The Wide World

by Pierre Lemaitre

Genres: City Life; Literary Fiction; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

From Beirut in 1948, to Saigon and Paris, this is the story of the Pelletier family, rich with corruption, death, blackmail - and murder. The first volume of THE GLORIOUS YEARS series, translated by Frank Wynne

'Literature with conviction; a furious talent' L'Obs

Beirut, 1948. The Pelletier family returns...

The Pelletiers are a prominent French family living in Beirut. The patriarch, Louis, has built a successful business manufacturing and exporting artisanal soaps. He hoped to pass the business on to his eldest son, Jean, but Jean doesn't have the sharpness or aptitude for such an enterprise. After nearly running the company into the ground, Jean marries a money-grubbing young woman who quickly makes him miserable, and they emigrate to Paris. But there's another reason Jean must leave - he has committed a terrible crime...

His brother, Etienne, travels to Saigon, where he soon uncovers irregularities in the local currency office and begins investigating what he believes is a scheme to channel smuggled goods and cash to the Viet Minh. It is evidence that presents a real threat to his own life.

François, the middle Pelletier brother, has gone to Paris, ostensibly to study, but finds himself working as a journalist. His career flies when he reports on the brutal murder of an actress in a cinema ladies' room. It seems a serial killer is on the loose.

'You have the ingredients Balzac would have cooked with. And it is exactly those great 19th century novels that Lemaitre will remind you of' Sunday Times

'Pierre Lemaitre skilfully captivates and stuns the reader' Le Figaro

(P)2023 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

Over the years, the annual Pelletier family pilgrimage down the avenue des Français had known many variations, but never before had it taken on the air of a funeral cortège. This year – if one ignored the inconvenient detail that she was still very much alive – it looked as though Madame Pelletier was being conveyed to her final resting place. Her husband, as was his wont, led the procession, his tread all the more solemn since his wife, now lagging far behind, kept pausing to glance at her son Étienne like a dying woman pleading for the coup de grâce. Behind them, Jean, known as Bouboule, being the elder son, walked stiffly while his little wife Geneviève trotted alongside. François, accompanied by Hélène, brought up the rear.

At the front of the cortège, Monsieur Pelletier smiled and greeted the hawkers selling watermelons and cucumbers, waved to the bootblacks; anyone would have thought he was a man heading to his own coronation, which was not far from being the truth.

The “Pelletier pilgrimage” took place on the first Sunday of March, come rain or shine. To the local children, it was an institution. One might miss a neighbour’s wedding, the New Year’s celebrations, the Paschal Lamb, but to miss the birthday of the soap factory was unthinkable. This year, Monsieur Pelletier had even paid for return tickets from Paris to ensure that François, Jean and his wife would be present.

The ritual consisted of:

Act I: the slow procession to the factory, principally intended for neighbours and acquaintances.

Act II: a tour of the factory that everyone knew like the back of their hand.

Act III: the return, along the avenue des Français, with a stop-off at the Café des Colonnes for an aperitif.

Act IV: the family dinner.

“This way, we’re bored senseless four times instead of one,” François would say.

Admittedly, at the café on the way home, it was tiresome to be forced to listen to Monsieur Pelletier – since he was standing drinks for everyone – as he reminded the assembled company of the principal chapters of the family saga, an edifying tale that began with the first Pelletier on record (who, it had apparently been proven, had fought alongside Marshal Ney) and concluded with himself and his empire, “Maison Pelletier et Fils”, which, in his eyes, was the realisation of a dynasty.

Louis Pelletier was a placid man, one who did not easily lose his sangfroid. Above a finely delineated mouth he had passed on to all his children, the perfectly straight line formed by his little salt-and-pepper moustache, a counterpoint to his silvery locks, was his pride and joy. “Every man in this family is bald by the time he is forty!” he would haughtily proclaim, as though the fact that he was not proved that, in him, the Pelletier line had reached its acme. His narrow shoulders contrasted with his broadening hips. “I could model for Badoit,” he would quip, referring to the distinctive bottle whose slender neck grew ever wider as it reached the base. He radiated an energy that was serene and faintly, discreetly smug. True, he had been a success. In the 1920s, he had acquired a modest soap factory which he had developed “by wedding quality craftsmanship to industrial efficacy”. He was fond of slogans. In his mind, the factory situated a stone’s throw from the place des Canons was destined to become the city’s chief industry. Within a few years, the Pelletiers would be to Beirut what the Wedels were to Lorraine, the Michelins to Clermont or the Schneiders to Creusot. Since then, he had somewhat scaled back his claims, though still boasted about being the figurehead of the “flagship of Lebanese industry”, something no one had the heart to contest. Over the years, he had never ceased to innovate, adding oils of copra, palm oil and cotton to traditional recipes, refining the drying process, altering the balance of oleic acid, etc.

The thirties had proved profitable for the Maison Pelletier, which managed to buy up a number of small soap factories in Tripoli, Aleppo and Damascus. The Pelletier family fortune was doubtless much larger than their relatively modest lifestyle might lead one to suppose.

While the day-to-day running of subsidiaries had been devolved to managers, Louis Pelletier refused to relinquish responsibility for overseeing quality control. Accordingly, he considered it his duty to visit his various businesses, sometimes arriving without warning, taking and analysing samples, making changes to the production process.

He claimed not to enjoy these travels. “I’m a bit of a homebody…” he would say apologetically. He sometimes travelled to Paris, where he had some hazy role with the Federation of Overseas War Veterans, but these clearly were of little importance to him, since he channelled all his energy, his talent and his pride into his factory and the quality of “his soap”. He was never happier than when surveying the great steaming cauldrons whose temperature was regulated day and night by a team of master soap makers, admiring the tubes that channelled soap paste into the plodders. The very sight of the soap being cut into cakes and bars could bring tears to his eyes. “I’ll take over from you for a while,” he would suggest to the man at the end of the production line who had not asked for help. And so, as workers looked on, the proprietor of the factory would sit in front of the cutting machine as it turned out bars of green soap and with a judicious blow from a soap mallet – neither too forceful nor too feeble – would stamp each with the seal of Maison Pelletier: a silhouette of the factory flanked on either side by cedar leaves. Madame Pelletier managed the staff, oversaw the deliveries of raw materials and the dispatch of the finished product, and dealt with the accounts. Her husband’s domain was the factory floor. It was not unusual for him to get up in the middle of the night and cycle to the factory (he had never learned to drive a car) and take samples which he and the maître savonnier would discuss into the early hours.

He insisted that the Maison Pelletier had been born on the day they fired up the first “great cauldron”, which he called La Ninon, an allusion, he claimed, to La Niña, the first of Christopher Columbus’s three ships, whose name, together with the company seal, were engraved on a copper plaque fixed to the base of the tank. When, two years later, her husband named the second vat La Castiglione, Madame Pelletier raised an eyebrow: she could see no connection to the discovery of the Americas. When the third cauldron was installed and christened La Païva, she was completely befuddled, and turned to her son François, who was considered the intellectual of the family, having passed his baccalauréat at a precocious age.

“They are the names of famous courtesans. The first is named after Ninon de L’Enclos, the second after Virginia de Castiglione. The third, La Païva, comes from the name adopted by a demi-mondaine called Esther Lachmann. People used to say ‘Qui paie y va’ – ‘You pay, you play’.”

Madame Pelletier’s lips formed a perfect O.

“You mean they were…”

“Yes, Maman,” said François imperturbably, “they were.”

“Pish tosh!” protested Monsieur Pelletier when confronted by his wife. “These women were sophisticated courtesans, Angèle. I named the vats after them because they are my darlings, nothing more…”

“Whores, that’s what they were…”

“Well, that too… But that was not why I used the names.”

Madame Pelletier liked to give the impression that her husband was a philanderer. Perhaps she found it flattering. In reality, Louis had never been unfaithful to her, but publicly she never missed an opportunity to deplore indiscretions that she knew to be completely fictitious. She made much of the fact that, when visiting Paris, he always stayed at the Hôtel de l’Europe. He regularly praised the hospitality of Madame Ducrau, the proprietor whom Madame Pelletier only ever referred to as “my husband’s mistress”, or, when speaking to her children, “your father’s mistress”. “Oh, Angèle,” Louis invariably objected, “Madame Ducrau must be at least a hundred!”, a protestation she would dismiss with a little wave that meant: “A likely story!”

Just now, however, Madame Pelletier had a more pressing concern than her husband’s mistresses or the soubriquets of the three great soap vats: surviving.

Nothing, she felt, could be less certain.

They had only just passed the Al-Majidiyyeh Mosque. The factory seemed far beyond her reach.

“Go, Étienne, leave me, I…”

She almost said: “I shall die here,” but was restrained by some vestige of lucidity and the fear of appearing ridiculous (one so often encountered people one knew). Instead, she merely slowed her pace and dabbed her temples with a kerchief. A sea breeze enfolded the city in the cool embrace of spring; no one, not even she, was perspiring. Even so, hearing the clinking cymbals of a passing street vendor, she gestured to Étienne to stop him and buy a glass of cool tamarind water which she sipped stoically as though it were hemlock. Aside from raising her hat a little and running her fingers over her brow, she had no other way to express her overwhelming exhaustion. She paused once more, one hand on her heart, struggling to catch her breath. Étienne turned and shot Hélène a fatalistic look; there was nothing to be done. The successive departures of her children had been so many nails buried, one by one, in their mother’s heart.

“But Angèle, our little ones are all grown-up,” argued Monsieur Pelletier. “It is quite normal, surely, that they should leave home.”

“They are not leaving home, Louis: they are fleeing!”

Monsieur Pelletier gave up. His wife was gifted with a talent for sophistry whose depths he had never sounded.

“Go, go…” wheezed Madame Pelletier, “don’t worry on my account.”

No longer troubling to reply, Étienne gently squeezed his mother’s arm, encouraging her to carry on in spite of her fatigue. One step and then another; eventually they would get there. The task of supporting his mother fell to Étienne because, on this occasion, he was at fault, he was the guilty party.

Previous leave-takings were engraved on the family’s memory.

When, two years earlier, François had announced his desire to move to Paris and apply to study at the École Normale Supérieure, Madame Pelletier had collapsed in a dead faint on the tiled kitchen floor.

“It’s quite remarkable…” equivocated Doctor Doueiri, who, it should be said, had never treated a complaint more serious than sunburn and bronchitis (a rather obtuse man, alarmed by his patients’ health problems, he excelled only when playing belote).

François had had to spend a whole day at his mother’s bedside and listen as she railed, even in her sleep, against her ungrateful son and this family she said would be the death of her. “And you say nothing,” she chided her husband, “you never say a word.”

“All the same, my dear, the École Normale…” he muttered vaguely, as he quickly straddled his bicycle and headed for the factory.

When Madame Pelletier finally consented to rise from her bed, François had to endure a further ordeal, no less painful than the first, that entailed watching his mother “pack his trunk”. “Since you have decided to leave…” she would mutter a dozen times a day as she gathered, sorted and selected articles of clothing and provisions. Begun with all the ceremony of preparing a wedding trousseau, the process gradually slowed to a crawl. Madame Pelletier obsessed over minor details, roughly set things down, as her anguish gave way to rage. François was no longer a young man whose departure she viewed with sadness, he was a churlish son being shown the door.

In truth, Madame Pelletier was settling an old score with her son. It still stuck in her craw, the letter he had left on the dresser in May 1941 when, at the age of eighteen, he ran away to the camp at Qastinah and enlisted in the First Light Division of Général Legentilhomme’s Free French Forces. Curiously, she had better understood this first leave-taking. He had been heading off to war, an honourable venture all things considered, rather than leaving to study when he could just as easily study in Beirut.

“No, Maman,” François would explain, “it’s just not possible here.”

“No, of course not! Beirut isn’t good enough for ‘monsieur’!”

When François boarded the ship, preceded by two trunks crammed to bursting point, Madame Pelletier had appeared calm and serious. “You will take care of yourself, won’t you?” she whispered into his ear. Louis feared that his wife would linger on the quay until the ship completely disappeared but, as soon as it moved away, she took him by the arm and said: “I do hope that he’ll write…”

She went back to her routine. Little by little, the incident lost its ability to wound. Especially when François passed the entrance exam to the ENS. It was as though the statute of limitations had passed and she was once again proud of her son; she all but claimed the credit for his departure and his success.

It was shortly afterwards that Jean, the eldest, announced that he and his wife were leaving Beirut for Paris. François had barely been gone eighteen months.

“Really? You too?” murmured Angèle.

She took to her bed and refused to see anyone, even Jean.

Doctor Doueiri, muttonheaded as ever, prescribed baking soda footbaths. “Doueiri is an imbecile,” thought Louis, a fact already apparent to everyone.

Angèle was not as grieved by Bouboule’s departure as she had been by that of François. For months before he left, Jean had been utterly miserable; he tried to stay out of her way, and she understood. If she kept to her room, it was because she did not want him to think she was less upset by his leaving than she had been by his brother’s.

While he waited for her to reappear, Monsieur Pelletier stopped off for a Cinzano at the Café des Colonnes on his way home from the factory.

The waiter who spent all day listening to Umm Kulthum proposed a game of backgammon, since there were few customers.

“My word…” said Louis.

Questioned about the state of Angèle’s health:

“Better, much better…” he said. “She’ll soon be back on her feet, in spite of Doctor Doueiri.”

No one would have refused the services of the doctor, who had become an institution, even if they never knew whether the illness or the doctor would prove more dangerous.

“The man’s a fool,” said the waiter.

“No, he’s a damn fool.”

“It’s the same thing.”

Monsieur Pelletier stopped playing.

“No, it’s not at all the same thing. If you explain something to a man three times and he still doesn’t understand, he’s a fool. But if, at that point, he is confident that he understands it better than you do, you’re dealing with a damn fool.”

The waiter gave a wry smile.

“Well, in that case, there’s no question that Doueiri is a damn fool.”

When the game of backgammon finished, Louis drained his Cinzano and sat a moment, brooding. He knew Angèle better than she knew herself and he knew that she would need some pretext to emerge from her room. He went back to the factory, then cycled home with a sheaf of invoices he had just paid. Angèle glanced through them.

“Louis!” she said, scandalised. “Please tell me that you have not paid these!”

“I… I shall do my best to recover the cheque before it is sent,” he blustered shamefacedly and rushed out of the room.

He returned to the factory (“Hell’s teeth,” he mumbled as he pedalled, “this had better be an end to it!”), wrote out a cheque, ripped it up, carefully placed the torn scraps in an envelope and left it on his wife’s desk.

The following morning, Madame Pelletier returned to work.

Jean and Geneviève sailed two days later. “Take care of yourself…” Angèle whispered in Bouboule’s ear. As the ship pulled away from the quay, she took Louis’s arm and said: “I do hope Geneviève will write…”

And now Étienne…

Once again Madame Pelletier stopped to catch her breath.

“Indochina! There’s a war on over there!”

Étienne had already explained this a thousand times, yes, there was a war, though not exactly, how could he make her understand?

“It’s an armed conflict, Maman.”

“An armed conflict in which people die is a war.”

She blew her nose affectedly and gazed up at him.

Though even with a gun to her head she would not admit it, she had always thought Étienne the most handsome of her three sons. Burning questions scalded the tip of her tongue but, from her slumped shoulders and her vacant stare, it was clear she would not ask them; she already knew the answers.

Indochina, his friend Raymond, the letters that had been arriving for months now…

When he first invited Raymond to the house, she had said: “I can see why you like him, he’s a handsome young man.” Oh, if everything in Étienne’s life could only be as simple as it was with his mother… But this was far from being the case. From his schooldays to his work at the bank, he had endured humiliations, overheard insinuations, experienced insults…

He was a slender lad, his light brown hair almost blond. Smiling eyes and a certain insouciance in his gestures and gait betrayed a sensual, voluptuous character. His talent with numbers had earned him nothing more than an accountancy diploma since he had no professional ambition.

What mattered most to him was love, which was unfortunate. The select social circle in which the Pelletier family moved was too civilised to reject him because of his sexual proclivities, but too bourgeois to accept him without some ulterior motive. And so Étienne felt torn between two worlds, of which his family was a microcosm. The women (his mother, Hélène) worshipped him. The men (François, Jean) loved him, but from a greater distance. This left only his father, his most devoted admirer, who forgave him everything and loved him with an awkward gruffness that expressed a slightly pained helplessness. Étienne was an “ethereal” creature, Angèle could think of no other word. He seemed to float in the air, one could never tell what he might do next. He was an idealist, but had no ideals. Life itself was not enough for him. Which is probably why he has these passions, his mother thought, these tumultuous desires. Sometimes, she would take his face in her hands and ask: “When will you be content with what life has to offer you, Étienne?” and he would laugh and say, “Tomorrow, Maman, cross my heart.”

He had met Raymond a year earlier while he was garrisoned near Hadath. They had had a passionate affair that lasted six months. Although Étienne had always been a joyful soul, his mother had never seen him as happy. Then, Raymond was posted to Indochina, where he was to serve out his tour of duty. He was Belgian, and had no desire to return to his native land. Before enlisting in the Legion (for reasons he never disclosed to Étienne), he had been a schoolmaster. “But that’s all over,” he wrote after a few weeks. “When my tour is over I’d like to stay on here, there are so many opportunities…” In their letters, they discussed various possible projects, from transport companies to plantations. Before long, Étienne began to look for employment in Indochina, though with few expectations, but then, four weeks later – it was scarcely believable – a letter arrived informing him that his application for a post at the Indochinese Currency Exchange in Saigon had been accepted.

“You’ll end up catching yellow fever, that’s what will happen.”

“Absolutely not, Maman, you know yellow doesn’t suit me.”

“Go ahead, make fun of me…”

Monsieur Pelletier had been more encouraging than his wife. He had an excellent working relationship with Lecoq & d’Arneville, a company based in Saigon, and while sales of Savons du Levant in Indochina were modest, they were not insignificant. “Étienne will always have a warm welcome there.” Then, when his wife failed to see how a company like Lecoq & d’Arneville could be useful to his son, he added: “It’s a fallback plan, Angèle. The French abroad share an esprit de corps. Lecoq is a fine fellow!”

Étienne, pressed to his mother’s bosom, chuckled. “After all, Maman, anyone with a name like Lecoq can hardly be a bad Frenchman…”

Weaving its way along the street, the little group, its members now strung out like riders in a stage of the Tour de France, finally came to the soap works.

By the time the last laggards had reached the factory door, Monsieur Pelletier – arms outstretched, gripping the handles – was gaily bellowing: “Watch carefully!” as he prepared to throw open the double doors leading to the main workshop. Intoxicated by his own enthusiasm, he hesitated a moment, prolonging a suspense felt only by him. Angèle felt he was making a meal of things. His four children simply waited; they were inured to the ritual.

François was clinging to the wrought-iron railing. His ship had docked only the night before after a two-day crossing during which he had been acutely seasick, and the smell of soap was making his stomach heave.

“If he doesn’t hurry up,” he whispered to Hélène, “I’ll be visiting the vomitorium before we even sit down to lunch.”

Hélène stifled a giggle that earned her a black look from her mother.

Monsieur Pelletier glanced over his shoulder, surveying his beloved empire.

“So? Any guesses? Well, here she is!”

“She” was a new vat. The fourth. Made of cast iron. Monsieur Pelletier scuttled over to the small copper plaque affixed to the base: “La Belle Otero”.

“Another harlot, I knew it! This isn’t a soap factory any more, it’s a brothel…”

“Maman…” warned Étienne.

But Monsieur Pelletier had already moved on to a detailed explanation of the purpose of the new tank, which entailed a complete description of the manufacturing process. The children trailed after him; no one was listening.

Jean could not stop his father from grabbing him by the arm and pulling him aside (“Come take a look, Bouboule, you’ll find it fascinating!”) before launching into one of his interminable explications.

As he stood on the threshold, Jean felt a rising panic.

His wife, Geneviève, painted and powdered like a marquise, glanced up at the great doorway. “Not a terribly fetching colour, that green, don’t you think?”

Jean said nothing. He swallowed hard and stepped inside this place that symbolised his failure.

To have his father lecture him now was a reminder of the torment of his time here, an ordeal that had ended thanks only to an escape without glory or merit.

It had always been ordained that Jean would take over the family business. From the instant he was born, his fate had been sealed: sooner or later “Maison Pelletier” would become “Maison Pelletier & Son”. And that son would be he, Bouboule, who had not balked at the prospect. In the small French community of Beirut, it was accepted that a child took over his father’s business – ideally, as in a monarchy, the eldest son.

Contrary to common practice, Angèle and Louis Pelletier had never thought of enrolling their children in religious schools, entrusting their sons to the Jesuits and Hélène to the Sisters of Nazareth. They were in favour of the Secular Mission School, where Bouboule had proved a thoroughly lacklustre student. He passed his baccalauréat exams by the skin of his teeth, though this did nothing to undermine his father’s confidence in his future as a soap maker. Louis Pelletier believed that the head of a factory was, first and foremost, an industrialist, so he steered Bouboule towards the sciences. To study chemistry. It was at this point that things began to go awry. Jean was not a brilliant student, or even average; he was staunchly mediocre. His father was untroubled by his grades, which were routinely described as “poor” or “inadequate”. The lycée was a private school, and the exorbitant nature of the fees and the social standing of the parents (that is to say, the customers), meant that teaching staff were loath to make more brutal (and more realistic) assessments, not that this would have shaken the faith of Monsieur Pelletier. “Book learning is one thing,” he would proclaim with unshakeable conviction, “soap making is another.” He was convinced that, once Jean left school, and had spent a few months working in the various areas of the production line, he would become an expert in the field.

A cursory glance at Jean was enough to belie his father’s faith.

He was a chubby, clumsy boy, although he possessed surprising physical strength. He was withdrawn, something of a dreamer, with a tactlessness that owed much to his shyness. Even as a baby he had been pudgy. His father thought he was the spitting image of Ribouldingue, a comic-strip character in Les Pieds Nickelés, which Angèle thought was hurtful, but the nickname Bouboule stuck. Since he had no particular passion, and few interests, Jean had resigned himself to following the path marked out for him, but the path had seemed terribly long and littered with disappointment, and this was only a foretaste of what was to come, since, after he was awarded his degree (no one knew how much Monsieur Pelletier paid for it), he suddenly found himself working in the factory where he was expected to become the resident expert.

“I’m not sure it’s a good fit for him,” Angèle ventured. “I cannot help but wonder whether he really has a technical bent…” But Louis remained confident. “Once he discovers how this factory really works, he’ll grow to love it, how could he not?”

But while Monsieur Pelletier would arrive at the factory at the crack of dawn and lustily breathe in the smell of oil and lye – “the perfume of the trade” – Jean was impervious to the delights of the soap-making process. Consequently, he learned nothing, remembered nothing.

It was 1946.

During the thirties, the Maison Pelletier had successfully exported products to Europe. Savons du Levant quickly established itself as a brand, and there was a constant demand. When the war ended, the factory, which now had a huge workforce, was snowed under with orders. Since its foundation, the factory had been based on the rue de la Marseillaise, on a cramped plot of land opposite the Customs Offices. When an adjacent site became available, Monsieur Pelletier was eager to buy it.

“Are you sure you’re not paying too much for the land?”

“It’s an investment, Angèle! We’ll make our money back in less than two years!”

And so, after Jean had served an apprenticeship lasting only a few weeks, during which he singularly failed to shine in any of the various manufacturing roles, his father entrusted him with the extension, which would be a decisive step in the company’s future. The hedges separating the newly acquired land from the soap factory yard were ripped out and plans were drawn up.

Jean was appointed general manager, and immediately found himself out of his depth.

He rarely made bad decisions because he seldom made any decisions at all. He never knew what to do. He pored over plans and elevations, palms sweating, open-mouthed, unable to make sense of the figures or the diagrams. The project manager did as he pleased since Jean never asked questions or made even the slightest demand.

Then came the day when Monsieur Pelletier realised that the new workshops were too small for the equipment they were intended to house, and everything had to be demolished, the foundations enlarged and the workshops rebuilt. This incident was only the first of many: the loading dock turned out to be too shallow, the drying sheds were poorly oriented, making it impossible to take advantage of the wind to speed up the drying process; problem followed upon problem like a string of worry beads. Whenever someone raised a question, Jean would say: “I’ll think about it”, and never mention the subject again. When some issue became problematic, he would roar: “We’ll deal with it later!”, masquerading as the man preoccupied with much more important tasks. He would hole up in his office for days on end, wringing his hands, knowing various people were waiting for him to emerge. He would sit, paralysed, for what he considered a decent period of time, then throw open the door, catching everyone unawares, and head down the stairs and to his car, calling to the waiting crowd: “Can’t you see I’m in a hurry?” He knew he had to make decisions, but when – miraculously – he managed to understand the problem, he had no possible solution. The trade association pestered him for guidelines. Now and then, facing pressure from all sides, he would democratically solicit opinions, only to abruptly decide on some initiative that invariably proved disastrous. Behind the scenes, his father seemed seriously concerned, but, determined not to give up hope, he would reply to questions with a fervent pride: “You know perfectly well that this is something you need to take up with Monsieur Jean!” Talking among themselves, the long-suffering staff would say: “We have to take it up with Môssieur Bouboule.”

Jean spent his days trembling and his nights waking up in a panic, throat constricted by terror. He would get up, run to the toilet to vomit. He began to bite the inside of his cheeks until t