dynamite, quick, quick, before it blows up in your hands, and Simon was 

the only person who would understand the scope of news like this. I’d lived 

with Simon for twelve years, he’d given me two children, he knew just how 

much of an issue my father was in my life. And now I needed his advice, his 

support. I needed him to hold me in his arms and tell me exactly what to do. 

I gave the driver the name of his hotel and we headed along the banks of the 

Seine towards Place de la Concorde. It was only then that I realised it was bang 

on a month since we’d seen each other. 

Simon had chosen a guesthouse behind the Gare de l’Est station. A really 

shabby little guesthouse for people in transit, and I wondered why he’d made 

this choice, he could have afforded better, he had the money, or he could have 

gone to his mother’s apartment, she wouldn’t be back from Cannes until mid- 

April. But maybe he wanted a complete change of scene? Maybe, like the other 

customers there, he liked to think he would buy a one-way ticket to Prague or 

Budapest and never come back. The thought almost made me lose my footing 

as I stepped out of the taxi. I ran the short distance to the hotel and stopped 

briefly outside the door. Even though it was dark, I could see through the glass 

and make out the receptionist behind his desk, a bald little man with an inscrutable 

face, and behind him the pigeon holes with keys dangling in them, it really 

looked like the sort of place you booked by the hour. I asked which room Simon 

was in, then said I was going up. The man got to his feet and reached his arm 

out to me: Wait. I stopped in my tracks and we stayed like that for a few seconds, 

frozen, slightly idiotic. In the end the man picked up his phone and while 

he waited for a reply he asked me in a whisper for my name. I lied. Although 

we’re not actually married, I gave Simon’s name, thinking that being his wife 

would give me more weight, but I immediately regretted this when the receptionist 

led me to understand that Simon didn’t want me to go up—it was even 

more humiliating than if I’d said I was a total stranger. 


Two Strangers 

43

44 

“Are you sure?” I persisted stupidly. “Can’t I go up, really?” 

“No,” said the receptionist. “He’ll come down. He asked for you to wait for 

him in the café over the road.” 

I ordered a beer and, as Simon still hadn’t shown up, had another one. The 

room full of tables was almost empty, there was just a couple at a little table in 

the window, they were rather like an atoll lost in the middle of the ocean, but 

the bar was a mass of people, immigrants clustering round to watch the television. 

It was a bulky old set hanging from the ceiling, like in a hospital room, and 

it was showing images of what had come to be known as the Arab spring. A few 

months earlier a street pedlar in Tunisia had set himself alight outside the government 

buildings, triggering a revolt that toppled the regime and took down 

those in Egypt, Libya and the Yemen in its wake. Morocco was not affected. 

Not yet, I thought. I succumbed to the magnetic draw of those emotive images 

in which crowds of people marched as one, forming such a compact tide that 

you instantly felt you were suffocating. The men at the bar made comments 

in Arabic. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they seemed to 

be delighted with this great wave of freedom, and I wished I could celebrate 

with them. I’d travelled a lot in that part of the world, had written guides and 

travelogues on most Middle Eastern countries; I knew how important these 

revolutions were, how necessary whatever the outcome, but my head was so 

full of my father’s request I felt like an outsider to the rest of the world.

© Hervé Thouroude/Stock 


Vladivostok 

Nights 

Publisher: Stock 



Fabienne Roussel 

froussel@editions-stock.fr 


Translation: Sue Rose 

suerosepoet@googlemail.com 

This richly sensual book, beset by invisible forces, is a particularly fine example 

of Christian Garcin’s ability to weave together interconnecting storylines, 

characters and places in his novels. 

This compelling fictional universe draws widely on the writer’s extensive travel 

experiences to provide an X-ray of contemporary China and Russia. 

BiograpHy Christian Garcin was born in Marseille in 1959. His first book, Vidas, was published by 

Gallimard in 1993, and he has since written many novels, short stories, and essays, as well as poetry, 

children’s books (for L’École des Loisirs) and travel literature (published by L’Escampette). In 2010, 

he accompanied the writer Éric Faye to Yakutia, where they travelled down the Lena River to its mouth 

in the Arctic Ocean. Their account of this journey, En descendant les fleuves—Carnets de l’Extrême-Orient 

russe, was published by Stock in 2011. In the summer of 2012, as part of the France-Russia cross-cultural 

exchange year, Garcin joined a group of French writers travelling along the Yenisei River in central 

Siberia to the closed city of Norilsk. In 2012, he was awarded the prix Roger-Caillois for his entire oeuvre. 

puBlications Christian Garcin’s most recent novels include Des femmes disparaissent, Verdier, 2011; 

La Piste mongole, Verdier, 2009; La Jubilation des hasards, Gallimard, 2005. 

45

46 

Frenchman Thomas Rawicz, whose only 

crime is a rather scatter-brained approach 

to life, is being held prisoner in a dingy room, 

sitting opposite a Chinaman convinced that 

he has finally tracked down Tomas Krawczyk, 

a gangster involved in prostitution and child 

trafficking whom he has been chasing for 

weeks. The Chinaman, ‘Zuo Luo’, is a private 

detective who has forged a reputation for saving 

battered women, assisted by Wanglin, the 

brains behind this unlikely partnership. Once 

the case of mistaken identity has been resolved, 

Thomas is released. Interested to learn what 

brought these two allies together, he joins them, 

postponing his departure for Irkutsk, where 

1 

I’m the one asking the questions 

he was supposed to meet Marie, his Franco- 

Russian girlfriend. 

What connection can there be between 

a Korean prostitute, a professional movie extra 

with a long career in Hong Kong Kung-Fu films, 

two soldiers killed in the Sino-Soviet war of 

1969, a strange bright-eyed Siberian woman 

and a Latino gang leader? What happens 

when personal histories become entangled 

with world history? From Vladivostok to the 

shamanistic Olkhon Island on Lake Baikal, 

via the subways of New York, what started 

out as a straightforward manhunt will end up 

having unexpected consequences … 

Thomas folded the newspaper with his free hand and placed it back on the 

small table between him and the Chinaman, prominently displaying the article 

he’d just glanced at without reading, and the somewhat blurred photo printed 

next to it. He jutted his chin at the photo. 

‘That ‘Zorro’ is you, isn’t it?’ he asked, with a grimace. 

His other hand, the one tied to the cast-iron radiator, was hurting. 

‘Shut your mouth, Krawczyk,’ said the Chinaman. 

‘How many times do I have to tell you that my name isn’t Krawczyk. It’s 

Rawicz. Thomas Rawicz. You took my passport, so you should know.’ 

The Chinaman drew deeply on his cigarette then slowly exhaled the smoke 

through his nostrils. 

‘Shut your mouth, Krawczyk.’ 

Then, with his eyes fixed on his trainers, the Chinaman murmured, shaking 

his head. 

‘Your passport … Do you take me for a fool?’ 

Thomas sighed. 

‘Is your name really Zorro?’ he asked again. 

‘It’s a nickname,’ replied Zorro through a fresh cloud of smoke. ‘In Chinese, 

it’s pronounced “Zuo Luo”’. 

‘And you don’t mind? I mean, don’t you think it sounds a bit stupid?’ 

Zuo Luo inhaled deeply, blew the cigarette smoke into Thomas’s somewhat

uised face, then turned his head towards the small round window. Every so 

often, there was a nauseating whiff of diesel. Darkness fell slowly like a thick, 

damp quilt. They could hear voices, the din of birds and a few cars, which 

sounded farther away, their engines muted. Probably a park, thought Thomas. 

Perhaps the small scruffy park below the avenue that ran alongside the port, 

between the boulevard with its busy traffic and the cranes. I think I saw what 

looked like an abandoned shed there yesterday. He coughed and asked for a 

sip of water. 

‘Yeah, and then what?’ said Zuo Luo. 

‘Just a sip,’ repeated Thomas. ‘Anyway, you’re hardly going to keep me tied to 

this radiator for months, are you? At some point, you’re going to realize you’ve 

got the wrong man. Then you’ll be sorry.’ 

Zuo Luo just sat there, gazing at his trainers. 

‘What’s your real name?’ asked Thomas. 

‘What’s it to you?’ replied Zuo Luo. ‘Planning to take me to court, are you? 

Fat chance.’ 

‘Not necessarily. But I do like your nickname. A while ago, I read a book 

about a bloke with the same name. Or, at least, his nickname was Zorro or Zuo 

Luo. He was Chinese too. Odd, isn’t it?’ 

Zuo Luo drew on his cigarette. 

‘A book,’ he repeated. 

‘Yes.’ 

‘A book about me.’ 

‘That I don’t know. A book about someone called Zuo Luo, anyway. A story 

about a private detective who helped young women who had been sold by their 

families. His real name was Tchou Weng Wang.’ 

Zuo Luo leant towards Thomas. 

‘What did you say?’ 

‘Tchou Weng Wang. At least, I think that was his name. It was spelt Z-h-u, 

I read it as Zu or Zou, but someone told me it was pronounced Tchou. 

Or Djouw. That said, he didn’t look much like you. He was much fatter.’ 

‘Why, were there photos?’ 

Thomas sniggered. 

‘Not fatter, but definitely heavier. You do know that there are such things as 

portraits, or descriptions, in novels, don’t you?’ 

The irony seemed lost on Zuo Luo. 

‘Tchou Weng Wang, you said?’ 

‘Something like that. Chinese isn’t really my thing. Why, is that your name?’ 

‘It’s close,’ said Zuo Luo. ‘Badly pronounced. It’s also my nickname and my 

job. That adds up to quite a bit.’ 

‘But he wasn’t your build. He was much bulkier, I’m telling you. Fat cheeks, 

a real sumo wrestler type.’ 


Vladivostok 

Nights 

47

48 

‘Hmm. What was the book about?’ 

‘Stories, I guess. Zorro in Canton, Zorro in New York, Zorro in Japan, Zorro’s 

childhood, Zorro growing up, Zorro in love, that kind of thing. A friend 

of his was also in it, as I remember, an informer called Duck Face. As well as 

loads of women.’ 

Zuo Luo took a deep drag, then threw his cigarette butt on the floor and 

crushed it out with his heel. 

‘Duck Face. That’s ridiculous,’ he murmured, blowing a thick pale grey 

cloud into the air. 

‘No more ridiculous than Zorro,’ said Thomas. 

‘Who wrote it?’ 

‘Do you think I remember that?’ said Thomas. ‘Why don’t you just give me a 

sip of water. When your friend gets here, he’ll realise I’m not the man you think 

I am, and you’ll be in deep shit for treating me so badly.’ 

Zuo Luo sighed, stood up, filled a glass of water from the tap, and offered it 

to Thomas, who gulped it down in one. Through the small, open window, they 

could hear occasional snatches of conversation in Russian, floating above the 

more distant noise of the cars. 

‘That’s rubbish,’ said Zuo Luo. ‘I’ve never set foot in New York. Or Japan.’ 

‘I never said it was you,’ said Thomas wiping his lips with his free hand. ‘It’s 

only a novel, after all. Wouldn’t you like to untie me?’ 

‘What? No. No way,’ murmured Zuo Luo, absent-mindedly. ‘Tell me, was 

the book written by someone Chinese? Or was he French like you?’ 

Thomas sighed. 

‘Listen, I don’t remember. I think it was attributed to a Frenchman but written 

by a Chinaman. Or the other way round. Understand?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Fine. Either that, or I don’t remember. Anyway, I don’t give a damn. When 

will your friend get here?’ 

‘He won’t be long now,’ said Zuo Luo. 

There was a silence. Darkness had fallen. The strange darkness of an electrical 

night. The birds were quiet now. All they could hear was the odd fragment of 

Russian conversation and the rumble of lorries in the background. And there 

was still the smell of diesel fumes. Even though it was night time, the heat was 

sticky and uncomfortable. 

‘If you’re not the man we’re looking for, what the fuck are you doing in Vladivostok?’ 

asked Zuo Luo. 

‘Why are you here?’ 

‘I’m the one asking the questions, remember,’ said Zuo Luo.

2 

The Day Before 

In fact, I’d ended up in Vladivostok by mistake. 

The day before, I’d been in Belogorsk. I’d gone there to meet Yuri Berdaiev, 

head of Galiana Editions, to make an offer for the rights to the latest books by 

three of the authors with that publishing house, which had been kind enough to 

give me the odd paid assignment from time to time: a novel by Igor Phren, one 

by Eugenio Tramonti and a posthumous story by Norwich Restinghale, with 

an introduction and commentary by George Traunberg. We’d agreed terms for 

two of them (Tramonti and Restinghale), and I stayed for two days, one spent 

walking in a beautiful forest with Yuri and his wife some thirty miles out of 

town, along the Chinese border, a magnificent, fertile region where tigers had 

been seen, although we didn’t spot any. We then spent the evening drinking. 

My train for Irkutsk was due to leave during the night. 

After that, I simply went to the wrong platform. I blame those stupid, 

bureaucratic, centralized Russian train timetables, though the booze might 

have had something to do with it. I was supposed to take the 3.37 a.m. Trans- 

Siberian train to Irkutsk where I was meant to be meeting Marie, who’d arrived 

in Moscow the day before, but I got on the train going in the opposite direction, 

to Vladivostok, where no one was waiting for me. I’d forgotten that the 

timetables for all Trans-Siberian trains are based on Moscow time, not that 

of the cities they pass through. So, although the Belogorsk-Irkutsk train did 

leave at 3.37 a.m., it was 3.37 a.m. Moscow time—in other words, the one leaving 

at 9.37 a.m. from Belogorsk. I’d showed up at the station six hours too 

early, in the middle of the night around 3.00 a.m., suitably sozzled from all 

the vodka I’d been drinking to keep me going which, incidentally, had been a 

very bad idea. When I couldn’t see any train indicated at 3.37 a.m., I’d remembered 

this business with the timetables and muttered a mouthful of abuse at 

the perverse inventor of such a bloody stupid system. Helped by the booze (or 

rather not helped by it), I’d proved completely incapable of coming up with a 

mathematical calculation to subtract—or was it add?—six hours—or was it 

five or seven?—I couldn’t for the life of me remember—from or to the train 

times, and had therefore simply tried to find a train leaving at 37 minutes past 

the hour, any hour, and I’d found one—a nice old Trans-Siberian train. That 

had to be the one, the train indicator said 9.37 p.m. Moscow time, yes, that 

had to be the right train, I’d told myself, there must be six hours’ time difference. 

I’d added six hours to 9.00 p.m. in my head and ended up with 3.00 a.m., 

but of course I was doing it the wrong way round, because I should have been 

adding six hours to that bloody stupid 3.37 a.m. Not only that, but I’d done 

it all, in my fuddled state, without realising that the indicated direction was 

Vladivostok, not Moscow via Irkutsk. I’d headed over to the freezing-cold, 


Vladivostok 

Nights 

49

50 

deserted platform, had climbed into the carriage, where, unaccountably, no 

one checked my ticket—usually a carriage attendant, the provodnitsa, inspects 

your ticket, but perhaps he’d gone off for a pee or had overslept, who knows. 

By another stroke of bad luck, my seat (upper bunk on the left as you entered 

the carriage) was unoccupied. I stretched out and, without even taking off my 

shoes, fell into a fitful asleep, continually interrupted by noises, lights when 

the train passed through a station without stopping, and both when the train 

stopped, plus a bad headache due to the amount I’d drunk. And, even stranger, 

the provodnitsa didn’t show his face for the entire journey. I didn’t realize my 

mistake until I’d fully woken up, about five hours later, seeing towns I hadn’t 

noticed on the way out flash past. In the meantime, a small plump woman had 

taken the lower bunk, and an old man the one opposite. I greeted them with a 

silent smile. There were another fifteen hours to go before we arrived in Vladivostok. 

I had nothing to do there but, after all, what did I have to lose? I prayed 

no ticket inspector would show up and make me get off the train in the middle 

of nowhere, in some gloomy town surrounded by impenetrable forests, disused 

factories or former gulags.

© Frederick Alexis/Sabine Wespieser 

Yanick Lahens 

Guillaume 

and Nathalie 

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser 

Date of Publication: April 2013 

Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton 

jguitton@swediteur.com 


Translation: Trista Selous 

trista.selous@btinternet.com 

A man and a younger woman meet in contemporary Port-au-Prince, the violent, 

poverty-stricken, fearsomely beautiful Haitian capital. Their passion is at once carnal 

and intellectual, touched by the shadow of a past trauma. 

In choosing to write this novel almost three years after the earthquake, Yanick Lahens 

provides a stunning celebration of the victory of life and writing over catastrophe. 

BiograpHy Yanick Lahens lives in Haiti. Her novels, short stories and essays, notably Failles (Sabine 

Wespieser éditeur, 2010), portray her island as it is, lucidly and without indulgence. Her independence 

of mind and the authority she has acquired through community activism give her a unique position on 

the Haitian literary scene. 

puBlications From Sabine Wespieser: Bain de lune (forthcoming 2014); La Couleur de l’aube, 2008 (rfo 

prize 2009). 

51

52 

Guillaume is a sociologist, Nathalie an architect. 

They meet at the office of the French agency 

funding the construction of a community centre 

on which both are working. Guillaume, now 

50, his utopian ideals long abandoned, has 

spent his whole life in Haiti, Nathalie has just 

returned, having left suddenly at the age of 18. 

From initial exasperation their mutual attraction 

turns into a dance of seduction as each gives 

way to a passion that will not be denied. 

Yanick Lahens is a fine storyteller who 

does not shy away from using the codes of the 

erotic novel to captivate her readers, writing 

of the impatience of desire and the unthinking 

sensuality it arouses. But she also looks beyond 

the particular situation of her characters and, 

as she plunges Guillaume and Nathalie into 

their affair, never forgets where they come from, 

still less where they are now. 

But, while the narrative acknowledges 

the poverty endemic to the Haiti in which it 

unfolds, and which its two black middle class 

protagonists are keen to hold at bay, there 

is nothing miserabilist in the writing. Nor does 

it dwell on disaster, beyond an unspecified 

sense of menace hanging over Haiti in 

December 2009. 

A couple pass through the door of an apartment block in Pacot, up on the hill 

overlooking Port-au-Prince, in the fiery glow of dusk. 

The sunset wraps the city in glittering colour, masking its shuddering 

tumult, the miraculous, searing passage of the centuries. 

At this hour you can watch the silence rise, dampening the great racket of 

days tossed this way and that. A silence that hangs like a veil between sky and 

earth. The silence of rooms locked to contain the agitated monologues of the 

flesh. Turmoil, trembling, fever. 

Guillaume has taken no special care over his appearance. He has never seen 

the need for such attention to the surface of things. And, turning fifty now, he’s 

not about to change. He doesn’t need to change. He’s already proved himself, 

at work and with women. From her figure it’s clear that Nathalie, meanwhile, 

is around thirty-three, thirty-four. No more than that. And her thirties suit 

her. Her lace-up walking shoes, jeans and tee-shirt reveal that she’s a practical 

woman. Guillaume is a good fifteen years older. In other words, he has left the 

first half of his life behind, whereas she, Nathalie, is in her prime. 

Something in the way they move towards the door of the apartment block 

reveals that they aren’t yet lovers, but soon will be. The imminence of this 

seems inevitable. 

As they enter the narrow street the space between them reduces. Eventually 

they touch. At shoulder height. Every now and then their upper arms brush 

against each other. Just. Their forearms too. Guillaume knows what he’s doing 

and Nathalie lets it happen. She feels immense pleasure at these lightest of 

touches that are almost nothing at all. This warm unspoken wanting. Of course

Guillaume knows this and finds it delicious. A few metres from the door he 

stands back a little and secretly observes her. 

Just now Nathalie and Guillaume are in the soft, sweet, enchanted 

uncertainty of beginnings. And there is nothing more enchanting than this 

uncertainty, these beginnings. Nothing. Of all the images it is these they will 

recall. Afterwards. Long afterwards, when all has been said and done. 

As she steps in front of Guillaume and stops at the door to the apartment 

block, Nathalie avoids looking at her image reflected in the big bay window, 

so she won’t have to see how fear has discomposed her features. She closes 

her eyes, just for an instant. Fear could plunge her into that great wild place, 

left behind, way down inside, and which still terrifies her. So she takes a deep 

breath. 

Just to gather her scattered fragments. 

Find a place for her fear. 

So it can sleep peacefully. 

Deep down. 

Nathalie wants to stay on her feet. 

On her feet in her desire for Guillaume. 

Guillaume follows Nathalie. He is tense, submerged in an almost unbearable 

male impatience. And yet he has put on the same show for so many women, 

without total conviction, rounding off his performance with the routine gymnastics 

of an ardour that holds no surprises. So many … Rifling through his 

memory, all vanity aside, the hastily calculated total seems considerable. He 

had thought that thus far he’d solved the problem of his manly appetites in a 

satisfactory manner. And yet here, in this twilight, his belly aches with a forgotten 

hunger. Aches with something that wants to seem like faith. Inside 

him there grows an inexplicable foreboding that he won’t be able to make this 

woman’s breast rise and fall with pleasure like a huge wave. That he won’t hear 

the babble of the angels from her lips. 

Nathalie can’t find her key and eventually sits down on the low wall to the 

right of the door. After three fruitless attempts she empties her bag of its contents 

with a gesture of powerlessness. Guillaume knows all about women’s 

bags and laughs out loud when Nathalie curses, then finally finds the wretched 

key. He squats down beside her, plants a kiss on her forehead and helps her put 

everything back into the bag. He pretends to wait with serene patience, as you 

wait for a child that insists on doing everything itself. 

The security guard sitting by the door with a rifle between his legs watches 

the whole business from behind his dark glasses, with the expression of a man 

who has seen it all before. But he’s enjoying the scene; he’s a male rejoicing 

at what he sees as the conquest of another man on whom luck has smiled. 

A brotherly voyeur. 

Before stepping inside the building, Guillaume glances, not at the big bay 

window, but at Port-au-Prince below. One last time. Port-au-Prince which, 

Yanick Lahens 

Guillaume 

and Nathalie 

53

54 

he could almost swear, has drawn back with its open sores, its naked strength 

and swagger, so as not to poison their first embrace. 

Port-au-Prince: a mirage in the dusk. 

2 

Guillaume pushes open the apartment door, swings Nathalie round and holds 

her close. He has hardly opened his mouth before Nathalie puts her fingers to 

his lips and murmurs in a light whisper, deliberately extended, “Sssshhh”. He 

mustn’t speak. Not yet. Not so soon. She wants to clear the decks. 

Make space. 

Guillaume closes his lips around the finger that has silenced him and bites 

it gently, very gently, before taking Nathalie’s face in his hands. Lips appear 

inside Nathalie’s closed eyelids. Thin lips. Almost like the lips of people from 

cold countries. But these are deep purple, the colour of star apples. Fierce, furious 

lips. Fierce too are the eyes the colour of acacia honey in the stubbly face 

before her. Guillaume kisses her with parted lips. Warm. Fleshy. His eyes are 

dark and soft. Coffee skin. Huge mouth. Probing tongue. Seeking. Probing. 

Nathalie falls back in his arms. Offers him the mouth of a woman who just 

wants to know, even if it’s bitterness and cruelty. She puts her hand on the back 

of his neck, holds him close against her and is still. Nathalie wants to find in 

this stillness the strength to go further. Guillaume caresses her lips and speaks 

to her softly. Very softly. The pleasure flows from his fingers to his belly. From 

his belly to the taut impatience between his legs. Nathalie can’t hear him. She’s 

stopped hearing him. 

Guillaume’s hands leave her face and move slowly downwards. They slip 

inside her tee-shirt, then under her bra. Her nipples rise, hard, between his 

fingers. Nathalie is already ready to die with pleasure. Here and now. Eyes half 

shut. But she looks at him from the depths of a mystery that he can’t enter. Not 

yet, not so fast. 

Guillaume pulls her tee-shirt up and over her shoulders, then immediately 

proceeds to free her from her jeans, undoing them with a contained fever. He 

slips his hand inside the white lace of her pants, takes them off and lays them 

on the floor. He could make love to her right now, get it over with. He knows 

what to do. He’s done it before. But just now Guillaume wants this woman and 

none other. He wants the game. 

As her joy mounts, Nathalie’s ever vigilant attention to the chaos inside her 

softens. A little. Slowly. Just as, for Guillaume, the outside world, the great 

hurly burly of the city below them, starts to fade. 

Nathalie wants the game too. But the game has slipped away from her.

She has to get it back. Quickly. Cling to it so she can be as close as possible 

to Guillaume. To Guillaume’s desire. So she stands up straight. Turns round. 

Pulls Guillaume towards her again and starts to undressing the man who is 

going to make love to her and to whom she is going to make love. 

Every now and then she looks him in the eye, as she likes to do. “Fierce” 

would be the right word to describe this far-sighted look. Piercing its target 

like a dagger. The look that is often her last form of protection. Nathalie clings 

to it with all her strength. With her full attention. Ready for disappointment. 

And then Nathalie dares. She touches the softness of his sex. In his turn 

Guillaume moans. And moans again, she closes her eyes. So does he. Too 

gentle, too hard, his moans tell her. Much too hard. And then, again, she 

looks at him. Another kiss seeking an adjournment. A reprieve. This reprieve 

is another name for the restraint of women. Agreed on by whom? For what? 

In her head the answers lose their shape. She stops looking for them. Nathalie 

thinks of the miraculous image of the Virgin with sad eyes that her mother 

hung above her bed, ribbons of every colour in her childish plaits, daybreak 

smell of coffee, taste of akasan with syrup, hard August rain on her skin. 

Between Nathalie’s knees Guillaume raises his torso, fists planted on the 

sheets, face distorted with desire. 

Then Guillaume moves. He moves with, deep in his belly, the male fear that 

he’ll be unable to raise the swell in this woman’s body. But he moves. And when 

Guillaume enters Nathalie’s wet warmth, it’s as a doubting conqueror. Nathalie 

meets him with a slight retraction. He speaks very softly to her. Trying to 

find the best, most gentle pulse. But doubting all the same. Even in the most 

honeyed words. Even in the last violent thrust into the slit. 

Guillaume sees nothing of Nathalie’s strangely staring eyes, just as she hears 

nothing but the silent sound of blood in her temples. She tries to jump overboard, 

to dissolve in her vast inner sea the hard, dense core that won’t let go 

of her. But she can’t reach it, the core slips away, breaks and scatters into the 

chaotic squall at the end of things. 

Guillaume sees nothing of Nathalie’s open eyes, open despite her to the 

colours of the sunset. To Port-au-Prince below them, however distant, with 

its open wounds, its naked force and its swagger in the first flight of these two 

bodies beneath its reddening sky. To the chaotic sea of its rooftops. 

Guillaume collapses without seeing. Men don’t see. Not those things. At 

least not at once. Guillaume flops into the dampness of Nathalie’s sex, his 

right arm around her body. Nathalie, meanwhile, looks for the first time at 

the softness of his chest and back, slightly lighter than his face and arms. The 

lazy undulations of his muscles. A mature man’s body. Still standing, but in 

defeat. The little everyday defeats reminiscent of the big defeat, far bigger than 

him. Bigger than everyone, all the men and women on the island. An unfathomable 

land of a body, rediscovered after so many paths wandered. A land to 

be reinvented. 

Yanick Lahens 

Guillaume 

and Nathalie 

55

Arthur Larrue 

Going to War 

56 

Publisher: Allia 


Foreign Rights Manager: Marjorie Ribant 

allia@editions-allia.com 


Translation: Paul Buck and Catherine Petit 

paul@paulbuck.co.uk 

A florid and oneiric style that sketches protagonists worthy 

of the best ‘polars’ in a narrative both poetic and savage. 

A stunning plunge into contemporary Russia in the company of the anarchists 

of the Voïna group, peers of Pussy Riot. When art morphs into politics. 

A highly topical novel, both brilliant and funny. 

BiograpHy Born in 1984, Arthur Larrue has chosen St Petersburg to teach French literature as well as 

search for adversity. Going to war is his first novel. 

© DR/Allia

While some couples grapple with difficulties 

in their relationship, others choose to risk their 

lives by shaking up the politics of the State. 

But what happens when those people run into 

each other by sheer chance? The narrator goes 

to squat at a friend’s apartment, whose keys 

he has been given, only to find others have 

already taken up that right. There he meets 

real squatters, two men, a woman and a child, 

members of the Voïna group*. 

Sharing a night with these colourful characters, 

the narrator evokes with extreme subtlety his 

few hours spent with the most radical branch 

of contemporary art. He breaks in through 

the back door, zooms in with the vigour of 

a telephoto lens: from the hairs of a beard 

stranded in the kitchen sink to the pixellized 

squirrel decorating the little boy’s tee-shirt. 

Arthur Larrue uses the actions of that group as 

1 

‘It doesn’t matter at all …’ 

Esther was standing naked in the middle of the room. She had shouted 

other things before that; she was trembling with rage. I didn’t respond. I was 

staring at details of her doll-like body, until I saw her as simply an empty husk. 

The fold of flesh beneath her breasts, the crack of her smooth and plump sex. 

I imagined throwing myself on her and ripping out her heart. That heart 

would have the dimensions and colour of a boiled beetroot, I thought. A beetroot 

that would bleed abundantly and would stain my nails purple. With that 

image in mind, what she was saying was no longer of any importance. She went 

to sit on the edge of the bath to apply red varnish to her toenails. I remained 

motionless, I stopped thinking about anything, I forgot the boiled beetroot. 

Then we went to bed, her body glued against mine, she repeated the same 

thing, and once again I failed to respond. 

‘It doesn’t matter at all, does it?’ 

Opposite the bed, I could see the night through the window. St Petersburg’s 

lights were wavering because of the rain. It was dark and blurred. The 

city seemed to transform into mist, the buildings to be drowned in miasmas. 

A morbid attraction made me restless. I felt like dissolving and being diluted 

within, like an alcoholic dissolves and is diluted into drinks to see what will be 

left of him after the liquefaction of his organism. To see what solid remains of 

a pretext to write a kind of thriller both funny 

and breathtaking, a night rich in twists and 

turns and shady characters, from the deranged 

neighbour to the inspector in charge of the 

“War” dossier. 

*Voïna (‘War’ in Russian). As fiendish as Pussy 

Riot (whose member, NadejaTolokonnikova, 

took part in Voïna) and no less blasphemous 

vis-à-vis the repressive politics of the State— 

they painted a giant phallus on the bridge 

facing the KGB offices in St Petersburg, 

organised an orgy in one of the rooms of the 

National Museum of Biology in Moscow and 

hung immigrant workers, Jewish people 

and gays in a supermarket—this anarchist 

group of artists has been waging, since 2007, 

a merciless war against a fascistic, xeno— 

and homo-phobic State. 

57

58 

oneself after having drowned in the night. 

That was it. She spoke for a last time but I no longer cared, I was staring at 

the darkness and the murky lights. 

‘Tell me please, tell me it doesn’t matter …’ 

She fell asleep and I parted from her. Her warm buttocks had been against 

my back. The wet cold fell on me as soon as I stood up. I left the light off. My 

eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. She was sleeping in a zigzag position, 

her right hand slid beneath the pillow and her mouth half-opened. The moon 

fell on the sheets, making them shine. All was very quiet and muted. I had that 

bed waiting for me on the other side of town. My friend TamrikoBamriko had 

left it for me. 

TamrikoBamriko was a Georgian duchess, the daughter of a boxer and 

herself a violinist in a Jewish orchestra. Alexandre Dumas had calculated that 

there were as many aristocrats in Georgia as there were men on horses, but that 

didn’t take anything away from the nobility of TamrikoBamriko. Her apartment 

was situated in a neo-Gothic red brick building, with pushchairs in the 

stairwell and houseplants weeping from the windows. I had already been in 

that apartment the year before for a dinner TamrikoBamriko had cooked, coriander 

thrown in everything. I was going back tonight in a taxi caught in front 

of Esther’s door. The journey cost me two hundred and fifty roubles. 

‘You can go there whenever you want, it’s big and empty …’ 

The street smelt of benzene and fried food. The sky was lead grey and swallowed 

the rusty roofs like some kind of huge toad whose flabby skin would 

distend into improbable proportions. I was incapable of getting away from 

Esther’s image. Everything I saw reminded me of her and represented a part 

of her body or the tone of her voice. That distortion weighed down at the back 

of my head, like some form of abscess. I could see her in the clouds and hear 

her laughter in the hooting horns. The fraction of the car window I had opened 

channelled the cold onto my neck. It stank of tobacco, I needed fresh air. The 

driver was chain-smoking, he didn’t throw out his dog-ends but piled them 

in an ashtray, never to be emptied. That scraggy man, with deep wrinkles and 

sunken eyes, cast sidelong glances at me. I probably puzzled him, with my melancholic 

way of sticking my forehead to the window and blowing little wavelets 

in the condensation. We were driving through Lomonossov Street, a green 

net hanging down to retain a collapsing front wall. Big blue screens had been 

erected in front of the pink arcades to signal the site was to be renovated, but 

the site and the screens must have been forgotten for rust and corrosion were 

eating away at them. One must live, I told myself, not become trapped. The 

main thing is to leave her, sharp. 

The radio was playing a meaningless pop tune, the gear lever was decorated 

with a chrysanthemum frozen in a Plexiglas cylinder, the Kazan Virgin’s oval 

head was taped to the dashboard. I stared at her, and she stared back. I had

thrown three jumpers in a big yellow canvas bag. Those idiots retained the 

stubborn shadow of Esther in their stitches; she had the habit of putting them 

on to slouch around. I used to lick her skin to rouse its scent, it drove me crazy 

and I spent hours smelling her like an insect in love with a flower. I caressed 

her belly through a moth hole, she emitted little sharp cries that she shut off 

with her teeth. I hated her. 

‘Are the bridges raised?’ 

‘We’ll soon know.’ 

‘I must get to Mir Street, I’m staying there …’ 

‘At this hour sometimes they are raised, sometimes …’ 

Esther had a cat who was jealous of me. I never knew if it was her or him who 

scratched my bag when we made love. I used to send him flying to the other side 

of the room by grabbing him around his ribcage, but he came back stealthily. 

He was a pedigree tom, black with white stripes above the eyes, and almost 

hairless ears. He miaowed each time we whistled or called his name. I was 

very proud of my wounds. Esther disinfected them with a cotton bud dipped 

in antiseptic lotion, told me, laughing, not to move, then sat down behind me, 

wrapping her legs around my belly. Her treatment made my blood pale pink. 

She mended her lover in order to torture him again. I was her toy, her thing, 

she used to say her man. Hers was a terrible nature, but it was sugar-coated. She 

didn’t give an order without attaching one of her moon-like smiles. 

‘You must reassure me, I must never ever doubt your love, or else …’ 

She liked military marches played by four hands on the piano, Gothic 

novels, menthol cigarettes, zoos. TamrikoBamriko’s apartment was situated 

on Petrogradskaya, north of Esther’s, on the other side of the Neva. We were 

level with Souvorov’s statue. A tramp was warming his feet at the flame of the 

war memorial in the Field of Mars, I could see his silhouette wavering in the 

gas. The taxi stopped in front of Trinity Bridge, which was in the process of 

being raised. We could no longer go that way. A militiaman was erecting metal 

barriers with orange crossbars, lining them up one after another, taking his 

time. The driver took the opportunity to teach me a lesson, it seems that driving 

exhilarates. 

‘Is there a timetable?’ 

‘A timetable?’ 

‘Yeah, a timetable for the raising of the bridges, so that you know when you 

can …’ 

‘You’re a foreigner, right, German perhaps, Danish?’ 

‘French ...’ 

‘Ah, France is pretty, no?’ 

‘Yes, it’s very pretty.’ 

‘Do you live long there?’ 

‘One hundred and twenty, even more with vitamins …’ 

Arthur Larrue 

Going to War 

59

60 

‘You live well and long! Ah …’ 

‘So what?’ 

‘In Russia, we kick the bucket early, but we are never bored.’ 

‘Hence that idea of looking for an open bridge...’ 

‘Or a closed one …’ 

‘I’m just tired, mister, and unhappy.’ 

‘A woman?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘A Russian?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘Our women are there to make us suffer, you should have taken something 

else!’ 

‘…’ 

‘Are you really that unhappy? In winter, a woman is useful and comfortable, 

she keeps you warm, you shouldn’t leave her when we are so close to snow, you 

will miss her even more …’ 

‘…’ 

‘What to do? Do you want us to plunge into the Neva?’ 

We crossed by another bridge without saying another word. At Tamriko 

Mamriko’s, the lift was out of order,I had six floors to climb. My sheepskin 

jacket weighed six kilos, it made me sweat but gave me a healthy look. I had 

lost all the tan acquired in a summer spent with Esther, one month had been 

enough and the texture of my skin had regained that nasty yellow typical of 

St Petersburg. 

‘Nikolai Gogol described it as a haemorrhoidal skin tone but we can’t 

claim a medical link between haemorrhoids and a flagging face, though one 

can reasonably assume that the suffering caused by one provokes a nervous 

exhaustion that may affect the other—I had a spot on my right cheek.’ 

Memories burnt my eyes. A scene came up. Under the sun, Esther was listening 

to the lapping of the sea. She was telling me about an octopus that lived 

at the third right pole of the pontoon of the Paressouso where she was lying. 

‘You will recognize its den by the shells it has arranged in front of its door. It 

is an octopus collector of shells,” the child told me. “Here’s a bamboo stick to 

force it out. Octopuses are very playful and this one likes fencing. When it cuts 

and thrusts at you, catch it by one of its tentacles, and pull it from the water so 

that I can see it. It will be very slimy, but out of love for me, ignore your feeling 

of disgust. Here’s the mask and snorkel …’ 

The kid who was lingering between the pointed poles under repair had 

tipped her off, he was painting the upturned shells lined up on the sand like 

cups. I think he told her his secret because he wanted her to like him. Esther was 

blond, she had green eyes, the salt from the sea flavoured her skin. When I bit 

her it left crystals on my tongue that made my teeth crunch. She was constantly

worshipping the sun,swooning beneath it from midday to half eight at night, 

spreading her fingers so as to burn the least little bit of white skin. I declared 

the line of her knickers the most beautiful frontier in the world but she replied 

that she wanted to nap. 

‘I read the future in your buttocks, Esther …’ 

‘Octopuses are eight times more intelligent than us. Eight, one for each 

tentacle. They chose not to rule the world in order to collect shells. I love you. 

Dive. I’m going to have a nap …’ 

Arthur Larrue 

Going to War 

61

Kettly Mars 


of Thirst 

62 

Publisher: Mercure de France 



Geneviève Lebrun-Taugourdeau 

genevieve.lebrun-taugourdeau@mercure.fr 


Translation: Sophie Lewis 

sophie_l@fastmail.fm 

Kettly Mars plunges us into a hell in which every kind of corruption is permitted and, 

by viewing it through the eyes of a man struggling with his own demons, 

she strives to comprehend the inexcusable. 

“If Kettly Mars makes her realist fiction out of the torments of her compatriots, 

it is only in order to force them, and we along with them, to face the chaos head on. 

Profoundly compassionate, yet free from misplaced idealism.” Le Nouvel observateur 

Her previous novel about the Haitian tragedy, Saisons sauvages, sold more than 

8,000 copies and was translated into English, German, Dutch and Croatian. 

BiograpHy Kettly Mars was born in 1958 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she lives today. At the Frontiers 

of Thirst is her sixth novel. 

puBlications Her most recent publications include Le Prince noir de Lillian Russel, published in 2011 

by Mercure de France (in collaboration with Leslie Péan); Saisons sauvages, 2010, (republished by 

Gallimard for their ‘Folio’ collection, 2011); and Fado, 2008. 

© Stéphane Haskelle/Mercure de France

Haiti, January 2011. Following the dazzling 

success of his first book, Fito Belmar is living 

off the royalties and appears to be leading 

an orderly existence, punctuated by boozy 

evenings with his friends and mistresses. But 

Fito is hiding a terrible secret: on certain nights, 

he slips away to the camp known as Canaan, 

one of the sprawling refugee camps that 

multiplied in the wake of the 2010 earthquake— 

since grown into an immense slum—there to 

pick up the young girls whom poverty forces 

to sell themselves to the highest bidder. Trying 

to suppress this dark side of his character, Fito 

finds himself helplessly returning to this place 

of perdition. 

Fito looked at his watch. Ten to seven: he would be on time to meet them. The 

Jeep’s headlights skimmed furtively over the twisted trunks of the neem trees 

that bordered National Highway 1. The traffic was flowing and the car slipped 

rapidly along with it. An abrupt but liberating development after the congestion 

that had held him up for almost an hour, all the way to the Bon Repos exit. 

Fito felt a little cold but he didn’t adjust the thermostat. Better to let his blood 

cool down. In no time he would be sweating out every drop of water inside him 

under a makeshift shanty. The vegetation grew sparser as he drove on. Soon 

he would be at the Route-Neuf intersection, the crossroads for every peril on 

earth, at the exit for Cité-Soleil. He saw them standing there beneath a clump 

of oleanders. He knew to look for them there, like the other times, but at the 

sight of them his heart beat loudly in his chest and his throat tightened. He 

turned off the tarmac, pulled his off-roader over onto the beaten earth verge 

and unlocked the doors. When the two men climbed into the car, the night 

surged in with them. There was almost no sound from outside; a few cicadas 

were sawing in the brambles here and there and, far away, the motor of a powerful 

generator throbbed. 

Inside the car, the three men exchanged a brief greeting. After about a kilometre, 

Uncle said: ‘Slow down … turn here, boss.’ Fito took a rocky path off 

to the right. First they had to go past Corail, the resettlement camp with its 

orderly rows of tents pitched by the foreign soldiers. Higher up, the perfect 

anarchy of Canaan camouflaged a ridge of treeless mornes, the Haitian hills 

that towered over the Northern highway and whose far slopes, facing away 

When he welcomes Tatsumi, a Japanese 

journalist writing a report about Haiti, to the 

island, Fito feels threatened. If she discovers his 

secret, he will be lost. But Fito is not immune to 

the slender journalist’s charms … Could Tatsumi 

help him find a more enlightened way to live? 

Kettly Mars turns her lucid gaze upon her 

native country, training the spotlight on the 

implications of humanitarian aid. She weighs 

up the material and ethical consequences 

of the earthquake: the dangerous levels of 

promiscuity, the prostitution of Haiti’s children, 

a world without moral compass, where 

everything becomes an object of consumption. 

63

64 

towards National Highway 3, merged with the foothills of Morne-à Cabrits. 

A terrain of volcanic tufa, hot and infertile. Here and there, a few, rare clusters 

of neems and some cactus, whose territory displaced families had reclaimed for 

their campsites. Canaan: a cauldron of women, children and men, of laughter 

and tears, of hungers and thirsts. A chaotic agglomeration of plywood shacks 

and tarpaulin lean-tos, mostly blue, stamped with international acronyms, the 

camp had grown like a vast fungus, creeping swiftly outwards from one morne to 

the next, overlaying each in turn with a thick carpet of displaced lives. Beneath 

the evident chaos, a subtle discipline instilled order in the area. Already there 

were Canaan 1 and Canaan 2 and, as the human occupation advanced, so new 

Canaans would go on reaching out into the thirstiest sinkholes on earth. Here 

and there, a few solid houses had put down roots, anchoring the place in its official 

topography as a slum under construction. And the dust was everywhere, 

in hair, in eyes, in handshakes and arse-cracks, between legs, encrusting the 

most intimate parts of these lives. A dry and solitary place. Canaan: invaded 

and proclaimed the promised land only a day after the earthquake by a few 

hundred people displaced from the afflicted zone. A year later, and according to 

unreliable statistics, there were 80,000 of them. An ngo was looking for water 

sources and, for some months now, had been promising to install a system for 

piping in water. In the mean time, the precious liquid had to be bought. In the 

early days, a few charity-sponsored water tankers came to dispense their loads 

into the people’s drums and buckets. Each one sparked fights, which the strongest 

fighters generally won. This water was then doled out like tiny packets of 

lard and re-sold at a premium. Everything had its price in Canaan: the squares 

of stripped earth; the water like gold-dust; kitchenware, cosmetics, bread, the 

internet; security, however improbable; marijuana and rocks of crack; sex in 

all its forms. 

The path came to an end at a clump of mesquite trees; they had to continue 

on foot. Fito flicked his cigarette away and it fell in a stream of sparks. He put 

his keys in his right trouser pocket. He felt the grip of his rubber soles on the 

stony path. A brisk but mild breeze was blowing, clearing the sky above them. 

The inhabitants of Canaan always abandoned the camp during daylight hours. 

It was impossible to stay even an hour in one of the tents without dying from the 

heat or going into a kind of thirst coma. Where did they go? Some had regular 

work in the few factories in Vareux; others sold all kinds of nick-nacks in Bon- 

Repos, in Damien, on the route to the Toussaint-Louverture airport or as far 

away as Port-au-Prince; still others were mixed up in dealing illegal substances. 

But the rest, the old people, the children, in what dehydrated silence did they 

make it through the day? Fito sometimes wondered but he had never mustered 

the courage to ask someone from the camp. When night fell and a cool wind 

came up from the sea, the place came to life again. It seemed there was a fine 

life in Canaan just a few dozen metres further up. Through the solitude of the

mornes, bursts of music and chatter were already filtering down. It was a steep 

climb and Fito panted shallowly. Gas lamps and candles lit some of the tents; 

from this distance they could have been on fire. A few small generators chugged 

away, allowing business to go on, small-scale commerce, honest and dishonest. 

The light around these spots attracted the people of Canaan. Behind the 

flimsy tarpaulins, every one of the shelters withstood extreme conditions. One 

tent was maintained for worship by a protestant pastor. Further up, a blind 

clairvoyant told the tarot for twenty-five gourdes a time. Canaan was getting 

itself together to face the future. A committee of concerned men and women 

inhabitants had even formed a supervision team and put themselves forward 

as the camp’s political representation. This committee strove to establish its 

authority, to compensate the absence of the State, which knew nothing of the 

lives of the displaced. It attempted to set up security patrols: petty thieves and 

rapists ran a low-down racket in the camps; a razor-blade was all you needed 

to get inside a tent … Without real resources, however, all this remained no 

more than a well-intentioned pipe dream. Yet already they had been visited by 

spokespeople for the candidates in the second round of elections that would 

take place in a few weeks. Canaan was a sleeping giant, a malè pandye—a massive 

time bomb. 

The young guy with dreadlocks stayed back, to keep an eye on the Jeep. 

Uncle went ahead, turning off into a passage to the left. Following behind, 

Fito put one foot into the alley and tumbled into another dimension. Now 

everything changed. Every face he saw was carrying him towards a paradise at 

the heart of hell, an unspeakable pleasure into which he advanced like a sleepwalker. 

He risked losing himself then, within that dense promiscuity, in the 

perilous, fascinating proximity experienced in this most intense intimacy with 

the people; he risked, ultimately, pure oblivion. He was no-one, nowhere. His 

pulse adjusted to the pulse of the camp, to the shouts and shadows, to the odour 

of urine that rose in waves on the breeze. To the heavy shock of slaps occasionally 

resounding off women’s skin, to the deep yells, to the everyday pain, dulled 

by fear. He knew the giggles of the girls as they gossiped among themselves, 

dreaming of love or of one day going to join a relative in America or Canada or 

France; the sombre eyes of men sitting through their boredom or waiting for 

the winning numbers to be called in the local lottery; the children in knickers, 

hanging onto their mothers’ legs or playing with broken toys, made in China. 

He was mixing with men and women who made it their business to survive, 

from each day to the next, Bible under one arm and giving thanks to God for 

simple gift of breathing. They pimped children in some of the canvas houses. 

There were gangs, guns and the unspoken intention of taking life, always for 

money. He knew he was in danger in this place, but the danger itself brought 

him new life, it slipped into his bloodstream like a drug, a powerful stimulant. 

Fito knew the very breath of the camp, its shape and its smells, its bursts of 

Kettly Mars 


of Thirst 

65

66 

speech and its whispers. The people of Canaan had not made the streets too 

narrow, should they ever want to build a town there, or should there ever be a 

fire. Should there ever … 

This evening was his sixth time; he always came on Fridays. Each of his 

visits was his beginning and his end. Afterwards he would emerge from Canaan 

exalted, but anxious. The camp’s white dust all over his shoes. Burning from 

the stigmata of his own disgust. Already alone. Already struggling with his 

demons. Already knowing the inevitability of return. Each time his guide 

would take him by a different route, to a different part of the camp. Uncle was 

not much given to talk, only pointing out the hazards of the path. Except sometimes 

to whisper something to him, to make him wait: ‘Boss, we’ve found a nice 

little plaything for you!’ Occasionally, Uncle came across men he recognised in 

the shadows of the night. A brief moment’s complicity. They would greet each 

other abruptly, knocking their fists together: 

‘Hey bro’. Out for a stroll?’ 

‘S’all good bro’. Easy …’ 

Fito never knew in advance who they would take him to. But the surprise 

was always worth the wait. He had visited several of the camps for the research 

into the establishment of social housing that he was meant to be carrying out: 

the ones in Port-au-Prince, the super-camp at Bowen Field, the former airfield, 

another at Santo in the Cul-de-Sac plain, and finally Canaan, the unspeakable. 

He had made technical assessments, topographical surveys, he had 

interviewed the inhabitants about their way of life, their access to water, their 

transport problems, on what they wanted from a new place to live. He understood 

the need to provide a local and rational response to their needs. What 

was needed here was a different kind of work, that would respect these people’s 

suffering. There was no point showing up with one-size-fits-all projects that 

didn’t work. They needed to be educated, to learn how to live under different 

conditions and in different kinds of housing. They needed sufficient energy 

and faith to move mountains in order to combat the corruption that rotted 

all their institutions from inside, that allowed hope to wither, stillborn. Fito 

enthused, worked hard, made proposals, tilted against the windmills of the 

system, slogged, grew disillusioned, lost heart. The weight of the status quo 

pressed down on him. Canaan sucked him in.

© Alicia Marty/Éd. du Seuil 

Éric Marty 

The Chinese 

Girl’s Heart 

Publisher: Éd. du Seuil 


Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat 

martineheissat@seuil.com 


Translation: Annette David 

annettedavid99@gmail.com 

You may already know Éric Marty through his literary essays. Discover another side 

of him in this surprising novel, a fantastically forceful thriller with ultra-violent urban 

scenes, unfolding at breathtaking pace through the streets of Paris. Marty creates 

a story set within a world of militant intellectuals around the figure of a devilishly 

handsome and brilliant leader. A reflection on evil and perversion. 

BiograpHy Éric Marty was born in 1955 in Paris and lives in Meudon. He is a lecturer of contemporary 

literature at University of Paris-Diderot. His first novel, Sacrifice, was published by Seuil in 2005. 

As an essayist and writer he has published a dozen works. 

puBlications Pourquoi le xx e siècle a-t-il pris Sade au sérieux ? , 2011 ; Roland Barthes, la littérature et le droit 

à la mort, 2010. 

67

68 

A clandestine group of revolutionary extremists 

shock France with a series of abductions 

and murders, while deceiving the police and 

the media. With its equally terrifying and 

endearing, strong characters and the sublime 

figure of a young Chinese prostitute the novel 

reads first and foremost as an excellent thriller, 

full of plot twists, violence and suspense. 

In addition, the more informed reader will find 

references to France’s intellectual and political 

life, spot certain ideologies and appreciate 

its caustic humour. 

1 

Good thought for the day 

Bad conscience doesn’t always explain sudden awakenings. Perhaps Politzer 

quite simply needed to pee. Besides, there was something else. Slightly strange. 

An unpleasant wet sensation that made the leg of his pyjamas stick to his real 

leg. How bizarre, seeing that he always slept naked … 

But it was still night, with the innumerable confusions of night-time. That 

bitter taste at the back of the mouth, the tongue thickened from sleep. And 

this time, it was more than acridness or bitterness. But what …? 

Najla, who was there, warm, soft, a little bit mean, and who would make a 

fool of him if she discovered … he could no longer quite remember, something 

from the dream he just had, no doubt. 

The sheet seemed humid. The week before they had made love for a very 

long time in the dark. And in the morning as they woke up they had discovered 

on the white sheets, surprised, the rosy mixture of pleasure and blood that had 

trickled from her genitals during the night. A kind of big, beautiful, abstract 

smudge. 

But if Najla had had her period the previous week, then it couldn’t be her 

blood. 

He ran his hand along his leg and over the sheets. It was like blood though. 

The viscosity of fresh blood, but already almost dry in places. And then there 

was the smell. The agonizing smell of blood. He sat up. It was dark. What time

was it? Najla was lying on her front, the shock of her black hair, shiny and curly, 

turned towards him like a speechless face, with no eyes. 

Was he sure that she really was lying on her front? Slowly, while trying to 

keep visual contact with this form that vanished without contours in the dark 

of the night, he searched for the bedside light with his left hand. Found straight 

away the lead, pummelling it with his thumb and forefinger as he worked his 

way up to the switch. 

And there was light. Dazzling. 

So bright that he immediately closed his eyes. He waited a second. Then he 

forced himself to look. Eyes soon wide open. The black and shiny mass was 

indeed her hair, but she wasn’t lying on her front. Like a veil her hair was folded 

over her face that one could no longer make out. What one saw, what Politzer 

was looking at, aghast, was the naked bust, covered in blood already black in 

places, thick, coagulated. But red, bright red, at the hollow of her neck. 

He no longer moved. Only his eyes flickered. In all directions. 

The blood had run with no apparent order, partly dividing the breasts. But 

on the shoulders, arms and even the right hand there were long trickles, now 

brown. 

He felt a sudden impulse to laugh, as if confronted with a half-baked Punch 

and Judy show, and this urge was so pressing that he abruptly began to vomit. It 

was brief. A small, thick flow of saliva, turned green from bile, and evil-smelling. 

Burning tears came, a result of the spasms. He wanted to say something. 

Made some uncoordinated gestures into empty space. Then, very delicately, 

he drew aside a fold in the sheet and uncovered the smile of the wound. That of 

a whore, where the red has brimmed over, by dint of having been screwed for 

too long. Above the gash was now her face that her hair no longer concealed. 

The mouth was open. As were her eyes. 

What did she have to hide from him, she who was now so definitively silent? 

To promise? 

Outside was the night. Maybe it was still raining. Not that it mattered. 

There was nothing to be heard. The night seemed to have swallowed all possible 

sensations. All things. Events even. Indifferent to it all. As if nothing had 

taken place yet. Unfair and impervious. It felt like it was too early. He would 

need the morning, the first glow of dawn, the first car horns tooting, dustcarts 

passing, idiots shouting. And the indifference would stop, be replaced by the 

bustling activity of people. Of cops. The shops would open, and with them the 

trading of things. So, he had to wait. Be patient. Politzer had never been capable 

of waiting. But this time, it was different. He kept still. At the same time 

completely un-concentrated and tense. Tensed towards nothing. 

And this heart that was pounding, that he tried to slow down, quieten. 

The silence above all. The background noise that prevented it from prevailing, 

or, on the contrary, contributed to its omnipotence, one never knows. 

Éric Marty 

The Chinese 


69

70 

A minuscule interference, having come from nowhere, maybe emanating from 

silence itself. 

Waiting can only be measured once it’s ended. A bit like those sieges, interminable 

at first, from where the assailants one day break camp. The besieged 

scrutinize the horizon, cannot believe their eyes, then, after a while, agree to 

rejoice, to celebrate their victory, and finally, to carry on with life as before, 

with only the most lucid not being completely certain that the enemy hasn’t 

quite simply hidden a little way away, in that old spiky forest where the sun 

never enters. 

Politzer got up and began, after having milled around aimlessly for a 

moment in the kitchen, to tidy up, to meticulously clean the small apartment. 

It was no doubt pointless. They had left too many traces. But it had to be done. 

A matter of discipline. He tidied up. That took some time. 

The radio was on. A female voice with a perfectly stupid intonation reeled 

off the news, right from the announcement of food poisoning in an old peoples’ 

home having provoked vomiting and diarrhoea, to the accident of a coach 

carrying Belgian tourists, the feeble rainfall this winter, results of basketball 

tournament pools … until one no longer knew what to think. And had stopped 

listening. But Politzer turned up the volume. It had just been revealed—by a 

reporter who happened to be in the 9 th arrondissement—that a coordinator 

from the extreme left organization Red Line, a certain Carlos Ryman, had got 

away early in the morning from the special unit having come to question him … 

Politzer walked towards the window, drew the curtains very slightly. An 

assemblage of mirrors of which the closest was a magnifying one made it possible, 

if there happened to be a cop outside the apartment block, to identify him. 

And he saw a man. Forty something, black raincoat, blond moustache, slightly 

drooping, and a short goatee under the lower lip. Looked like a jerk. Politzer 

grabbed his mobile and photographed the face revealing itself so accurately in 

the oval mirror fixed to the guardrail of the balcony. 

Everything was ready. In a small night-blue rucksack he had placed the kit 

prepared by the so-called “Vomito” section, led by Eva directly under Mao’s 

orders: a weapon, magazines, two mobile phones, money, a bank card, a passport 

and an identity card in the name of Paul Mesnard, a master key, the keys 

to the hide-out. He added the razor he’d found on the floor at the end of the 

bed, two thirds open, and which he’d carefully cleaned, with everything else in 

the apartment that he thought to be important. 

Politzer was already washed and clean-shaven, having left nevertheless an 

emerging moustache so as to match perfectly, within a few days, the photo on 

his new identity papers. 

He went out through the back door, climbed the five stairs right up to the 

attic, snapped off the chain that held the metal ladder in place, and reached 

without difficulty a small window opening onto the roofs.

Up there, he looked straight ahead of him. The sky was heavy with thick, 

grey clouds. He knew by heart the itinerary allowing him to escape the cops. 

Thanks to the cold, his trainers stuck brilliantly to the frozen zinc on the rooftop 

and to the slates. He moved with the right speed, the one he’d been told to 

adopt and that he’d practised well over a dozen times. He was lighter than a 

fox … “Renard doesn’t rhyme with Godard.” Politzer smiled and then winced. 

He must not think of Najla. He hadn’t concerned himself with her body while 

leaving the apartment. Over the hours to come, he ought to forget her. Forget 

her completely. 

He arrived on the roof of number 56 in another street. Rue Pierre-Semard. 

A sharp, fierce kick on a very battered kind of skylight. He slipped his hand 

inside and opened it. Now he just had to jump. It was less high than he’d 

thought. The pane deformed everything. Glass is like ideology, Mao said, 

because it’s transparent, it deforms all the more so. He was right. 

Stop thinking. Act. He hurtled down the stairs. Go down to ground level, to 

the flattest level, as close as possible to zero. Meaning, to reality. There, where 

everything is equal. Where everything merges with everything else. Where the 

luck of the draw reigns. The street. The narrow pavement. A gang of noisy highschool 

girls, with little bare bellies despite it being December, gave him the 

chance to vanish for a moment. The street climbed slightly. He turned left, very 

quickly. Rue de Maubeuge. He went down Rue de Chantilly, then immediately 

along Rue de Bellefond—climbing too—into Rue Rochechouart. He knew he 

was being followed. Ten or so meters behind him, an exact copy of the cop in 

the mirror. His stupid face. Pig-eyed. It was him. The same one. 

The technique in case you’re being followed is very simple: most importantly, 

you do not run, or only when all other solutions have failed. Your escape 

must be smooth. Go where the crowds take you, know an apartment block with 

double entrance in every neighbourhood of Paris, locate very quickly a department 

store, a hypermarket, a metro station that opens onto another space, 

another street, another reality. Politzer knew all this. Najla’s body had perhaps 

been discovered … Who had killed her? How, during their sleep? 

He did the contrary to what he’d been taught. He began to run. Not very fast, 

to begin with, so as to not make the cop panic. Surprise him, that’s all. 

Éric Marty 

The Chinese 


71



72 

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy 


Foreign Rights Manager: Patricia Roussel 

proussel@calmann-levy.fr 


Translation: John Fletcher 

j.w.j.Fletcher@kent.ac.uk 

A French voice, fresh and inventive, the kind of voice you wish 

you could hear more frequently. 

The universal appeal of the theme of the father-son relationship 

and of the figure of the sports medallist. 

A quest for the father, beginning in France and continuing in Poland, 

the United States and Israel. 

BiograpHy Patrick-Olivier Meyer was born in 1969 under the Californian sun. At the age of two he ended 

up in Montmorency. Since then he has been writing, looking for a way out. Muscle and Flesh is his second 

novel. 

puBlications Nevrospiral, Calmann-Lévy, 2010. 

© Olivier Segnette/Calmann-Lévy

As he looks forward to becoming a father 

himself, Ewad Kubicz, a thirty-one-year-old 

Parisian photographer, learns of the death of his 

own father, from whom he has been estranged 

for fifteen years. 

Kazimierz Kubicz, former pole-vaulting 

champion, had many times reinvented himself, 

moving from his native Poland to the United 

States, without ever settling anywhere: 

a national hero later seen as a traitor to his 

His first contact with the pole was hardly a revelation. What was he supposed 

to do with this thing that stood almost three times higher than he did? After 

several weeks practising in the sand pit without major incident, he decided to 

confront the issue head-on. His run-ups were gauche, his positioning of the 

pole inexact, his attempts at lifting his body risky. Kazimierz the kamikaze. 

Aleksander showed him how to place his hands and thrust his shoulders forward 

to avoid falling backwards. He told him how to lift his pelvis and when to 

make the leap. If Aleksander accepted his presence and was unstinting in giving 

advice (‘don’t forget, it’s always you that makes the bar bend’), it was mainly 

in order to please his niece. And if it happened that thanks to a winter whim 

Irena wanted to abandon pole-vaulting for hockey, Kaz was still game once 

more to bite the ice. He would, however, also learn to flirt with those inverted 

precipices, those summits. 

After training sessions, Kazimierz and Irena became ordinary kids again, and 

choosing narrow lanes rather than main streets, lost themselves deliberately 

in the town. In spite of the pitiless cold, she accompanied him almost to his 

house, and he walked her back almost to hers, talking about what they’d got 

up to during the day. Kazimierz got better and better from one session to the 

next, to such an extent that Aleksander, impressed by his keenness, viewed 

him in a different light. Irena was half a head taller and used a pole some five 

inches longer, but in their world of shared values and competitiveness, it mattered 

little if she was first and he second. He imagined the scene later on: the 

country, an unfaithful husband, a disloyal 

father, a capricious seducer, and a man who 

remained an enigma to his son. 

When Kazimierz’s death is announced, his 

son refuses to believe it. It opens up old wounds 

and drives Ewad to go in search of him and 

to look up the women in his father’s life. The 

search for the father becomes a personal quest: 

how far can one forgive those loved ones who 

have betrayed you? 

73

74 

pride of a whole people, the national anthem playing and flags waving, the two 

of them choking back the tears, standing to great applause side by side on the 

podium at the awards ceremony, with all the spectators in the stadium leaping 

to their feet. As for Irena, she dreamt of certificates and medals gracing their 

house deep in the country, and of hordes of kids milling round. 

One Monday Irena had a slight headache and he hastened to pay her a visit. It 

was the first time he’d been invited indoors. In the kitchen they ate star-shaped 

cinnamon cakes. Kaz’s gaze kept drifting back to the legs of Irena’s mother, 

Jolanta. In the house classical music was playing. Sitting facing Irena on the 

floor in her bedroom, he repeated word for word Aleksander’s encouraging 

remarks. With her face close to his she listened with rapt attention. He had 

considerable potential. If he carried on training hard, he could go far. Destiny 

beckoned. They closed the door. Irena placed her lips on his and Kaz’s heart 

began beating fit to burst. The air was suddenly filled with pulsating atoms. It 

was perhaps the effect of light or just the projection of his own feelings, but 

even the elegant Wolfgang Nordwig, the East German pole-vaulting legend 

whose giant poster hung on the wall above Irena’s bed, was pale with envy. 

Even though he’d been crowned European champion in Athens the previous 

summer, with a bar set at 5.3 metres, he could do nothing to halt Kazimierz’s 

conquest of Irena’s heart. It was their first kiss. At first, just on the lips, and 

then, to the accompaniment of heavy breathing, there followed very quickly the 

tongue’s tentative exploration of the palate. Rare oxygen. “Don’t forget you’ve 

got homework to do” Jolanta said, pretending not to have noticed anything 

when she entered the room without knocking. Kaz went as red as a beetroot. 

Yes, he would return—he said to himself on the way home—his head full of 

stars that bathed the hostile structures of the railway station with a dappled 

light. He would be counting the days until he could see her again, at training 

the following Monday. He would stick it out, only seven days to go. 

Kazimierz was not only perfecting his jumps, he was making progress in the 

art of kissing, and his hands were now exploring what lay under her sweater. 

As he embraced Irena he felt a current running from head to toe. Sometimes 

he would close his eyes and think of Jolanta. He dreamt of finding himself 

in bed between mother and daughter, even if he didn’t know what he’d do if 

that were to happen. The thrill he felt on leaping over the bar was, however, 

more intense. Jubilation when the pole responded, lifting him to ever greater 

heights. He doubled the training sessions, then tripled them. He became the 

best in the group, and requested private lessons. The eyes of his coach shone 

when he spoke of him. While Kazimierz’s father still lived in fear of a broken 

neck, of damaged vertebrae, of years spent in a wheelchair, Brygida was starting 

to reconsider his potential and regain hope. She gave him his first carbon-fibre 

pole. It could just about fit into his room.

Feeling neglected, Irena developed an unusual kind of jealousy, not vis-à-vis 

other girls, but vis-à-vis the pole. It was unwieldy, it got between them, it took 

up too much space, it occupied all of Kazimierz’s thoughts, it was the sole 

object of his desires, the source of all his sorrows. The thing that had brought 

them together in the early days was now gradually driving them apart. Irena 

was kicking herself: it was she after all who had introduced them to each other, 

so she had only herself to blame. But how could she have guessed? It was like 

inviting a plain, lanky, gangling, stiff-legged beanpole of a girl to your first 

party. Except that the giantess played on an air of mystery, showed an attitude 

of defiance, dazzled people with her wit, looked the boys haughtily up and 

down, threw out challenges, veiled appeals at first, then acts of pure bravado. 

Arrogant, intimidating. A rival whom one could only curse. Or grovel to. 

As is often the case with those who enjoy a startling debut, Kazimierz soon 

came up against his own limitations. He had struggled with fatigue and bad 

weather, he had kept fit throughout his journey. ‘If you manage to leap over 

that bar, you will be champion of Poland. Champion of Poland if you leap over 

that bar’, he kept repeating to himself. But there was nothing to be done: he was 

stuck at 3.2 metres. It had been like that since the beginning of the year. 1971 

refused to smile on him, the path to sporting glory was blocked, all because 

his twist lacked dynamism. Aleksander urged him to be patient. ‘You won’t get 

the bolt to shift just by banging on the lock. You have to turn slowly, methodically.’ 

Bolts be damned. If he was going to win gold at the Olympics, he hadn’t a 

moment to lose. When he went back to the changing room he hurled his trainers 

against the wall. Everybody fell silent except for two boys. 

‘So, Kaz, problems at take off? Arse stuck to the grass?’ 

‘Light as you are, you should be nudging the stratosphere’. 

The other laughed like a drain. 

‘You can climb on my shoulders. Otherwise, I think my grandfather’s still 

got his stilts.’ 

‘He’d better not climb too high, else there’s a risk we won’t be able to see 

him any more.’ 

Kazimierz got up, went towards the smart-arses, grabbed the bigger of the 

two, and executed a furious maïte tsuki, a memory from judo. The boy’s head 

banged against the metal locker and his broken nose spurted blood. No one 

could take the mickey out of Kazimierz Kubicz and hope to get away with it. 

Irena took stock each day of her disappointment and of the centimetres that 

separated them. Her heart was no longer in jumping. One Thursday he refused 

her invitation to go to the pictures, preferring to refine his technique in the stadium, 

the laboratory for his future exploits, so she went to wait for him outside, 

wrapped in her scarf, the warm air coming out of her mouth like the smoke of 



75

76 

a cigarette which she’d soon be smoking, the first, a passport to adolescence, 

at the point where their paths were diverging. 

‘Put your sweater on, you’ll catch cold.’ 

‘I’ve got the bolt to shift’, he said with a broad grin. 

‘You’re the most gifted boy I’ve ever seen, I’m sure you’ll go far.’ 

She banged her gloves together to keep warm and to bolster her spirits. 

There was a melancholy note in her voice. 

‘We could go out at least one night during the week. You choose the day. We 

could go for a walk, go bowling … I was your first supporter, you know.’ 

The snowflakes were falling in slow motion but everything was accelerating 

in his head. The fire was burning in his veins; on the inside Kazimierz was 

alight. Fever, a temperature shock, his scalding sweat. With her eyes fixed on 

his, Irena hoped for a crumb of comfort. Kaz’s words bumped into each other 

on his lips: ‘ Cos don’t get this wrong, I’m very keen on you, it’s just that from 

now on, I can’t help it, what I want isn’t to go further, it’s to go higher, you see, 

ever higher, one notch more’

© Antoine Rozès/Viviane Hamy 


Soft Shadows 

Publisher: Viviane Hamy 


Foreign Rights Manager: Maylis Vauterin 

maylis.vauterin@viviane-hamy.fr 


Translation: Ros Schwartz 

schwartz@btinternet.com 

A “Romeo and Juliet” story against the backdrop of the Indochina War. 

A historical novel written with great lyricism. 

The author’s name means “remembering our home country” (her parents fled Indochina 

just before she was born), a mission which her writing fulfils admirably. 

Italian rights sold to Ugo Guanda. 

BiograpHy Born in France in 1976 to Vietnamese parents, Hoai Huong Nguyen’s name means 

“remembering our home country”, a reference to her family’s exile. Her first language was Vietnamese 

but she learned French at school. She has a doctorate in contemporary literature, having written a thesis 

entitled “Water in the poetry of Paul Claudel and that of Chinese and Japanese poets”. Hoai Huong Nguyen 

has already published two poetry collections: Parfums and Déserts. Soft Shadows is her first novel. 

77

78 

1954, the Indochina War, and the Viet Minh 

relentlessly attack the French troops. 

Mai, a young Annamese volunteer, is 

working at the Lanessan hospital in Hanoi 

where the wounded French soldiers are taken. 

Yann, a young Breton soldier, has been injured 

in the chest. Mai falls in love with him and 

shows astonishing inventiveness in finding 

ways to prevent Yann from being sent back 

to the front, even lying to the doctor about his 

medical condition. Yann becomes aware of her 

energetic efforts to delay his departure and falls 

in love with her. Their precarious happiness 

10 

is soon disrupted. Mai’s father, an influential 

judge, has other ideas for his daughter’s future 

and plans to marry her off against her will. Her 

obstinate refusal estranges her from her family. 

She believes she will now be free to follow 

her heart. Anxious to make the most of every 

moment together, the two lovers marry in haste, 

the day before Yann is sent back to Dien Bien 

Phu. Now it is the war that keeps the couple 

apart. 

To save Yann and rescue him from this limbo, 

Mai is prepared to put herself through hell. 

Dien Bien Phu’s verdant plain surrounded by hills lay in a wild, mountainous 

region. Running northwards, the Black River cut through the massifs of 

sculpted peaks and chasms, while to the south flowed the Nam Ou and the 

Nam Seng. It was like a turbulent sea of vegetation and rocks, where tigers 

feasted on their prey and insects on rotting carcases, an encounter between 

shadowy lands and eternal spirits. For centuries, a supreme calm had reigned 

over the plain, a balance between nature and the people who cultivated the 

fields and grazed their animals. During the war, this calm had been disrupted 

by the invasion of the Japanese and violent battles; then, after their defeat, the 

Viet Minh had taken their place, hiding out among the craggy rocks. Even so, at 

no point had man managed to destroy the harmony of the place. In November 

1953, it felt as if nothing would ever change. 

A brood of egrets was roosting among the branches of a grapefruit tree 

growing on the banks of the Nam Youn, the river that snaked across the entire 

basin. The tree was as tall as three men, laden with green and yellow fruits. 

Concealed among its double leaves, the egrets watched in astonishment 

as dancing white patches appeared in the sky towards late November, their 

domed forms like inverted lotus flowers. There was one, then two, and it was 

like a shower of white blossoms; they floated in the air, their silk skirts becoming 

more and more visible. Some were solitary and pathetically small; others 

fell in clusters of three, four or five, with a bigger, heavier object dangling from

them; they were followed by many others, the dancing rain lasted three days. 

When the flowers reached the ground with a dull thud, they crumpled softly 

inwards. Then came the sound of voices shouting in a language that had never 

been heard in these parts; sometimes there were bullet holes, and the white 

sails were stained with mud and blood; it was the beginning of the disruption. 

The tiny forms were men, not very different from those who had lived 

until now in the hills. The minute they dropped onto the ground, they hastily 

gathered up their parachutes and set to work. During those three days, they 

arrived in vast numbers; very soon, there were thousands of them. What they 

did within a few weeks seemed deliberately unreal. They worked with the application 

of meticulous and highly disciplined ants. The grapefruit tree was pulled 

up along with the lemon and tamarind and all the other surrounding trees. 

The birds vanished, and many other animals fled too; the villagers scattered. 

The verdant landscape was soon obliterated and transformed into a building 

site of ditches and metal brambles. Soon all that was left was the bare, yellow 

earth, a field of scrub planted with mines and spiked with metal. As if in ironic 

homage from death to life, the positions invaded by the the French troops who 

assembled in a circle for battle were given the names of women—Claudine, 

Béatrice, Éliane, Huguette, Françoise, Anne-Marie … Those names became 

part of the soldiers’ dreamscape, taking on an intensely carnal reality; they 

formed a living tableau that merged with their surroundings scenery. Yann 

was among the newly landed troops after New Year, arriving in this desolate 

place at the end of February. He was posted to Isabelle, the remotest position 

to the south. At first, things were relatively calm, sniping from the paddy fields, 

a few skirmishes and the first deaths. The incidences of harassment gradually 

increased, so as not to take the men too abruptly by surprise; patience, and the 

worst would come. 

Little information about events in the basin filtered through to Hanoi. The 

French army was considered to be the most powerful in the world; the Japanese 

occupation had dented its reputation, but, after the routing of the enemy, 

the former power had returned with full force. The Vietnamese generally had 

mixed feelings towards France. Even though the colonisation was unjust, 

many people refused to fight for independence under the Viet Minh banner. 

Some had chosen to side with the French, out of opportunism, because France 

was reputed to be less ruthless than China or Japan; the sad reality of the colonised 

was to favour the master who was the least cruel. Some, enamoured 

of French culture, fought or at least hoped for a peaceful emancipation. And 

others, concerned solely with their survival or their pleasures, had no interest 

in these matters. 

By February, it was rumoured that in Dien Bien Phu the fighting would only 

end up reinforcing French domination, even though some were beginning 


Soft Shadows 

79

80 

to believe that the resistance might possibly win. Mai wanted her country to 

be free, but she also feared that whatever the outcome, it would not be good. 

Ordinary people felt that the Viet Minh’s struggle was not just for independence 

but was a cover for unspoken resentments, and that the first to pay for a 

Communist victory would be the educated, the wealthy, the man who had a 

beautiful wife or who had provided a suckling pig at his son’s wedding. Mai 

had not received any political education, but she shared this vague feeling. If 

the French won, that would be the end of nationalism for a long time; but a 

Communist victory would signal the beginning of a reign of the arbitrary and 

terror. Mai would not have used these words, but she feared the reality: she had 

heard what the Viet Minh had done to a man in the countryside close to Hanoi. 

They had buried him in a field, leaving only his head poking out of the ground, 

then they had driven a plough over him. His head had been crushed and torn 

out of the ground, and there had been dances and shouts of victory. She certainly 

did not want the tyranny of those people. No one had any illusions as to 

how the Viet Minh leaders would treat their fellow countrymen if they gained 

power. Faced with the impossibility of the situation, and to stop herself from 

giving in to despair, Mai had obscurely resolved to think only of her husband. 

When there is nothing to be salvaged from a house, you realise that the only 

thing that matters is human lives. A few days after Yann’s departure, Mai had 

returned to the Ngoc Son Temple. She stood for a long time in front of the 

altar. She asked the temple spirits for her husband’s safe return, and made a 

vow that she would do anything they asked of her. The spirits seemed to have 

heard her prayers, a bright sun was shining that day, as if the sky had approved 

her words. What good fortune, she thought, perhaps, the bitter fortune given 

to innocents allowing them to change the course of events, or was it rather the 

sign that they needed this illusion while the fighting continued. 

For Yann and Mai, the wait had a new character and location. While Yann was 

at Lanessan, he was almost certain that she would come once or twice in the 

day. During his stay in hospital, only once had she failed to show up. He knew 

that she was not far away, he could fill her absence with images. In the morning, 

she was at home, or already on the way on her moped; if it was raining, she 

would always open an umbrella for protection. He would picture the countryside 

flashing past her eyes, the trees in the city, the colourful market stalls, the 

cries of street, the smells rising from steaming cooking pots; or, if she was still 

at home getting ready, he visualised her putting on her dress, brushing her long 

hair, covering up with a shawl, stepping outside the house. Now, everything 

was different. Mai did not know where he was or what he was doing. She could 

not imagine his life at the front, she had heard soldiers’ tales, but words do not 

convey a true picture. To anyone who has not experienced the horrors of war, 

it is like a closed box whose lock cannot be forced. She tried to attach images to

the grim words, shell, explosions, but those images were vague and eventually 

dissolved. Or was it that her mind did not have the strength to imagine such 

things, because they were too terrifying? Mai had seen injured, mutilated and 

dying men brought in on stretchers or operated on in their hospital beds. She 

had smelled the stench of their burnt flesh and heard their screams; she had 

seen sick men who preferred death to pain, men who were lost and for whom 

courage meant to finish dying. She could not imagine Yann among those men, 

the idea of pain and death was unbearable to her; she chose rather to recall his 

voice, his face, his ash-blond hair. 

During the daytime, she managed to forget the fighting. But at night, that 

was no longer possible. She was haunted by the same images and nightmares. 

Yann was caught in an ambush, or someone was firing at him with a machinegun, 

blowing off his arm; or he was on a battlefield, she was always imprisoned 

in the house that she had seen in a dream before his departure, she could find 

no way out, while he was waiting for her, wounded, perhaps fatally, his face 

covered in blood, he was waiting for her and she couldn’t find the way out. She 

talked, shouted sometimes in her sleep, the words echoed in the silence of her 

room, if he isn’t going to come back, please don’t let him suffer—if he must 

die, let him die peacefully—let him fall down and then lose consciousness— 

let another man bring back his body—let him not lie alone in the mud in the 

dark—but no, he must live, stay alive until the end, victory and defeat no longer 

mattered. Such thoughts would torment her until morning. 


Soft Shadows 

81



82 

Publisher: Buchet/Chastel 



Christine Legrand 

christine.legrand@libella.fr 


Translation: Georgina Collins 

glcollins@hotmail.co.uk 

A story of passionate love and worlds colliding. Can two people truly commit 

to each other despite overwhelming cultural differences? 

The Second Wife is based on the author’s own extraordinary life. But this is more 

than a short and simple personal tale: Pochon has developed her story into 

an authentic but profound autobiographical novel. 

Hortense is the main character in ‘The Second Wife’. She may be from the West, 

but she never casts judgement on the African realities she describes. Instead, 

she draws the reader into her story in a way that is extremely moving. 

BiograpHy Caroline Pochon was born in 1970. At the age of 15, she played the role of Johnny Halliday’s 

daughter in the film Conseil de famille directed by Costas Gavras. She then studied at the Sciences Po 

university of social sciences in Paris before attending La Fémis film school and the Langues O institute 

of oriental languages and civilisations. It was there she learnt to speak Wolof. In 2005, Pochon started 

directing short films and documentaries. The Second Wife was initially a 46 minute autobiographical 

documentary broadcast on TV5 Afrique. She has also co-directed a number of films with Allan 

Rothschild: La Face cachée des fesses achieved the Arte channel’s highest viewing figures for 2009, followed 

by Du culte des seins and Des pieds et des mains. Democratic Books released publications to accompany 

each of these films. In 2012, Pochon’s documentary Stimulation cérébrale: un nouvel espoir pour les TOC ? 

was broadcast on Arte. The Second Wife is her first novel. 

© Jean-Luc Paillé/Buchet Chastel

Hortense is fed up with her family, society in 

general and her home town of Caen in France. 

Fascinated by Africa, she decides to leave it all 

behind, flying out to Burkina Faso to attend a 

film festival in the capital city of Ouagadougou. 

There, liberated from her past, she begins a 

period of exploration and discovery. At the 

festival she meets Seydou, the ‘Keur Massar 

Poet’, and falls head over heels in love. He 

wants to marry her, so she has to convert to 

Islam and become Aïcha. But more importantly, 

she will be his second wife. The first wife is 

called Awa; she is pregnant and about to give 

birth. 

3rd March 

Anna-Maria finally stops to talk on the poolside terrace at Hôtel Indépendence. 

With deep brown hair and jewellery jangling on her wrists, she doesn’t 

look out of place in the swarm of people buzzing around her. Everyone seems 

to know her and nods in her direction when passing nearby. As we sit in the 

shadow of a large palm tree, she offers to buy me an exotic fruit cocktail with 

the vouchers the festival organisers have given her: she’s a permanent guest. 

She won’t stop talking about this year’s films but grants me just a few minutes 

from her ‘busy high-priestess schedule’ to listen distractedly to my story. When 

I mention the ‘Keur Massar Poet’, her face freezes. News of my great romance 

is greeted with frosty irony. 

“So, you’ve brought love at first sight to Ouagadougou, have you Hortense?” 

Her tone seems so harsh to me. There was a time that she too had experienced 

the same kind of ‘exotic’ adventure with African film makers ... Seydou 

is really nice but he’s a dreamer, not to say a loser. His career had begun well in 

France, but when he returned to Senegal, he wasn’t inspired any more. 

“Everyone says he should do a quick stint in France to relaunch his career. 

Maybe that’s what you want to be? A French quickie for the big shot film 

maker?” 

To make matters worse ... she’d heard he was married. 

“You need to learn how to say I-love-you-bye!” says a flabby White woman 

With a gift for sharp and lucid expression, 

the author analyses the emotions that motivate 

Seydou and his two wives. Pochon reveals how 

Senegalese women live their lives and invites 

us to discover, from within, African polygamy 

in all its complexity. 

The Second Wife is a first novel that 

combines adventure, love, hate and violence. 

It has an authentic charm while revealing 

a passionate love story that may be difficult 

to accept. 

83

1. An outdoor café-bar 

and popular hangout. 

84 

in her sixties to her two African companions sitting beside us, endlessly echoing 

my disillusion. The excessively glammed-up young sirens demand another 

drink, like little girls. Is it right to be annoyed by my wicked godmother for 

lacking any kind of restraint on this occasion? Or is it simply that truth hurts? 

I rush out to the street, taking a Xanax without water to ease the pain. I trip and 

tumble to the ground, resting there a moment amid the indifferent crowd. The 

noise, the poverty, the foreignness, suddenly it all seems insufferable. 

That evening 

But it’s true, Seydou is married. We meet up outside a small maquis. 1 A neon 

street lamp is casting a weak green-coloured light over our location. We sit 

uncomfortably around a rickety table. Me, all mixed up, and him, thinking 

through the barefaced truths. Beside me, an obese, frumpy woman leans over 

to sweep the floor with a short-handled broom. I cling to the rhythm of the 

broom as it beats in my brain. He’s ordered a Fanta and offers me brochettes. 

His hand is trembling. Impossible to eat. The absurd little broom going back 

and forth, the ample body of this woman leaning over us, the idea of the other 

woman, all pound in my head. 

He’s been mulling things over since we met up. He needs to tell me something. 

He takes my hand. I quiver. 

“Come with me to Keur Massar and be my wife. My second wife.” 

My chair breaks, I fall flat on my back, my body hurts, I burst into tears. 

He takes me in his arms. The woman who’s sweeping continues her job 

without batting an eyelid, shoving her broom right up to us, her heavy body 

sagging towards the ground. Out comes a packet of Xanax. Essential. He 

snatches it from my feeble hands. 

“Hortense, now you’ve got me you don’t need these pills to be ok any more, 

can’t you see they keep you in a state of dependency?” I should burst into bitter 

laughter at the absurdity of this ultimate misconception, but I watch him throw 

away my beloved pills. He squeezes me in his arms and leads me, alongside 

him, into the street, his body interlaced with mine. For a lingering moment we 

say nothing. And I know that he loves me. 

He speaks to me about his wife, with whom no intellectual exchange of words 

is possible, since she’s almost illiterate (but her talent for managing her family’s 

everyday life means she’s out of the ordinary). She’s precious to him because she 

connects him to Africa and for that reason precisely he’ll never be able to leave 

her. Her education has prepared her to have one or more co-wives. Whereas 

with me he’d be one half of an artistic couple that transcends geographical and 

cultural borders! I imagine a frumpy middle-aged woman who’s ugly, equipped

with a broom, with a cooking pot, with an apron round her waist, speaking 

loudly, like all those women you see selling fritters or fabrics at Ouagadougou 

market. A small cynical assessment brings me to the conclusion that when 

compared to me, ultimately this woman doesn’t stand a chance. I am young, 

I am white, I am rich. I have everything, she has nothing. 

By the pool at Hôtel Indépendence 

Everything had been so intense, unpredictable and inevitable. I have my first 

moment of solitude after three days swimming at a hundred miles an hour in 

a total synthesis of bodies, spirits, anxieties! I listen intently to the frenetic 

sabars, 2 which for me embody the fire of passion and the Senegalese spirit, 

which I know I’m now bound to. Forever. 

The Keur Massar Poet. 

His smile, animated by expressions that are already familiar to me. The 

way he speaks, rolling his ‘r’s, constructing sentences, laughing! His purity, 

his spirituality. His lyricism captivates me. His outrage. The way he dares to 

speak when others stay quiet. The impulsive way we discovered each other—or 

rediscovered—as if as one in another life. Two beings aware they’ve each found 

their other half—one a man, the other a woman, the same suffering, the same 

quicksilver liveliness, the same way of handling things, the ability to see from 

more than one perspective. 

I run into Anna-Maria for the last time on the poolside terrace at Hôtel 

Indépendence, amidst the disorder and disarray of the last party. With the radio 

still playing the lackadaisical fespaco 3 film festival jingle in the background, 

I announce to the high priestess that I’m staying in Africa to marry Seydou. 

“Well, if that’s what you’ve decided, good luck to you! He’s rather handsome 

and likeable, but what are you going to do about his wife?” 

I explain to her that Seydou shares nothing with his first wife, that she won’t 

be a rival because we come from different worlds. And in saying this I consider 

myself to be extremely modern for accepting polygamy in this way, and proud 

not to be racially prejudiced. Anna-Maria finally wishes me a safe trip before 

disappearing in a flutter of fabric and the fragrance of an Yves Saint Laurent 

perfume. 

I find Seydou again on the terrace. 

“Don’t worry about it, she’s part of the old generation of Francophone African 

paternalists and doesn’t understand a thing about love between an African 

man and a French woman: she’s never really dared to live.” 

So, this time I suggest that if he wants, after Keur Massar, he can come and 

join me in France to relaunch his filmmaking career. 



2. A type of traditional West 

African drum. 

3. The Festival panafricain 

du cinéma et de la 

télévision de Ouagadougou 

(Panafrican Film and 

Television Festival of 

Ouagadougou). 

85

4. A traditionally nomadic 

population from the 

Saharan interior of North 

Africa. 

5. A griot is a traditional 

African orator, storyteller 

and musician. 

86 

“You’re so thoughtful! It’s a quality one admires in Senegal. It shows nobleness 

of heart.” But what he really wants, is just for me to come and see where 

he lives, modestly, with his family. In the real Africa. 

6 March, Ouagadougou Bus Station 

Keur Massar is two days from here, God willing. The heat is already unbearable. 

Dust there permeates the air of the bus station, a place dismissed to the 

outskirts of the city where sophisticated figures fade into the distance with the 

diverse fruits of their labour from fespaco. A feverish commotion reigns over 

the bus and lots of sweaty men are loading up enormous bags of merchandise. 

The cargo seems to be bulging out of the vehicle from all sides. Strings hold 

together what could be described as an enormous floppy hat made of hessian 

and tarpaulin, holding bags and cases crushed one against the other all higgledy-piggledy. 

I’m the only White woman. The only woman. I watch these 

men dash around, selecting a bus at random and embarking upon crazy journeys 

across the Sahara to the banks of Lampedusa or Barcelona, whilst Seydou 

and I prolong our honeymoon. They look at my legs. My knees emerge from 

the folds of my skirt. 

“Don’t worry about people looking, you’ll have to put up with that quite a bit.” 

The driver sits behind his fake leather steering wheel opposite a sticker of 

Mecca. He looks tough, skin darkened with the sun and wearing a loose blue 

turban like the Touaregs 4 do. He’s bartering with customers for seats. My purse 

is empty. The bus is about to leave. Seydou had very little money coming here 

but pulls his last note from his pocket and asks the driver how much the journey 

will cost. 

“30,000,” states the man in blue without even turning his head, staring at 

a fixed point on the horizon. 

“50,000 for two people then, chief?” 

“The White woman can’t pay the same as everyone else! They colonise us 

and then ask for a friends’ discount!” 

Seydou launches into a griotic 5 tirade complete with arm gestures. I stop 

myself from smiling and pray that he wins. 

“Chief! You need to understand, we’ve no time left to go to the bank. They’re 

waiting for us in Dakar where we’re getting married. All our family members 

are there, she’s already had a long journey from France to get here... It’s a marriage 

between the Black race and the White race; do you not support peace 

between different populations? God is great, he will not forget you. 

“OK, hop in!” 

Seydou hands the Touareg his last note and winks at me victoriously. We 

share a quiet little chuckle. 

“You won’t need money anymore when you’re in Keur Massar,” he says.

© DR/Le Rouergue 


Amazons 

Publisher: Le Rouergue 


Foreign Rights Manager: Brigitte Reydel 

brigitte.reydel@lerouergue.com 


Translation: Josephine Bacon 

bacon@langservice.com 

An inter-generational, escapist novel in the tradition of ‘Thelma and Louise’ 

whose heroine is an old lady who is devilishly comforting. 

A book combining humour, irony and fantasy, that is a pleasure to read. 

Raphaëlle Riol asserts her iconoclastic free-spiritedness in this amusing, 

feminist novel that carries the reader along at top speed. 

BiograpHy Raphaëlle Riol was born in 1980 and studied literature in Clermont-Ferrand and Paris, 

gaining a master’s degree in contemporary poetry. She lives and works in Paris. Amazons is her second 

novel. 

puBlications Comme elle vient, Le Rouergue, ‘La Brune’ collection, 2011. 

87

88 

It is late summer at ‘Repos fleuri’, a retirement 

home for old ladies who have outlived their 

deceased husbands. One of them, Alphonsine 

Guerini, aged 89, cannot stand the hospice 

any longer. Then there is Alice, aged 3, who 

has come to visit her grandmother. Do the 

two women have nothing in common? Quite 

the contrary. Both of them have a lot to share, 

their hatred of the country, for instance. 

No sooner have they met than here they 

are, running away from Repos Fleuri, to one 

of Alice’s childhood homes, which actually 

happens to be in the country … In a few days, 

each of them will try and re-appropriate her 

life and memories because, as they put it, 

‘we aren’t living among women just to be 

broken down’. We discover the miserable life 

led by Alphonsine, married to a dignitary who 

went off hunting on Sunday and was a tyrant 

at home. We see Alice, a Parisian working 

in event management, whose lover has just 

died and who dreams of ditching everything, 

including her job. They are real warriors, these 

Amazons, who have but one alternative ‘to 

become Madame Bovary or to kill’ … They are 

against resignation to their fate, but very much 

in favour of the revolution—at 30 as much as 

at 89! 

I lift the receiver. 

My mother demands explanations for my sudden departure. Yes, demands! 

Yet the whole family is used to them, and these are often exceeded by my 

uncontrollable and rude ill temper. No allusion to my sidekick. No one has 

yet made the connection between her disappearance from the Repos Fleuri and 

my departure. All the better. That leaves me time to consider what is going to 

happen next. I improvise by explaining that I am off for a break to Loupiac. 

I need to take important decisions and get my breath back. She thinks I am 

referring to Robin’s recent death, convinced, like the rest of the family, that his 

sudden death traumatised me. Her comfortable platitudes prevent her from 

imagining for a moment my relief at the present time and even more so the 

curative necessity to commit murder, vindictive and obsessive as I was until his 

death. In any case, I am well aware that I can reassure no one about my states 

of mind, I would be judged indecent. So I keep quiet … The truth is that only a 

moment ago I was indeed intending to spend a few days in Loupiac to consider 

whether to resign from my job. I hate my shitty job. And it would give me the 

opportunity to see Max again and look after the grapefruit tree. 

What with all this, I forgot to make the compulsory introductions. My name 

is Alice, I am thirty years old. I deserve better than crying for a lover or killing 

myself by being shut away in a retirement home. Apparently, I am still young 

and pretty. Yet, people are always telling themselves, I’ll never grow old. 

Because I deserve better. 

So, in order to deserve it, I’m running away.

2 

My name is Alphonsine Guerini. I am 89 years old and I hate the countryside. 

I saved the life of a young girl who was about to do something irreparable. Her 

name was Alice. At the time I climbed into her car, that is all I knew about her. 

I didn’t know how old she was or where she lived, nor why she had considered 

taking pills. 

I hate the countryside, and yet today, I am going back in the same daze as 

when I went there for the first time. The countryside is such a stultified and 

insipid landscape … And it is the same hackneyed stereotype as it was the first 

time round … 

Lingering on a single image. No doubt the first colour photo I had seen 

in my life. A last clear one, as well. My husband, triumphant. And at his feet, 

a pig with its throat cut. My husband, his feet submerged in blood-soaked mud. 

There could be no more miserable panorama than that of ordinary life. My 

husband, the pig, the swine, a meeting, a first time. Throughout his life, or 

almost, he would cut the throats of pigs and kill wild boars so that in the end, 

in my eyes, he became an old, fat pig himself. And against a din of terrified 

screams, imploring vainly to prevent the death of the innocents, how many 

times had I hoped for his? I am not ashamed to say so. 

Is there a duty of memory in marriage? I must admit that as for his death, 

I hoped for it. I would also prefer to forget him as well. 

Animals scream against death long before the cold contact of the knife blade. 

It’s instinctive in them. They foresee the end even before they feel it across their 

hide. These pigs are such necromancers! 

On that day, I was wearing a virginal white lace dress. It was Chantilly lace, if 

you please. It was a mild spring day. The rays of the sun pierced through my 

dress. The day could be seen passing in the chiselling of the fine fabric that lifted 

with the wind. Daisies swayed amidst the poppies that covered the meadows. 

A few white and red splashes in a meadow that I had barely contemplated so 

deeply was I thinking about what to expect. A little of the probable and so much 

of what was uncertain … Because happiness is always unnameable before it 

has been tasted. Even as early as this, I found the countryside uninteresting. 

I was born by mistake in Rome, of a mother whose name was Borghese and 

a French father. I came from a family in which, strangely, women had quite a lot 

to say for themselves. Apparently, I may be descended from Pauline Borghese, 

so you see … Pomp and artifice are in my veins. The taste for independence as 

well … 


Amazons 

89

90 

The vein just behind the ears is fairly vulnerable. That is the one that needs to be 

sliced through if the animal is not to struggle to the bitter end. If it is paralysed 

and can be turned on its back, the neck artery is in the perfect position. In the 

past, the knives were sharpened. Very quickly. Steel must be impatient. The 

choreography needs to be arranged to the millimetre. 

When he kissed me in the church, his kiss was moist and fearful. He seemed 

to be afraid of being bitten. That was his sole mark of affection for the day. No 

night of love, he was too tired. Too drunk, above all. In the cool of the night, 

when the frail petals of the poppies had shrivelled, he was already snoring on 

my numbed arm. A thin trickle of dribble flowed into his brown beard, close 

cut for the occasion. 

All cats are grey at night and all poppies are crimson. 

Once an animal has been brought down, there should be no delay. The blood 

should then be collected in a brass bowl and stirred with the delicate amplitude 

of a female forearm. Because the splashes that soil are reserved for the women, 

once the throat has been successfully cut. It is the women who will make the 

black puddings, once the intestines have been cleaned for sausage casings. It 

is traditional for the men to do the slaughtering and for the women to clean up 

after them. 

I stroked his hair to the sound of the hooting owls. The window was halfopen. 

An acrid smell rose from the damp earth. It was the daisies, apparently … 

I swear to you that I would very much liked to have been loved. My intentions 

were pure, until that famous morning. 

Above all, don’t throw out the heart. Keep it, either for the black pudding or 

for the dogs. It arouses them before the hunt. It gives them an appetite for it. 

Finally, scrape the skin. Clean it. Burn the hairs off with a blow-torch unless 

this has been done already. Rinse in hot water. Fold the skin in four. That’s 

done. 

Along the nerves that stood out on his strong neck, I drew exclamation marks 

that were strident with the cries of the rodents who fought in the meadow 

between the daisies and the poppies. He didn’t wake up. Instead, his nostrils 

blew an alcoholic mist. It is strange to discover an odour which you know will 

never release you. Close up, he wasn’t ugly. But he looked his best from afar 

and that is how he impressed me … Due to my scrutinising him attentively, 

I woke him up. That is when he went into action. He sniffed at my armpits. 

Noisily. Then my chest, the curve of my breasts. That is how he grabbed them, 

like fruits for squeezing at breakfast. Like a pig’s heart from which you squeeze 

the last drop of liquid.

No waste, please. Do not discard the offal. 

I didn’t cry out. I continued to study him, to examine all his actions and 

gestures. And soon his body was entirely tattooed with invisible punctuation 

marks. The animals roared so that night. Oh, such languid exclamation 

marks … 

He penetrated me. 

Wash the intestines in hot water and stuff them with the flesh which must first 

be cut into tiny pieces. Above all, do not remove the fat. Do it well, the large 

intestines will be made into big sausages. The little ones will be kept for ordinary 

sausages. 

In the blue-black night of a dawn that was still uncertain, his eyes shone like 

the honed metal of the knives. My flesh bent but did not concede. 

The intestines are normally robust. But if the membrane tears, just tie it in a 

knot, cut a piece off the intestine and place this empty casing over the spout of 

the sausage-maker. 

Continue. 

It wasn’t rape because I was expecting it. 

(I think I am making you dream). 

It had been arranged since my birth as a girl, I am telling you. 

Continue. Don’t forget the brains. 

Continue. Look, I’ve taught you the lesson of how to be a perfect wife. 

There’s no need to feel sorry. At the end, he leapt up after wiping his sexual 

organ on a starched pillow slip embroidered with our two initials delicately 

entwined. (Do you remember the trousseaus of young married women and 

their candid probity?). The practised swiftness of this gesture made me realise 

that he was no beginner. In those days, this is what prostitutes and drunken or 

mentally deficient peasant-women were for. They were for taking virginity. As 

far as I was concerned, it had been done. 

Arrange the hams in the troughs, cover them with coarse salt and massage 

them regularly. As for the sausages, hang them up on a string in the cellar so 

as to let them dry. 

He finally left to hunt wild boar. 

I never heard it cry out, that one. 

A wild board must be brought down swiftly, like a tree struck by lightning. 


Amazons 

91

92 

Whereas a pig is killed. The pig is first chosen, then felt all over meticulously 

before being sacrificed. The flesh is worked, it is caressed. Only after this is the 

knife plunged in. The wild boar, on the other hand is not approached immediately. 

Hours are spent in a hide waiting for it. It is desired and expected, it is 

even prayed for when one can no longer bear crouching in the undergrowth. It 

is waited for, I tell you. It comes or doesn’t come. It depends on whatever the 

animal wants to do. 

One doesn’t win every time. Certain encounters can even prove fatal.

© Raphaël Gaillarde/Serge Safran 



Publisher: Serge Safran Éditeur 


Foreign Rights Manager: Marie Sorlot et 

Marie-Pierre Garro 

right@pierreastier.com 


Translation: Clémence Sebag 

clemencesebag@gmail.com 

Stibbe’s debut novel ‘Bérénice 34-44’ is impressive in its maturity. The author guides 

us deep into the velour, brocade, and mysteries of the Comédie-Française. 

Through the prism of an extraordinary destiny we are immersed in the murky waters 

of this period of history. A spellbinding artistic journey, Bérénice does justice 

to the fates broken by the murderous madness of World War II. 

BiograpHy Isabelle Stibbe was born in Paris in 1974. She began her career in international law, before 

working in theatre PR, first at the Comédie-Française then at the Grand Palais. Stibbe is also an opera 

critic. She is currently Secretary General of the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, and teaches at université 

Paris 3’s Institute of Theatre Studies. Bérénice 34-44 is her first novel. 

93

94 

It’s 1934. Bérénice Capel, a young Jewish 

girl with a ‘dramatic’ first name, passes the 

entrance audition of the Conservatoire de Paris 

entrance auditions, against her father’s wishes. 

Estranged from her family but with the help 

of her protector—Madame de Lignières who 

gives Bérénice her stage name –, the young girl 

begins acting under the tutelage of the famous 

film and theatre actor and director Louis Jouvet. 

Bérénice de Lignières is gifted, hard-working 

and passionate about the stage. She studies the 

most prestigious roles in the repertoire. In 1937, 

she is accepted into the Comédie-Française 

theatre company. 

1 

Neither the rise of fascism in Europe, nor 

political tension in France, professional rivalry, 

or liaisons can sully Bérénice’s happiness— 

she quickly becomes an acclaimed actress. 

In the early days of the Occupation, even 

before the promulgation of the Race Laws, 

the House of Molière excludes Jews from its 

company. 

The past of this beautiful and remarkable 

Comédie-Française associate starts catching up 

with her. Will she continue to hide her past, at 

the risk of losing more than her identity? Or will 

she emigrate with composer Nathan Adelman 

and build a new life in America? 

Of the meaningful looks, the knowing smiles, she will not speak a word. “No 

such thing as chance,” “it was bound to happen”—a familiar tune that never did 

quite go over her head. And so was born the family myth that the call of theatre—which 

fell upon her when she was six, never to leave her again—sprang 

from her first name: Bérénice. There was only one person who dared to say 

otherwise, whether speaking her mind or in jest or—most likely—merely 

to play devil’s advocate. Bérénice’s grand-mother Mathilde—an educated 

woman with a fondness for pithy remarks—would often quip: “Jolly good job 

you didn’t call her Sappho, or she would have been a lesbian”; she sometimes 

added a variant: “Do you think if you had called her Isabelle, she would have 

become a Catholic?” Alluding to Isabel the Catholic—the damnable queen who 

chased the Jews from the Spanish kingdom—brought bad blood without fail: 

Catholic, in the Capel family’s hierarchy of values being nearly as reprehensible 

as lesbian. But it was to be neither Sappho, nor Isabelle, it was Bérénice, Gott 

zu dank, thank God—well, nearly. 

She will not tell her grand-children, nor even her children that she was 

brought forth on 28 June of the year of our Lord 1919, which was all the more 

sacred for being the year—better still, the very day—of the Treaty of Versailles. 

In the early twentieth century, France was busy convincing herself that the 

newly created League of Nations would bring world peace. 

“It had been downright lousy, but it was the war to end all wars, we’ve had a 

terrible time of it. The end. Europe would be pacifist from now on,” her father 

and thousands of others like him said in unison.

On that Saturday 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination 

of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, France was glued to the news—newspapers or 

radios the ersatz for witnessing the arrival of the plenipotentiaries in the Hall 

of Mirrors, gravely soaking up the historical Versailles ceremony—solemnly 

awaiting the signature of the Treaty to wash France of the humiliation in 1871. 

It wouldn’t bring back the dead, it wouldn’t erase the cold, the worms, the suffering, 

the hell, but still, they would pay. 

Even though he had fought as early as 1914—and with pride too, don’t you 

know, for what could be more honourable for a Jewish immigrant than serving 

France? –, even though he had two wounds, a Mention in Orders and a Croix 

de Guerre to show for it, on that day Mr Capel had other things to worry about 

than the fate of the Huns : would his wife give birth to a boy or a girl? If it was 

a boy, he would be named Philippe, naturally—after the saviour of Verdun. 

If it was a girl, case closed just as surely: she would be named Bérénice. Just 

so—after Racine’s heroine, that’s right, ladies and gentlemen! He hadn’t read 

much, had Mr Capel, but in the war he had chummed up with a schoolteacher. 

A smashing young guy who had read scores of books and knew entire poems 

from memory. Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine—Verlaine especially. A long time 

ago, in the cheder in Russia where he had learned to read and write, Mr Capel 

had met a chaver like him who could recite the Torah off by heart. You’d tell him 

the number of a chapter or verse, and hey presto, he’d reel off the passage in 

question without ever getting it wrong. Even the rabbi was bowled over. The 

schoolteacher was a goy and an atheist (he might even have been a freemason, 

which goes to show it can happen to very respectable people) so practised his 

skills on French literature—which, when you thought about it, was even more 

impressive than the Bible. And not a bit pretentious either, a simple man, who 

didn’t turn his nose up when it came to doing chores; a decent chap. Louis was 

his name, a good French name, a king’s name. 

They stupefied you, the trenches, so to kill time and escape exhaustion, the 

heebie-jeebies, and the hunger, they would tell each other about their lives. 

They got along well, those two, even though from the outside they didn’t 

appear to have much in common—one being of French extraction, and the 

other a Jew exiled from his native Russia to avoid serving the Tsar, whose army 

was known for its virulent anti-Semitism. It hadn’t stopped Maurice Capel 

from enlisting in the French army on the very first day of the war: “Here they 

allow me to be Jewish, they allow me to work and feed my wife, now my turn 

has come to bring my contribution to France.” 

As a rule, Louis was a bon vivant, full of banter, always with a joke or a story 

to tell; but sometimes, when it was freezing, or when there was nothing to do, 

when the routine of military life crushed their spirits, when they felt suffocated 

by the narrow tunnels and stacked up sandbags, a little sentence would escape 



95

96 

from him, one that was an enigma to Mr Capel’s ears: “when the day begins 

and the sun climbs the sky and then declines”... Just those words, always conjuring 

away the end, always with a hint of a sad smile tinged with irony—as if 

he himself were surprised by the flippancy of his subconscious. Realising that 

Mr Capel did not understand the reference to the Racine verse, he recounted 

him the Bérénice tragedy, told him how Titus burned for Bérénice, and how 

the Roman Emperor had promised marriage to the Queen of Palestine, and 

how he renounced her—dared not disobey the laws of Rome—and how Titus 

sighed and how Bérénice wailed, told him everything that makes Racine what 

he is. 

He also explained about the context—how the former Port-Royal student 

had written into his play Louis XIV’s love for Mazarin’s niece Marie Mancini, 

and how the king had given her up, bowing to State expediency. And how Alexandre 

Dumas echoed this same renunciation in his Vicomte de Bragelonne—but 

fictionalised of course: with musketeer d’Artagnan and his disdain for the 

prince’s cowardice brought into the real-life lovers’ rendezvous. French literature 

really was quite fascinating, thought Mr Capel… Cross my heart and 

hope to die, as the boys would say, if he came through this war, he would read 

all the books the schoolteacher had introduced him to. “When the day begins 

and the sun climbs the sky and then declines...” it was quite something, and no 

denying it—sounded so French… “And Titus will not see his Berenice”. Such 

concision in the French language: in one sentence everything was said. What a 

shame there weren’t more books in the barracks library. You couldn’t find plays 

in there, so that Mr Capel had no choice but to ask Louis to recite Bérénice to 

him again and again, the way children demand stories before they fall asleep— 

always the same one—banning the adults from changing so much as a single 

comma. By dint of it, without realising, ‘Bérénice’ had become their code name 

for peace, for their dreams of homecoming, of returning to normal life, for the 

caress of daily routine, for the wives they could hold in their arms again, for 

the jobs they could take up again—one going back to his pupils, badly dressed 

little rascals in their grey overalls, back to their mischief and their ink stains; 

the other to his furs and his clients, bourgeoises with their strings of pearls, their 

airs and graces, their minks, their expectations. 

What’s more, Bérénice, Mr Capel thought gleefully, Bérénice, tee-hee, well 

she was the Queen of Palestine. Not that Mr Capel had ever considered living 

there, like those meshuggene who wanted to recreate a nation and revive a dead 

language, oïe abro’h! no, Sir, not him, he was no madman but still, the country 

of milk and honey, “next year in Jerusalem,” repeated every year during 

Passover, it meant something, so he liked that Racine fellow for having made 

a Jewish woman a dramatic heroine. That wasn’t something he dared tell his 

chum Louis, he wanted to show he was integrated, that he was French first, and 

Jewish after. It was his own little secret, one that filled him with mirth. No doubt

about it, Bérénice was the most beautiful name in the world for his little girl. 

The schoolteacher would have liked that, killed though he was in the trenches 

in 1918, just a few days before the end of the war. Poor bugger! He was only 

twenty-five and left a widow, a lovely little lady he had shown him a picture of. 

Twenty-five, what a waste. The best are always the first to go. Louis would never 

see the young imps from his school, the winsome little monkeys Mr Capel felt 

he knew—the schoolteacher had told him about them so. Camille, the little 

redhead whose work was full of spelling mistakes but who was so smart and, 

most of all, good as gold; Charles, the great big ninny who had grown too fast 

so that his long pants ended up looking like short pants; Léon, who showed 

off because his father was loaded and drove a Torpedo; Victor, who was bosseyed… 

Louis would never know what these little fellows would become when 

they grew up. War was a nasty piece of work and no mistake. 

It was the day of the Treaty of Versailles, and it was a girl. The little lady was 

born in good health, a big seven-pound baby with huge eyes that ate up her 

whole face, a head of hair just as full as a one-week baby, and darling little nails, 

so long and smooth they seemed to have been manicured. And what a cry, what 

a cry... No doubt about it, she would be a real Capel, a wilful girl who wouldn’t 

let anyone tell her what to do. Oh, she would give men no end of trouble, the 

happy father thought cheerily. When she had discovered the sex of the baby, for 

a moment its mother was apprehensive of her husband’s reaction. In Jewish 

law, does not morning prayer make the man say: “Thank you, my God, for not 

making me a woman”? Mr Capel knew it all too well, he’d heard the prayer in 

the synagogue in his youth enough times, but even though he could hardly be 

said to have studied for long, he wasn’t backward enough to believe in such 

nonsense. Girl or boy, no matter, he would love his child just the same. After 

the pogroms, the death of his first wife in Russia, the trouble finding work in 

France, everything was going well, at last. His second wife was industrious 

and attentive, and now they had a little girl who would grow up in the land 

of human rights, the land of Zola,—a country where one put revolutionary 

ideas and melodious verses in writing,—a country where Racine could write 

about a Jewess and his play could become a masterpiece, where a splendid chap 

like Louis the schoolteacher could exist, where you could move around freely, 

laugh, and sing, without having the Cossacks or the Tsar’s police on your back. 

Halleluiah, the era of pogroms was well and truly over, the French Section of 

the Workers’ International was sure to win the general elections soon. What 

more could one want? He was a happy Jew in France. 



97



98 

Publisher: Fayard 



Carole Saudejaud 

csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr 


Translation: Imogen Forster 

imogen.forster@talktalk.net 

Michelle Tourneur is, of course, paying homage to Delacroix in her novel, but she is less 

interested in claiming to enter his private world, or to unlock the secret of his genius, 

than in marvelling over and over again at the excitement it creates. It would perhaps be 

more accurate to speak of a novel of wonder, or quite simply, a declaration of love. 

“Michelle Tourneur offers us a thrilling romantic story, written in taut, resonant 

language that never puts a foot wrong. The passions it depicts are fleshed out in 

a wealth of exquisite detail. The writing has a wild, almost drunken energy.” La Vie nouvelle 

“With its almost visionary insight, Michelle Tourneur’s novel reaches dizzying heights, 

revealing how a person may burn, drown, lose, and then find themselves again in a painting; 

how they may be intoxicated by a facial feature or a colour, discovering things they had not 

seen and will never see again. How that may be a matter of life or death.” Télérama 

BiograpHy Michelle Tourneur was born in Grenoble. After writing her dissertation on Delacroix and 

George Sand, she gave up teaching to do what she had always wanted to do—become a creative writer. 

She has worked in radio and television and in publishing, and has written some thirty plays and serial 

episodes for radio, as well as film and television scripts. The television adaptation of Les Mouettes sur la 

Saône won the Prix de la Fondation de France, and her play La Burette was awarded the Plume d’or de la 

ville de Genève. In addition to the solitary activity of writing she likes to meet audiences at performances 

which use text, piano and visual images to bring to life an artist in his or her historical setting. They include 

Haendel le voyant and Le Trio d’un siècle: George Sand-Delacroix-Chopin. In Thrall to Beauty is her fifth novel. 

puBlications Her most recent novels with Gallimard include Nuit d’or et de neige, 2002, and Lumières 

d’alcôve, 1999. 

© Bruno Charoy/Fayard

When she presents herself at Eugène 

Delacroix’s studio, Florentine knows only one 

thing: she wants to spend as much time there 

as she can, among his completed works and 

those still in progress, surrounded by the aura 

and charisma of a man who encompasses 

entire worlds within himself. She offers him 

her services. He has already realised she is no 

domestic servant, and though mistrustful and 

wedded to his solitary way of life, he allows 

himself to be won over without understanding 

why. 

For the first time since his visitor had entered the room, he looked up at her, 

and felt a sudden stab of pain, the return of an old, deep-seated turmoil. He 

saw the room with new eyes—the faded wallpaper, the notebook full of drawings 

lying on the bed—and framed in the doorway he saw a face whose features 

were so mobile it was impossible to retain them. His pulse raced and he was 

no longer aware that he was holding a pestle in his hand. The powder spilled, 

dirtying his fingers and falling over his cuff. 

‘If we were to start this weekend, you’d have to leave me a key, Sir. Or else 

decide on a hiding-place for when you were out.’ 

‘Start this weekend?’ 

In a state of shock, he dropped the empty pig’s bladder and grabbed a rag 

to wipe his hands. He studied this golden vision who had come in out of the 

fog, with her little mud-spattered shoes, her childlike mouth and wide bluegrey 

eyes, her uncovered hair tied loosely at the nape of her neck. Nothing 

about her appearance, neither the dark cloth cape nor the black mittens that 

exposed fingers red with cold, gave any hint as to this young laundry-woman’s 

social standing. How old was she? About twenty, not much more. She wanted 

to know where the key was hidden so that she could come and get rid of the 

dust. So many of them knew that dust, so many who passed through, modest 

or brazen, dark-complexioned or fair like this one, leaving the key after willingly 

agreeing to do whatever he asked of them. This one had arrived uninvited, 

but he studied her closely, and the more he studied her, the more he felt her 

Florentine is an orphan, brought up by 

a priest and his sister in a small presbytery in 

the Landes, lashed by the wind from the ocean, 

and the illuminations in an old book of hours 

have taught her that to live is to see. An uncle 

in Paris, the wealthy owner of a shop selling 

de-luxe fabrics, takes her into his home, and 

she realises that she will never see the world 

more vividly than through Delacroix’s paintings. 

And patiently, in secret, she devises the most 

ingenious and unexpected way of convincing 

him of that fact. 

99

100 

presence was something uncanny, conjured up by his weariness or by the turpentine 

fumes that hung suspended in the air. Had she vanished into the folds 

of the portière he would not have been so very surprised. 

He recalled that he had spoken to Elise about hiding the key. He thought of 

her—old Elise from the washhouse—as a formidable warrior, someone who 

had been clever enough to withstand poverty and ill-health, managing her little 

team of laundresses with an expert hand. Whenever he thought of her, he saw 

her surrounded by a dazzling aura, an heroic figure of the city streets. Out of 

respect for Elise, he felt obliged to reply. 

‘The models know where the key is,’ he said curtly. ‘If they find it, it means 

I’m busy. They wait. Elise knows too, but she’s tactful. Everyone holds their 

tongue. Apart from the sort of people who hang around the studios. You sometimes 

get them here. It’s the nature of the beast. You have to …’ 

‘Watch out?’ 

He decided she was quick, and corrected her: 

‘You have to protect yourself! Yourself, and the work. The kind of people 

who rub shoulders at the studios—dealers, casual visitors, cranks—they think 

they’re at the circus. And they think we’re acrobats, all hanging from our flying 

trapeze. It’s dangerous, a free spectacle. Some people can’t get enough of it. 

I avoid that sort of mayhem, myself.’ 

He shrugged and concluded: 

‘And as for taking care of this room, there’s a maid who comes in. She’s 

accustomed to it. I’ve no need of anyone else.’ 

‘I understand. My name’s Florentine. Florentine Victorine Marie Galien.’ 

She had taken a piece of paper out of her pocket. She wrote her name on 

it, with all her forenames, and passed it to him. Struck by her alacrity and surprised 

that she could write, surprised at her tone of voice and even more at the 

ease with which she conducted herself among the enormous canvases whose 

force she felt without apparently being unnerved by it, he took the piece of 

paper. She must have prepared for her visit. He could have sworn this wasn’t 

her first impression. 

Besides, it wasn’t a good moment for a long discussion. There were a dozen 

canvases to be finished for the Salon at the Grand Louvre. For weeks he had 

been getting up at crack of dawn, painting for seven hours at a stretch, eating 

badly or not at all, only putting down his brush to fall into his armchair, consider 

the overall effect and decide whether the dominant tone wasn’t weakened 

by the profusion of colours. The work met his expectations, and he was satisfied 

with it as a whole. But that didn’t mean his paintings had been accepted. 

The forty members of the jury were taking their time about announcing a date. 

That was their usual tactic, and faced with their silence, you had to keep a low 

profile, stay out of sight, along with anything you were working on. In no circumstances 

let your ideas seep out.

And that being so, to let a stranger wander about his workplace was certainly 

not a good idea. 

That was obvious, obvious. For a moment he repeated the word to himself. 

But even so, at the same time, the idea of genuinely useful assistance hovered 

about him, took him back to the polished silver and sparkling glasses in the 

well-kept drawing-room of his childhood. He heard himself ask: 

‘Have you been employed before?’ 

‘Me?’ 

She gave a start at his question. She had missed nothing. He did not speak 

to servants in a familiar way. Why not? That was strange. She was surprised at 

his formality and even a little frightened. 

‘For three years I was employed as a lady’s maid by the Baron de Chanfreneuse, 

in Normandy,’ she said. 

‘You left your position, then.’ 

‘To come to Paris.’ 

‘With a clear idea in mind?’ 

‘We all have our reasons, Sir.’ 

‘It’s dangerous to arrive in Paris on the off-chance. The city’s full of unsavoury 

characters. Where do you live?’ 

‘In a little attic not far from here, with a friend who’s found work at the 

washhouse.’ 

‘Why didn’t you have a look there, too?’ 

She looked straight at him with her blue-grey eyes, then looked away. He 

had the feeling he was being interrogated, bluntly and forthrightly. He met 

her gaze. 

‘I prefer working by myself.’ 

Her expression was confident, almost haughty, although her tone of voice 

was respectful. From her cape, fitting loosely round her long neck, drifted the 

fragrance of someone who keeps herself clean and tidy. It was very different 

from the unpleasant odours left by the maid each time she came to clean up in 

the studio. 

‘You should find something near here,’ he said. ‘Take a look by the footbridge. 

Ask. It’s a busy neighbourhood—plenty of people live around here.’ 

She shook her head, and like a chess-player moving his last pawn when he 

decides the game isn’t yet lost, she said, 

‘I also like taking care of evening clothes. Satin lapels, fine velvet … I know 

how to do it, and I enjoy it’ 

She hadn’t given up hope. The drop of oil the painter had poured into the 

mortar was beginning to liquefy the pigments. His movements became slower 

as he worked. He was thinking about his visitor’s voice, and the paleness of her 

skin. Raising his head, he saw that she was drawing the ribbons of her cape 

more tightly round her neck. He picked up the bag lying at the foot of the chest, 

and offered it to her. 



101

102 

‘Don’t forget. A studio can’t abide a mess. I’m a stickler about things left 

lying around.’ 

There was no more to be said. She felt herself at the centre of a vacuum that 

the overcharged atmosphere did not fill but opened up still further, turning it 

into a yawning abyss with each passing second. The gilt frames lying on the 

floor, the canvases, the prints, the sketches, the big portrait of a tiger on the 

wall, all seemed to surge wildly towards her, set on driving her to the edge of 

that bottomless pit. But at that very moment, an answer came to her. Through 

all her confusion and the rapid pounding of her heart, she felt herself filled 

with strength and light, and suddenly before her eyes appeared the warmth and 

brilliance of an object she had never seen, one that glittered. She took a breath 

before leaping into the depths. 

‘For the seated woman, Sir, you should give her a gold bracelet.’ 

‘The seated woman?’ 

She looked at him, eyebrows raised, strong, taller now, sure about what she 

was suggesting, more luminous still. 

‘On the carpet.’ 

He had the curious feeling that the words were coming out of his own 

mouth. For months he had kept this elusive image before his mind’s eye, 

nourishing in secret the idea of the woman seated on the carpet, under the 

hooked-up curtain, in the small, rather warm room. Sleeping with the seated 

woman, living and breathing with the seated woman and her companions. 

Apart from a few colour-notes, some quick references, there was no actual 

sketch of the subject in the studio, nothing substantial anywhere. Nothing. 

But the seated woman of his imagination was, in fact, wearing a gold bracelet 

on her bare ankle. 

Swept along by that force, incapable of stopping it since it emanated from 

his own painting, and somehow overcome, under a compulsion, in thrall to the 

thing that was trying to come to him but which he could not identify, he said: 

‘The key’s over there … behind the door, under the skirting-board. You just 

have to slip your hand in.’

© Roberto Frankenberg/Grasset & Fasquelle 


The Unfaithful 

Wife 

Publisher: Grasset & Fasquelle 


Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke 

hwarneke@grasset.fr 


Translation: Ian Monk 

ian.monk@wanadoo.fr 

Philippe Vilain is back with a novel which is rather evocative of the world of Alberto 

Moravia: the story of a man who, when he discovers that he is being cheated on, decides 

to remain silent. In fact, do we ever really know the person we share a bed with? 

BiograpHy Philippe Vilain was born in 1969. He is the author of several novels and essays. 

The Unfaithful Wife is his eighth novel. 

puBlications Among his most recent novels: Pas son genre, 2011 (republished: J’ai lu, 2013); 

Faux-père, 2008; Paris l’après-midi, 2006. 

103

104 

It is the story of a couple like so many others: 

a man and a woman, whose love has become 

worn out over time. One evening, she goes out 

for a moment and carelessly leaves her mobile 

phone on a shelf. Her husband glances at it 

and discovers a text message which has clearly 

been sent to her by a lover. 

When his wife comes back home, instead of 

confronting her, he decides to remain silent. 

Nothing has changed in her behaviour, except 

that the person who goes to sleep and wakes 

up beside him has now become unfaithful to 

him. Or has she always been so? Is she even 

the person he thought he knew? Will choosing 

secrecy save their life as a couple? In the end, 

if a man is being deceived, hasn’t he also been 

deceiving himself? 

This finely crafted novel constantly alternates 

between farce and tragedy. 

I shall never forget the day I found out that my wife was cheating on me. It was 

a Saturday afternoon in November last year, in our flat on Rue Laffitte. I was 

smoking a cigarette by the window, when my wife popped out for a moment. 

The rain seemed to be whitewashing the streets and buildings, while the shopsigns 

were glittering between them, as though isolated from the rest of the city. 

I finished my cigarette, watching her as she went, with her red umbrella, then 

I closed the window and switched on the television. I ran through the channels, 

without managing to settle on anything, surfing from a programme about 

politics to a football match between Milan and Rome, while saying to myself 

that I had no desire to watch tv, in fact no desire to do anything in particular, 

and that being on my own in the flat was so tedious. I ended up turning off the 

sound. Watching tv with no sound had become a habit: that way, things looked 

less ridiculous to me. The images lit up the living-room, and the footballers 

danced, distorted by the reflexions from the window panes. The rain intensified. 

I thought of phoning my wife, to ask her where she was, and if she’d found 

some shelter, but just as I was about to do so, I noticed that she’d left her mobile 

phone on a shelf in the bookcase. I picked it up and, for no real reason, or no 

other reason, honestly, than to kill time, and without really understanding why, 

as I had never once suspected my wife during the eight years we’d been married, 

or mistrusted her in any way, it was as if I were being called by her telephone. Of 

the hundred or so text messages recorded on it, most of them were from me 

or her girlfriends, except for one, which dated from the previous week, was 

unnamed and had been stored under the initial ‘F’: ‘Every night I dream of you,

of your body …’, then, below it, came my wife’s answer: ‘I belong to you, I’m 

your slut’. I then put the phone back down where I had found it and returned 

to the television. I couldn’t believe what I’d just read. I looked at the things 

around me without seeing them, the living-room, the rain behind the window, 

the match, red against white—an entire scene that I no longer recognised, to 

which I felt alien. I don’t know how long I waited, about thirty minutes perhaps. 

When my wife came back, I forced myself to remain natural and focus my 

attention on the match, but I couldn’t stop looking at her, staring at her even: 

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know. Like what?’ 

‘Like that!’ she said opening her eyes wide to imitate my strange stare. ‘You’re 

looking at me like that!’ ‘I don’t really know why I’m looking at you,’ I replied 

without thinking. ‘Can’t I look at my wife anymore?’ 

* 

It requires an effort to remember the next few days, and it would be hard 

for me to describe the feeling that then dominated me, which was neither 

anger nor even jealousy, but instead a sort of devastation, or stupor, which 

stopped me from reacting. Some men would have erupted into fury, others 

might have broken down, but I did nothing. I remained dumb. Mute. Oddly 

enough, I didn’t suffer. It was as if I were under a local anaesthetic which had 

smothered any sensation of pain, while I still remained conscious of what I 

should have been feeling, and while it was also diluting the emotion caused 

by this shock, but without wiping out the memories I had of it: and so I constantly 

went on reliving it, unable to prevent it from surging up to burst into 

my thought processes. What kept coming back from that scene was not the 

most violent moment, but the most decisive one. It was not the instant when 

I discovered the text messages, but instead when I noticed my wife’s mobile 

phone and walked over to it: each time, I saw myself going towards that phone, 

while imagining that it might be possible to rewind, that I still had the choice 

to stop right there, to go back to the window again or sit down in front of the 

tv, while also saying to myself that, if I decided to do so, then nothing serious 

would happen, our life as a couple would return to normal and be just like it had 

been, before my wife had gone out. What I felt above all, when playing back that 

inner film, was the inevitable, predestined nature of that moment, its terrifying 

slowness, which was leading me towards my destruction, because, in my 

mind’s eye, I was walking in slow motion, gliding, as if my memory had worn 

itself out by repeating itself or else, by slowing down my steps, it was trying 

to avoid tipping me instantly into misery, thus holding me back a little while 

longer in a ‘time before’. 

I have no idea how long this lasted; two weeks, a month, maybe more. I felt 

distant from everything. Current events, which normally interest me, left me 



Wife 

105

106 

indifferent. Nothing that happened during the end of that month of November 

attracted my attention. Autumn slipped past me. As I was still failing to recover, 

incapable of getting over the fact of finding out that my wife was cheating on 

me, it required mental force to focus my thoughts on anything else, with a feeling 

of exasperation at all other preoccupations, from my professional activities 

to my everyday pastimes, which distracted me from the essential. Not only did 

I feel that the time I spent on such things had been wasted, but I felt a need to 

think about this situation constantly, until I became numb and lost in endless 

deliberations which, in the end, heightened my incomprehension: for example, 

all I had to do was to start having doubts about my wife’s love for me, for her 

to start proving how much she loved me at once (by never leaving my side and 

continuing to discuss our future projects); however, no sooner had I noticed 

such proofs than I started to have fresh doubts about her because, by betraying 

my trust and no longer respecting any duty to remain faithful to me, she no 

longer embodied that form of love that we had decided on together. Without 

providing me with any answers, these endless reflections at least gave me the 

feeling that I was progressing towards the truth about love: quite clearly, if we 

can cheat without loving, just as we can love while cheating, or abstain from 

cheating but without loving, or even not love the person we are cheating with, 

in order to love even more the person we are cheating on, then we never love 

except in a contradictory way, while fidelity is no more a proof of love than 

infidelity is a proof of love’s non-existence. Only then was I able to conclude 

that cheating was meaningless. 

They say that thinking too much makes men mad, but I would have been 

driven crazy by no longer thinking about all this. It was all I could do. Applying 

my intelligence in this way gave me the impression that I was avoiding a 

sort of dementia. I felt as though I had to use my reason, to test myself out 

in this exercise, and that my salvation lay in sticking to this path. So it was 

that I investigated the question of infidelity; so it was that I read testimonies 

on web forums written by husbands with adulterous wives, while avidly 

diving into novels that dealt with what I was going through; so it was that the 

unpleasantness caused by this infidelity—my general lack of interest and my 

self-absorption—no longer worried me. It had no doubt been necessary for 

my wife’s infidelity to become an obsession with me, before I could feel that I 

still had any connection with her. 

* 

I might be thought naïve if I confess that I had always found it unimaginable 

that my wife would ever cheat on me, because I trusted her so much, and was 

so certain that we were a close, mutually-supportive couple. We had always 

got along fine, and had always helped each other out during difficult times: for 

example the first year we lived together when, as a mere junior accountant at

Assurances Generali, my wife provided me with vital material support while 

I devoted my salary to paying off the mortgage, and living so thriftily, that I was 

reliant on her and would refuse to splash out on the sort of fun or travels that 

we yearned for as a young couple. This situation weighed on me, but she found 

it natural: ‘Look,’ she used to say, ‘I really don’t see where the problem is. You 

know, it’s not as if I was depriving myself of anything, and I’m sure you’d do 

the same thing for me!’ She had been quite right about that: later on, after she 

had lost her job as a consultant, and I had become a chief accountant, I was 

now the one on a good salary, while she could count on my help—which, to 

my mind, was not a sign of my being grateful, but instead the proof that I no 

longer dissociated the two of us, and that, in a sense, my wife had become me. 

Our complicity seemed faultless. Everything I shared with her gave me a sort 

of sensual pleasure. We were inseparable. As for me, I went out of my way to 

devote as much of my time to her as possible, and I missed her whenever a 

business trip drew us apart for a time; I would then phone her several times a 

day, or else send her text messages. I experienced no feeling of tedium, nor any 

need for independence, even though such sensations are no doubt natural after 

several years spent living together: whenever I was far away from her, I felt dull. 

When I think about what attracted me most about my wife, I must admit, 

ironically, that I was on the point of saying that the trait of her personality which 

I had always appreciated most in her, and the quality which made me esteem 

her, was precisely her faithfulness, her uprightness, the kind of honesty that 

she exhibited before one and all, but also in terms of herself, and which meant 

that, for example, in her professional life, she had turned down an attractive 

post as a consultant which her family, being influential in this field, had pushed 

her way, because she felt that she lacked the necessary skills; or, to take another 

example, in her sentimental life, she would flee from self-interested relationships 

and would reject suitors from her milieu, who had better jobs or more 

money than me. Although my wife came from a family of notaries, she possessed 

neither the smugness nor the insincerity of heiresses, who, so as not 

to diminish the extent of their successes, fly in the face of reality and deny the 

very advantages they have benefited from; for she had distanced herself from 

her family at a young age, and was proud of the fact that she now owed them 

nothing, while remaining aware that her education, social position, and the 

financial security she had enjoyed during her youth, might not have given her 

a guaranteed future, but had at least allowed her to approach it with equanimity—all 

of which seemed to her to be a ‘luxury’; but this desire to be ‘self-made’ 

was not associated in her with any form of individualism; on the contrary, 

I would say that, at work as in her family life, my wife liked nothing more than 

to share, cooperate and participate in a collective venture. This is why she had 

preferred to join an agency of consultants rather than become self-employed, 

even though her family had encouraged her to do so. 



Wife 

107

Alice Zeniter 

Gloomy Sunday 

108 

Publisher: Albin Michel 



Solène Chabanais 

solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr 


Translation: Naomi Colmer 

nay.colmer@gmail.com 

A family novel with varying shades of light, nostalgia, 

historical drama, distance and certainty. 

Alice Zeniter has a true feel for narrative and its polyphony, 

its occasional immoderation. She understands the power of detail and anecdote, 

and how to paint human beings in all their contradiction and fragility. 

This promising young novelist has already attracted the attention of critics 

(Le Monde, Télérama, Le Figaro, La Vie, Libération, Rolling Stone, etc.), 

booksellers and literary prizes (Prix de la Cité de l’histoire de l’immigration, 2010; 

Prix de la Fondation Laurence Trân, 2011). 

BiograpHy Alice Zeniter was born in Basse-Normandie in 1986. In 2003, aged only 16, she published 

her first novel, Deux moins un égal zéro, with Éditions du Petit Véhicule. She finished her baccalauréat the 

following year, after which she moved to Paris to continue her studies. She spent a year in Hungary, where 

she taught French at the University of Budapest and interned with Árpád Schilling, artistic director of 

the Krétatör theatre company. The young novelist is passionate about theatre: she acts, writes her own 

theatrical works, and takes an interest in artistic direction. Her first play, Spécimens humains avec monstres, 

on the subject of war, has been chosen to receive the backing of the Centre nationale du théâtre. 

puBlications Jusque dans nos bras, Albin Michel, 2010 (republished by Le Livre du Poche, 2011) 

(prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée, presented by the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration); 

translated by Alison Anderson, Take this Man, Europa Editions, 2011. 

© David Ignaszewski/Koboy/Albin Michel

Gloomy Sunday, 

I waited for you with white bouquet, 

One Sunday morning, chasing after my dreams, 

The carriage of my sorrow returned without you … 

Grandfather’s voice reached the house from the furthest corner of the triangular 

garden. Imre didn’t need to hear the way the song’s consonants were being 

slurred to know that the old man was drunk: his grandfather bellowed the song 

with astonishing ferocity. 

Since then my Sundays will always be sad, 

Tears my only drink, sorrow my only bread … 

His voice was accompanied by the sound of the big rake. Dull thuds could be 

heard as he struck the fence with the end of the implement, again and again. 

Each impact must have vibrated throughout his entire body, resonating along 

the crooked spine that ran diagonally across his back like a road that had 

decided to make a detour. Grandfather’s dead leg, which he dragged behind 

him with great difficulty, affected his walk to such an extent that it created a 

bend in his spine. Any form of physical activity caused him great stabs of pain. 

But he refused to stop raking. 

Tears my only drink … 

The Mándy family have lived in the same 

timber house next to Budapest’s railway lines 

for many generations, with each of its members 

working at the central station. Young Imre has 

grown up in an impenetrable world of family 

secrets where many things are left unspoken. 

At the fall of the Berlin Wall he leaves school 

to work in a sex shop. He meets a young 

woman—a German—who, for him, embodies 

the myth of the free and easy West. But for 

the Mándys, whatever the regime, life has 

always been more about watching the trains 

go by than about becoming the passengers 

themselves … 

Through communism and consumerism, 

life at the Mándys’ stands still. Imre, a loser 

of the likeable variety—a sensitive, gentle, 

romantic dreamer—is the perfect embodiment 

of a society that expects nothing from the 

future, and whose tragicomic history betrays 

its powerlessness to command its own fate. 

109

110 

Grandfather was now bawling even louder. Those words sounded strange on 

the lips of a man whose singing was the result of too much pálinka. Imre knew 

that his grandfather had slipped a bottle of the stuff into his back trouser pocket 

just before he went out into the garden: a long, tubular bottle that looked more 

like a cosmetic product than a liquor bottle. Imre was well acquainted with 

Grandfather’s eau-de-vie. A few months ago he had opened the bottle to smell 

it, and the fumes had burnt the insides of his nostrils. It was medicinal, brutal. 

It got up into your nose, attacking and cauterising the mucous membranes. 

Imre could see no possible connection between the plump, golden apricots 

that decorated the bottle and the smell of hospital inside. The disappointment 

had been crushing. 

That 2nd May began to feel familiar to the young boy as the old man drank 

himself into oblivion. He was conscious that none of this was new. He had 

seen it all before. He couldn’t remember when. His young brain could not yet 

perceive his life in a clearly chronological way, but that song: he knew it. He 

had heard it before. 

Every year the same scene would play itself out. The old man would swear 

that his grief was forgotten. That he would be fine. That he might take a walk 

into the town centre to keep his mind occupied. But every year the family would 

find him lying dead drunk in the grass amid the rubbish he had given up gathering, 

the rake at his side and the bottle lying empty near his hand. Imre was 

never allowed to see him. He would always be sent to his room. Yet he remembered 

seeing Grandfather’s feet protruding from the grass. They had seemed 

enormous; he had thought it was a dead giant. That night, he hadn’t been able 

to sleep. 

And every year, Imre would hear the accursed song, each rendition filled 

with more hate. One day he had asked the old man to teach him the words, 

but his grandfather had refused. He had said that the song was shitty, and that 

its composer, Rezsö Seress, was a criminal; Imre could not understand why 

Grandfather insisted upon singing a song that he hated. The boy would sing a 

few snippets that he had been able to retain, over and over, trying to unearth 

the hidden meaning that unleashed the old man’s fury. 

This last Sunday, dearest please come, 

A priest there will be, and a casket, a shroud, 

Flowers there will be, flowers and a casket … 

Grandfather was now launching into the most dismal verse. Imre felt the song’s 

sadness as a pain in his chest, a stabbing under his ribs. He moved closer to the 

window and looked out at the old man. He was still on his feet. It would be a 

while before it was over. 

Slowly but surely, Grandfather’s movements would become less precise and

the rake would not reach as far. Both Grandfather and the rake would seem to 

shrivel and shrink. His voice would become less distinct. The song would give 

way to a succession of expletives. He would wish death upon everybody he did 

not like. I hope they all die, he would say. I hope Stalin dies again in his grave! 

Then he would add: And death to all gardeners! That was always his final curse: 

the one he would come out with just before he fell, that took the most effort to 

say, that hurt the most. Then he would fall asleep. 

Agnès, Imre’s sister, and Pál, their father, would then go out noiselessly to 

get him. Both of them would go over to the old man, but it was always Agnès 

who carried him into the little house. Pál was too sensitive; he could not bear 

to see him in such a state. For a moment, he would bend over his father lying in 

the grass, but, before he could do anything, he would suddenly become overwhelmed. 

He would drop down next to him, weeping silently. Ági’s shoulders 

would bow under Grandfather’s weight as she struggled to carry him into the 

living room. 

Inside, sat squarely in her armchair, Ildiko, the children’s mother, would 

refuse to budge. She had no sympathy for the old man: his yearly intoxications 

made her furious. Büdös disznó! she would say, spitting on the floor. Filthy 

swine. She hated any form of alcohol, but she hated her father-in-law’s the 

most. He can stay out there all night for all I care, she would say indifferently. 

Nobody forced him to get into that state. 

But Imre, Agnès and Pál had too keen a sense of family to let the old man 

sleep outside. He would have been exposed to the night trains and the rubbish 

that the passengers threw out of the windows. 

The little house sat among the railway tracks that streamed out of the Nyugati 

station, and the trains skimmed past the fence of the triangular garden. 

At the time the house was built, the station had been nothing but a vague proposal, 

and nobody had imagined that the tracks would spread as far as they 

had, right up to the timber house. The name of the station itself—nyugat, 

meaning “West”—had promised an entirely different course for the future 

trains. Instead, they sped northwards and eastwards, encircling the house. At 

the end of the 1980s, though the house was not yet completely surrounded by 

the tracks, the left side of the garden was already lined with long metal girders. 

Since then, a fence had been erected to establish a clear boundary between the 

dominion of the trains and that of Imre’s family. The division of land had been 

in the trains’ favour. 

It was Grandfather’s grandfather who had bought the land, in those distant 

days when it was nothing but a field at the city’s edge. It was also he who had 

built the house; his name was engraved above the door in large, shaky, black 

letters: imre mándy. For centuries this had been the name of every first-born 

male in the family. Imre felt proud each time he looked up at the gable on his 

way into the house. He felt, almost tangibly, the quiver of the bond that his 

Alice Zeniter 

Gloomy Sunday 

111

112 

name established between himself and his grandfather, his great-grandfather, 

and his house-building ancestor, his great-great-grandfather. But not with his 

father. Curiously, the family name had skipped a generation and Pál was called 

Pál. It was a flaw in the family tree. 

‘Why doesn’t Apa have the same name as you and me?’ the boy would ask 

his grandfather. 

‘Inquisitive boys and girls grow old before their time.’ 

‘Why don’t you have the same name as us?’ 

‘Makes for a change,’ his father would reply, smiling sadly. 

But Imre thought that it couldn’t be nice for him to come home and see 

somebody else’s name over the door. 

Grandfather liked to say that Imre Mándy the Great, who had built the 

house, had purchased the most beautiful piece of countryside that ever existed: 

the triangular garden had been a green meadow, dotted with disorderly clumps 

of violets. A stream had run through it, and water snakes had hidden in the dark 

grasses at the water’s edge. In springtime there had been rabbits and frogs, 

and the sound of animal life had filled the house, offering up its complicity, its 

secret whisper, to those who lived there. 

There in that marshy paradise, all by himself, their ancestor had built their 

home. On the ground floor was the main living room with its fireplace, and 

the small kitchen whose walls were covered in different coloured pots; on the 

floor above, the two bedrooms: the master bedroom, and the children’s bedroom 

that could have been a miniature. Beneath the staircase was a lavatory 

in which it was difficult to stand. The house had been built slowly with his own 

two hands; it was a world without machines. 

Since the time of Imre’s great-great-grandfather, the modernisation of 

Budapest had transformed the humble dwelling into a small island amid the 

tracks. Despite the increasing speed of the passing trains, the house was still 

upright. Over the years it had been the subject of continuous dispute between 

Imre’s family and the local authorities, who didn’t want anything to hamper 

the development of the railways. The occupants of the timber house had met 

offers and threats with the same calm indifference. Their ancestor had decided 

on behalf of all future generations that the family would be rooted to this precise 

spot, behind a door bearing its name. His descendants had carried out his 

wishes with the conviction that, no matter how many laws and land registries 

the opposition shook at them, they were acting within their rights. They liked 

the idea of being a dynasty bound to their land. 

After decades of unsuccessful negotiation, the railway company had abandoned 

their plans to demolish the house, upon the condition that they could 

erect a substation next to it, whose upkeep would be the responsibility of the 

house’s occupants. It was this enormous metal box that now sat at the straight 

far end of the triangular garden.

Imre was afraid of the substation. It was made of a bluish metal, covered in 

little rust stains that looked like dark round eyes, and wide as two men. Every 

now and then sparks would shoot out of it, and the family would have to inspect 

it for potential damage. Pál or his father would open the door bearing the sign 

“Danger of death” to check the cables. They would sink up to their elbows in 

the wiry insides of the big box, and Imre was terrified that the heap of electrical 

wires might suddenly pull tight around them in one great terrible spasm, 

swallowing them whole. 

When he was home alone, Imre would go out into the garden and walk 

around the machine, certain that one day it would reveal its demonic nature: 

something to do with aliens or Russian satellites. But the substation was asleep, 

or pretending to be asleep, and the child could find no evidence to justify his 

fear. 

Alice Zeniter 

Gloomy Sunday 

113

Here are the titles presented in the 

previous issues of Fiction France 

whose foreign rights have since 

been sold abroad. 

Abecassis Eliette 

Sephardi 

Albin Michel 

u Castilian [La Esfera de los Libros] 

u Hebrew [Kinneret Publishing House] 

u Italian [Marco Tropea] 

Adam Olivier 

The Steady Heart 

Éd. de l’Olivier 

u Castilian [El Aleph/Grup 62] 

u Italian [Barbès] 

Adam Olivier 

Unfavourable Winds 


u Albanian [Buzuku, Kosovo] u German [Klett- 

Cotta] u Italian [Bompiani] u Polish [Nasza 

Ksiegamia] 

Arditi Metin 

The Louganis Girl 

Actes Sud 

u German [Hoffmann & Campe] 

u Greek [Livanis] u Russian [Ripol] 

Astier Ingrid 

Quai des Enfers 

Gallimard 

u Italian [Bompiani] 

u Spanish [Océano, Mexico] 

Aubry Gwenaëlle 

No One 

Mercure de France 

u Croatian [Disput] u English [Tin House 

Books, United States] u German [Droschl] 

u Hungarian [Joszoveg] u Italian [Barbès 

Editore] u Korean [Open Book] u Rumanian 

[Pandora] 

Aubry Gwenaëlle 

Partages 


u Croatian [Disput] u Italian [Clichy] 

114 

Foreign Rights 

Bassignac Sophie 

Back to Back 

JC Lattès 

u Russian [Azbooka Atticus] 

Bello Antoine 

The Pathfinders 

Gallimard 

u Czech [Kniha Zlin] u Greek [Polis] u Italian 

[Fazi Editore] u Slovak [Premedia Group] 

Benchetrit Samuel 

A Heart Outside 

Grasset & Fasquelle 

u Chinese (simplified characters) [Shanghai 99 

Readers] u Dutch [Uitgeverlj Arena] u German 

[Aufbau Verlag] u Hebrew [Keter Publishing 

House] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] 

u Russian [Astrel Publishing House] 

Berest Anne 

Her Father’s Daughter 

Le Seuil 

u Castilian, Catalan and Basque [Alberdania] 

u German [Knaus/Random House] u Turkish 

[Dogan] 

Berton Benjamin 

Alain Delon, Japanese Superstar 

Hachette 

u Italian [Nottetempo] 

u Vietnamese [Nha Nam] 

Besson Philippe 

The Accidental Man 

Julliard 

u German [Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag] 

u Korean [Woongjin] u Polish [Muza] 

Bied-Charreton 

Enjoy 

Stock 

u Czech [Euromedia Group] 

u German [Sujet Verlag] 

Bizot Véronique 

A Future 

Actes Sud 

u German [Steidl Verlag] 

Bizot Véronique 

Prize Day 

Actes Sud 

u German [Steidl Verlag] 

u Norwegian [Solum forlag] 

Blas de Roblès Jean-Marie 

The Midnight Mountain 

Zulma 

u Chinese (complex characters) [Morning Star, 

Taiwan] u Czech [Host] u Dutch [Ailantus] 

u German [Fischer Verlag] u Italian [Frassinelli] 

u Romanian [Trei] 

Blondel Jean-Philippe 

(Re)play! 

Actes Sud 

u Swedish [Bokförlaget Opal] 

Cendrey Jean-Yves 

Honecker 21 

Actes Sud 

u Turkish [Everest Publications] 

Chalandon Sorj 

My Traitor 


u Castilian [Alianza] u Chinese (complex 

characters) [Ten Points] u English [The Lilliput 

Press, Ireland] u Italian [Mondadori] 

Condé Maryse 

My Life Unvarnished 

JC Lattès 

u Swedish [Leopard] 

Constantine Barbara 

Tom, Little Tom, Little, 

Little Man, Tom 

Calmann-Lévy 

u Castilian [Seix Barral] u Catalan [Grup 62] 

u Chinese (complex caracters) [Yuan- 

Liou Publishing] u German [Blanvalet] 

u Hungarian [Könyvmolyképzo Kiado] u Italian 

[Fazi Editore] u Korean [Munhakdongne 

Publishing] u Russian [Azbooka-Atticus] 

u Vietnamese [Maison d’édition des femmes] 

Dantzig Charles 

My Name Is François 


u Arabic (world rights) [Arab Scientific 

Publishers] 

Darrieussecq Marie 

Clèves 

P.O.L 

u Castilian (world rights) [El Cuenco de Plata, 

Argentina] u Danish [Tiderne Skifter] 

u Dutch [Meulenhoff] u German [Carl Hanser] 

u Italian [Ugo Guanda Editore] 

u Korean [The Open Books] u English [Text 

Publishing, United Kingdom and Australia] 

u Swedish [Norstedts]

Davrichewy Kéthévane 

The Black Sea 

Sabine Wespieser 

u Dutch [Meulenhoff] u Georgian [Ustari] 

u German [Fischer] u Italian [Rizzoli] 

u Swedish [2244] 

Davrichewy Kéthévane 

The Separated 


u Italian [Barbès editore] u Georgian [Ustari] 

Decoin Didier 

Is This the Way Women Die? 


u Castilian [Alianza] u German [Arche 

Literatur Verlag] u Korean [Golden Bough 

Publishing] u Russian [Geleos Publishing 

House] 

Delecroix Vincent 

The Shoe on the Roof 

Gallimard 

u German [Ullstein] u Greek [Govostis] 

u Italian [Excelsior 1881] u Korean [Changbi] 

u Rumanian [RAO] u Russian [Astrel] 

u Serbian [Laguna] u Spanish [Lengua de Trapo] 

Des Horts Stéphanie 

The Panther 

JC Lattès 

u Greek [Synchroni Orizontes] 

u Italian [Piemme] u Serbian [Laguna] 

Desarthes Agnès 

In the Black Night 


u English [Portobello, United Kingdom and 

Commonwealth] u German [Droemer Knaur] 

Descott Régis 

Caïn & Adèle 

JC Lattès 

u Spanish 

Despentes Virginie 

Apocalyspe Baby 


u Bulgarian [Colibri] u Czech [Host] u Danish 

[Tiderne Skiften] u Dutch [De Geus Uitgeverlj] 

u English [Serpent’s tail Ltd] u Finnish [Like 

Publishing Ltd] u German [Berlin Verlag] 

u Hungarian [Nyittott] u Italian [Einaudi 

Editore] u Portuguese [Sextante Editora] 

u Romanian [Trei Editura] u Swedish [Albert 

Bonniers Förlag] 

Deville Patrick 

Equatoria 

Le Seuil 

u Castilian [La Otra Orilla] u German [Bilger 

Verlag] u Italian [Galaad] u Polish [Noir sur 

Blanc] 

Deville Patrick 

Kampuchea 

Le Seuil 

u Castilian [El Aleph/Grup 62] 

u German [Bilger Verlag] u Polish [Noir sur 

Blanc] 

Dugain Marc 

An Ordinary Execution 

Gallimard 

u Bulgarian [Fakel Express] u Catalan [Pages] 

u Dutch [De Geus] u Greek [Kedros] u Hebrew 

[Kinneret] u Italian [Bompiani] u Japanese 

[Kawade Shobo] u Polish [Sic !] u Portuguese 

[Ambav; Record, Brazil] u Rumanian [RAO] 

Dugain Marc 

The Stars Never Sleep 

Gallimard 

u Hebrew [Armchair Books] 

u Italian [Marco Tropea] u Russian [Corpus] 

Énard Mathias 

Tell Them of Battles, 

Kings and Elephants 

Actes Sud 

u Albanian [Buzuku] u Arabic (Egypt) [National 

Center for Translation] u Bulgarian [Prozoretz] 

u Castilian [Mondadori] u Catalan [Columna] 

u Chinese [Shanghai Translation Publishing 

House] u Croatian [Profil] u Czech [Albatros] 

u Dutch [De Arbeidespers] u German [Berlin 

Verlag] u Italian [Rizzoli] u Japanese 

[Kawade Shobo] u Korean [Bada Publishing] 

u Portuguese [L & PM Editores, Brazil; 

Dom Quixote, Portugal] u Russian [Atticus] 

u Serbian [Geopoetika] u Turkish [Can] 

Énard Mathias 

Zone 

Actes Sud 

u English [Open Letter, United States] 

u German [Berlin Verlag] u Greek [Ellinika 

Grammata] u Hebrew [Xargol] u Italian 

[Rizzoli] u Lebanese for the Arabic language 

[La Librairie Orientale] u Portuguese [Dom 

Quixote, Portugal] u Serbian [Stylos Art] 

u Turkish [Can] 

Fargues Nicolas 

You’ll See 

P.O.L 

u Hebrew [Babel] u Italian [Nottetempo] 

u Russian [Azbooka] 

Faye Éric 

The Man With No Prints 

Stock 

u Bulgarian [Pulsio] u Slovak [Ed. VSSS] 

Ferrari Jérôme 

A God an Animal 

Actes Sud 

u Italian [E/O edizioni] 

Filhol Elisabeth 

The Power Station 

P.O.L 

u German [Edition Nautilus] u Italian [Fazi 

Editore] u Swedish [Elisabeth Grate Bokförlag] 

Flipo Georges 

The Commissaire 

is Not a Poetry Fan 

Éd. de la Table Ronde 

u English [Felony & Mayhem, United States] 

u German [Blanvalet] u Italian [Ponte Alle 

Grazie] u Polish [Noir sur Blanc] 

u Russian [Pokolenie] u Spanish [El Aleph] 

Garnier Pascal 

Captive Moon in a Dead Eye 

Zulma 

u English (worldwide rights) [Gallic Books] 

u German [BTB Verlag] 

Garnier Pascal 

The Panda Theory 

Zulma 

u English (worldwide rights) [Gallic Books] 

u German [BTB Verlag] 

Germain Sylvie 

The Unnoticed 

Albin Michel 

u English [Dedalus Limited, United Kingdom] 

u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] 

Ghata Yasmine 

The Târ of My Father 

Librairie Athème Fayard 

u Castilian [Siruela] u Dutch [De Arbeidespers] 

u German [Ammann Verlag] u Greek [Melani] 

u Italian [Del Vecchio] 

Giraud Brigitte 

A Year Abroad 

Stock 

u Dutch [Uitgeverij Van Gennep] 

u German [Fischer Verlag] u Italian [Guanda] 

u Portuguese [Platano Editora] 

Giraud Brigitte 

Not to Worry 

Stock 

u German [Fischer Verlag] 

Guénassia Jean-Michel 

The Incurable Optimists’ Club 

Albin Michel 

u Castilian [RBA Libros] u Catalan [Edicions 

62] u Croatian [Vukovic & Runjic] u Czech 

[Argo] u Dutch [Van Gennep] u English 

(Great Britain) [Atlantic Book (Grove 

Atlantic)] u German [Insel Verlag] u Greek 

[Polis] u Italian[Salani Editore] u Korean 

[Munhakdongne Publishing] u Norwegian 

[Forlaget Press] u Russian [Azbooka] u Serbian 

[Carobna Knjiga] u Swedish [Norstedts Forlag] 

115

Guyotat Pierre 

Coma 


u English [Semiotexte, United States] 

u Italian [Medusa] u Russian [Société d’études 

céliniennes] 

Haddad Hubert 

Opium Poppy 

Zulma 

u Italian [Barbès Editore] 

u Spanish (worldwide rights) [Demipage] 

Hane Khadi 

So Hungry It Hurts 

Denoël 

u French [NEAS, Senegal] 

Hesse Thierry 

Demon 


u Castilian [Duomo, Spain] u Hebrew [Modan] 

u Italian [Fazi Editore] u Norwegian [Agora] 

u Ukrainian [Tipovit] 

Jauffret Régis 

Lacrimosa 

Gallimard 

u English [Salammbo, United Kingdom] 

Joncour Serge 

How Many Ways I Love You 

Flammarion 

u Chinese [Phoenix Publishing] 

u Korean [Wisdom House] u Russian [Ripol] 

u Ukrainian [Tipovit] 

Khadra Yasmina 

Olympus of the Unfortunate 

Julliard 

u Finnish [WSOY] u Greek [Kastaniotis] 

u Italian [Marsilio Editori] u Portuguese 

[Bizâncio] u Spanish [Ediciones Destino] 

Kiner Aline 

The Game of Hangman 

Liana Levi 

u German [Ullstein] 

Korman Cloé 

Colour-Men 

Le Seuil 

u Castilian (Latin America) [B Ediciones 

Mexico] 

La Peine Bertrand (de) 

Soundtrack 

Éd. de Minuit 

u Spanish [Pasos Perdidos, Spain] 

Laferrière Dany 

The World Trembles around Me 

Grasset 

u English [Arsenal Pulp Press, Canada] 

u Japanese [Fujiwara Shoten] 

116 

Lalumière Jean-Claude 

The Russian Front 

Le Dilettante 

u Castilian [Libros del Asteroide] 

Lapeyre Patrick 

Life is Short and Desire 

Neverending 

P.O.L 

u Albanian [Toena] u Bulgarian [Altera/ 

Delta Entertainment] u Castilian [Destino] 

u Catalan [Aleph/Empuries] u Chinese 

[Sichuan Literature and Art Press] u Croatian 

[Skolska Knijga] u Czech [Euromedia] u Dutch 

[Van Gennep] u English (worldwide rights) 

[Other Press , United States of America] 

u German [Karl Blessing] u Hungarian 

[Mandorla] u Italian [Ugo Guanda Editore] 

u Japanese [Sakuhin Sha] u Korean [Minumsa] 

u Lithuanian [Baltos Lankos] u Polish [Replika] 

u Russian [Azbooka/Atticus] u Serbian 

[Akademska Knjiga] u Turkish [Pegasus 

Yayinlari] 

Laurain Antoine 

Mitterrand’s Hat 

Flammarion 

u English [Gallic] u Italian [AtmosphereLibri] 

u Russian [Olga Morozova] 

Lê Linda 

In Memoriam 

Christian Bourgois 

u German [Amman] 

Le Bris Michel 

The World’s Beauty 


u Italian [Fazi Editore] 

Le Tellier Hervé 

Enough About Love 

JC Lattès 

u Chinese [Chu Chen Books] u English 

[The Other Press, United States of America] 

u German [Deutscher Taschenbuch u Verlag] 

u Greek [Opera] u Italian [Mondadori] 

u Japanese [Hayakawa] u Portuguese 

[Teodolito] u Spanish [Grijalbo/Random 

House] u Turkish [Monokl] 

Lecoq Titiou 

The Ladettes 

Au diable vauvert 

u Chinese (simplified characters) [Baijing 

Yanziyue Culture & Art Studio] 

Lesbre Michèle 

A Huge White Lake 


u French [Héliotrope, Quebec only] 

Liberati Simon 

Jayne Mansfield 1967 

Grasset 

u Italian [Fandango] 

Lindon Mathieu 

My Heart Alone Is Not Enough 

P.O.L 

u Dutch [Ailantus] 

Luce Damien 

Luxemburglar 

Éd. Héloïse d’Ormesson 

u German [Droemer Knaur] 

Majdalani Charif 

Caravanserail 

Le Seuil 

u Catalan [La Campana] u German 

[Knaus/Random] u Greek [Scripta] 

Malte Marcus 

Garden of Love 

Zulma 

u Italian [Piemme] u Polish [Albatros] 

u Spanish [Paidos] u Turkish [Pupa] 

u Vietnamese [Les Éditions littéraires 

du Vietnam] 

Malte Marcus 

Harmonics 

Gallimard 

u Greek [Kedros] u Italian [Barbes Editore] 

Marc Bernard et Rivière Maryse 

When Men Clash 

Calmann-Lévy 

u Castilian [Rossell Editorial] 

Mars Kettly 

At the Frontiers of Thirst 


u German [Litradukt] 

Martinez Carole 

The Field of Les Murmures 

Gallimard 

u Albanian [Buzuku] u Croatian [Alfa] 

u Danish [Arvids] u Dutch [Van Gennep] 

u English [Europa Editions, United States of 

America] u Hungarian [Ulpius Haz] u Italian 

[Mondadori] u Spanish [Tusquets] u Swedish 

[Norstedts] 

Mattern Jean 

Milk and Honey 


u Croatian [Fraktura] u Greek [Hestia] 

u Hungarian [Magveto Kiado] u Italian [Giulio 

Einaudi] u Romanian [Polirom] 

Mauvignier Laurent 

Some Men 


u Chinese [Art et littérature du Hunan] 

u Danish [Arvids] u Dutch [De Geus] u English 

[University of Nebraska Press, United States] 

u French (for Algeria only) [Barzakh] u German 

[Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag] u Italian 

[Feltrinelli] u Spanish [Anagrama]

Meur Diane 

Down to the Plain 


u English (worldwide rights) [Seagull books] 

u Italian [Barbès editore] 

Miano Léonora 

These Troubled Souls 

Plon 

u Swedish [Sekwa förlag] 

Minghini Giulio 

Fake 

Allia 

u Italian [Piemme] 

Miské Karim 

Arab Jazz 

Viviane Hamy 

u Castilian [Adriana Hidalgo] u English 

[McLehose Press] u German [Lübbe Verlag] 

u Greek [Polis] u Italian [Fazi Editore] 

Monnery Romain 

Free, Lonesome and Drowsy 

Au diable vauvert 

u Castilian [Grijalbo (Randomhouse)] 

u Catalan [Rosa dels vents (Randomhouse)] 

u Dutch [Nijgh & Van Ditmar] 

Monnier Alain 

Our Second Life 

Flammarion 

u German [Ullstein] 

Nahapétian Naïri 

Who Killed Ayatollah Kanuni? 

Liana Levi 

u Dutch [Querido] u Spanish [Alianza] 

u Swedish [Sekwa] u Ukrainian [ECM Media] 

NDiaye Marie 

Three Strong Women 

Gallimard 

2009 Goncourt Prize: 31 contracts signed 

worldwide 

Nguyen Hoai Huong 

Soft Shadows 

Viviane Hamy 

u Castilian [Destino] u Italian [Guanda Editore] 

Ollagnier Virgnie 

The Uncertainty 

Liana Levi 

u Italian [Piemme] 

Olmi Véronique 

First Love 

Grasset 

u Chinese (complex characters) [Asian Culture 

Co. Ltd] u Chinese (simplified characters) 

[Hunan People] u Danish [Arvids] u German 

[Antje Kunstmann] u Italian [Piemme] 

u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Polish 

[Wydawnictwo Otwarte] u Russian [Atticus] 

u Vietnamese [Nha Wuat Ban Tri Thuc] 

Ovaldé Véronique 

And My Transparent Heart 


u Albanian [Toena] u English [Portobello, 

United Kingdom] u Italian [Minimum Fax] 

u Korean [Mujintree] 

Pagano Emmanuelle 

Childish Hands 

P.O.L 

u German [Verlag Klaus Wagenbach] 

Page Martin 

Perhaps a Love Affair 


u English [Viking, United States] u German 

[Thiele] u Greek [Patakis] u Japanese 

[Kindai Bungei Sha] u Korean [Yolimwom] 

u Portuguese [Rocco, Brazil] u Romanian 

[Humanitas] u Russian [Astrel/Ast] u Serbian 

[Nolit] 

Pancol Katherine 

The Slow Tortoise Waltz 

Albin Michel 

u Bulgarian [Colibri] u Castilian [La Esfera 

de los libros] u Catalan [Edicions 62] 

u Chinese (traditional characters) [Business 

weekly] u Chinese (simplified characters) 

[Thnkingdom] u Czech [Jota s.r.o] u Danish 

[Bazar Forlag] u Dutch [WPG Belgie NV] 

u Finnish [Bazar Kustannus Oy] u German 

[Verlagsgruppe Random House GMB] 

u Hebrew [Keter Books] u Hungarian [Libri 

Publishing] u Italian [Baldini Castoldi Dalai 

Editore] u Japanese [Hayakawa Publishing] 

u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] 

u Latvian [Apgads Kontinents] u Norwegian 

[Bazar Forlag] u Polish [Sonia Draga] 

u Portuguese [A esfera dos livros] u Russian 

[Astrel] u Swedish [Baza Forlag] u Turkish 

[Pegasus Yayinlari] u Vietnamese [Cong Tv Co 

Phan Truyen Thon Dan/Lao Dong] 

Pétel Gilles 

Under the Channel 

Stock 

u English (worldwide rights) [Gallic Books, 

United Kingdom] 

Provost Martin 

Beefsteak 

Phébus 

u English [Whereabout Press, United States] 

u Romanian [Nemira] u Spanish [Demipage] 

Raoul-Duval Jacqueline 

Kafka, The Eternal Fiancé 

Flammarion 

u English [The Other Press, United Kingdom 

and United States] u Estonian [Eesti Raamat] 

u Hungarian [Ab Ovo] u Italian [Gremese] 

u Lithuanian [Gimtasis Zodis] u Russian [Text] 

u Turkish [CAN] 

Ravey Yves 

Bambi Bar 


u Greek [Agra] u Romanian [Bastion Editura] 

Ravey Yves 

Kidnapping with Ransom 


u German [Kunstmann Verlag] 

Reinhardt Éric 

Cinderella 

Stock 

u Italian [Il Saggiatore] u Korean [Agora] 

Révay Theresa 

All the Dreams of the World 

Belfond 

u Czech [Euromedia] u German [Der Club 

Bertelsmann] u Hungarian [Athenaeum] 

u Polish [Swiat Ksiazki] u Portuguese [Circulo 

de Leitores] u Russian [Family Leisure Club] 

u Serbian [Alnari] u Spanish [Circulo de 

Lectores] u Ukrainian [Family Leisure Club] 

Rolin Olivier 

A Lion Hunter 

Le Seuil 

u Castilian [Cuarto Proprio, Chile] u Chinese 

(simplified characters) [Shanghai 99 Readers] 

u Dutch [Ijzer] u German [Berlin Verlag] 

u Italian [Barbès] u Portuguese [Sextante] 

Rolin Jean 

A Dead Dog After Him 

P.O.L 

u German [Berlin Verlag] 

u Polish [Czarne] u Russian [Text] 

Rosenthal Olivia 

What Do Reindeer Do When 

Christmas Is Over? 

Verticales 

u Italian [Nottetempo] 

Roux Frédéric 

The Indian Winter 


u Chinese (complex characters) [Ye-ren, 

Taiwan] u Greek [Papyros] 

Ruiz Raoul 

The Spirit of the Stairs 

Librairie Arthème Fayard 

u English [Dis voir] 

Sansal Boualem 

The German’s Village 

Gallimard 

u Bosnian [B.T.C Sahinpasic] 

u Catalan [Columna] u Chinese (complex 

characters) [Asian Culture Company, Taiwan] 

u Czech [Pistorius & Olsanska] u Danish 

[Turbine] u Dutch [De Geus] u English 

[Europe Editions, United States; Bloomsbury, 

United Kingdom] u Finnish [Into] u German 

[Merlin] u Greek [Polis] u Hebrew [Kinneret] 

u Italian [Einaudi] u Lithuanian [Tyto Alba] 

u Norwegian [Kagge] u Polish [Dialog] 

u Serbian [IPS Media II] u Spanish [El Aleph] 

117

Schneck Colombe 

Reparation 

Grasset 

u Chinese (complex characters) [Shanghai 99] 

u German [Luchterhand] u Italian [Einaudi] 

u Polish [Proszynski Media] 

Schwartzbrod Alexandra 

Farewell Jerusalem 

Stock 

u Croatian [Hena Com] u Hungarian [Ulpius 

Haz Könyvkiado] u Italian [Leone Editore] 

u Turkish [Can] 

Seksik Laurent 

The Last Days 

of Stefan Zweig 

Flammarion 

u Chinese [Shanghai 99 Readers] u Danish 

[Arvids] u English [Pushkin Press] 

u German [Karl Blessing Verlag] u Hebrew 

[Hakibutz Hameucad] u Italian [Gremese] 

u Korean [Hyundaemunhak] u Russian [Ripol] 

u Spanish [Ediciones Casus Belli] u Turkish 

[Can Yayinlari] 

Sylvain Dominique 

Dirty War 

Viviane Hamy 

u English [MacLehose Press] 

u Italian [Mondadori] 

Toussaint Jean-Philippe 

The Truth About Marie 


u Chinese (simplified characters) [Éd. d’Art et 

de littérature du Hunan] u Chinese (traditional 

characters) [Aquarius, Taiwan] u Dutch 

[Prometheus/Bert Bakker] u English [Dalkey 

Archive Press, United States] u Galician 

[Glaxia] u German [Frankfurter Verlaganstalt] 

u Italian [Barbes editora] u Spanish [Anagrama 

editorial] 

Varenne Antonin 

Fakirs 

Viviane Hamy 

u Croatian [Fraktura] u English [MacLehose 

Press, United Kingdom] u Finnish [Wsoy] 

u German [Ullstein] u Italian [Einaudi] 

u Turkish [Dogˇ an Kitap] 

Viel Tanguy 

Paris-Brest 


u Dutch [De Arbeiderspers] u German 

[Wagenbach] u Italian [Neri Pozza] 

u Spanish [Acantilado] 

118 

Vilain Philippe 

The Unfaithful Wife 

Grasset 

u Italian [Gremese] 

Winckler Martin 

The Women’s Chorus 

P.O.L 

u Russian [Ripol-Classic]

Fiction France

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