On Thursday, February 17, after a hasty late lunch at the Comptoir, a café at the Carrefour de l’Odéon where, every time he went there, he recalled a sentence by Jean Echenoz on the paradox that in this very windy spot in Paris, fairly ugly and quite polluted, the sidewalk cafés are always packed (a sentence he unfortunately did not have the time to look up in order to quote it literally, because in literary matters it is not so much the idea that counts as the manner), Ivan, before heading back to The Good Novel, bought Le Ponte at the kiosk situated below Danton’s outstretched bronze arm, near the métro station. It had been ages since he could read the papers every day. He bought individual issues, once a week, on the day when the literary supplement was included, and he went through the Book pages of the weekly magazines on the Internet—and as he did so he jumped on his chair, grumbled, and abruptly left his computer, reinforced in his conviction—happy overall—that The Good Novel was on the right track. He had felt obliged to subscribe to the weekly Livres Hebdo, and read it out of professional conscience. To be honest, he knew of only one publication whose Literature pages were impeccable, and that was 303, the fine quarterly journal published in the Loire Valley.
On his way to the bookstore, from the pile the vendor had handed him he removed the few pages of literary supplement, apparently designed for this purpose, since not only was it detachable but had already been detached and, as was his usual habit, he left the rest of the papers on a bench.
Before he had reached the corner of the rue Dupuytren, he stopped short and stood motionless in the street, with that paper open in front of his face. On page two, over four columns, the wink-wink headline made him forget the place, the time, and to make a long story short, everything that was not The Good Novel. “The Commissars of Literary Worth.” By the bottom of the first column, he got it. They were bringing out the heavy artillery.
The article was signed by one Jean-Brice Abéha, assistant professor of political sociology at the University of Paris IV. “In September a bookstore opened in Paris, with considerable means behind it and the shameless intention of selling only great novels.” Ivan read as quickly as he could. “The advertising for the launch of the bookstore was unequivocal . . . Nobody thought it worthwhile to be alarmed. This, however, is nothing more nor less than a totalitarian undertaking. Individuals who have been careful to keep their identity a secret have claimed the right to decide for others—worse, to decide for everyone—which are the great novels, and to push aside those books, far more numerous, that they happen not to like . . . What does good novel mean? Who are these kapos who have the nerve to place their seal of approval on this book and not that one? Where are they coming from? What gives them the right?”
The article concluded: “We all know where lists lead. The next stage is purges. The bonfire of forbidden books is not far behind.”
Van raised his head and once again became aware of the boulevard, the cinemas, the sun veiled in a grayish white light, and his own pulse, which seemed to be racing. “Where are they coming from?”: he thought he was hearing those Saint Justs in jeans perched on the soapboxes of action committees in the 1970s, the violence they displayed to discredit everything that wasn’t them, their grotesque phraseology, their methodical bad faith. This has gone far enough, he thought. But at this point, far did not mean a great deal.
He folded the supplements and mentally smoothed his face before going through the door at The Good Novel. Once he was inside, back in the silent and vibrant atmosphere of the busy time, for a moment he had the impression he had woken up from a nightmare. But alas, the attack did exist, it was under his arm, black on white in the daily paper considered to be the most serious one in France, and the dream might instead be this ideal bookstore.
He would wait a few hours and think about the best strategy before calling Francesca. He sat down at the cash register, behind one of the computer screens, and looked on the Web to see what he could find out about Jean-Brice Abéha. He found nothing. Among the entire faculty at Paris IV, there was no one by that name.
Folco, the cartoonist, came in with Le Ponte in his hand. He went straight to Van: “Have you seen this?” Van placed his hand on Folco’s arm: “Let them talk. There are always people who, the moment they see a rose that has just bloomed, feel like crushing it into a million pieces.”
But five minutes later, Francesca called. She wanted to show him something. She was at the stop of the number 63 bus, outside the École de Médecine.
Ivan wasn’t sure it would be about today’s Ponte. Francesca never read papers when they came out. She was both more and less detached than he was where newspapers were concerned. She had subscriptions to a dozen publications—L’Idée, Le Ponte, Esprit, Le Débat, La NRF, Les Inrockuptibles, Le Matricule des Anges, Critique, Art Presse, Cahiers du Cinéma, Alternatives économiques—which she never read when they came out and later only partially, but she leafed through them from A to Z. Every time she had a fit of reading, she would devote two or three hours in a row to pruning the pile of printed matter she had allowed to accumulate, transferring everthing, after a quick look through, from the magazine rack where they were stacked to the firewood basket that was always kept by the fireplace in her study at the rue de Condé.
Van saw her waiting at the number 63 stop, sitting on a bench beneath the shelter. She got up and came to meet him.
“Have you seen?” she said.
“Yes,” said Van. “We might have expected this. Good old lefty criticism is alive and well. Anything that is not their style they call fascism. But tell me, that’s not like you to read Le Ponte on the day it comes out.”
“Someone shoved it in my face.”
“In your face?”
“Haven’t you seen?” said Francesca again.
She made Van turn around and led him to the Odéon métro station. On the façades of the buildings between the shop fronts and the window displays, on the back of the newspaper kiosk, on the two low concrete walls on either side of the métro escalator, on the municipal panel with the map of the neighborhood, the article had been glued, at eye level, thirty or forty times over.
“I’ve come here from Saint-Germain,” said Francesca. “It’s everywhere, in front of the church. I love dazibaos. It seemed that this one had just been put up, so I went to read it right away.
“When I saw the same posters here, in the métro, I popped over to the Place de l’Odéon. Same thing over there. They’re all around the theatre.”
She squeezed her shoulders, and continued, “I feel a chill in my spine just to think that someone bought a hundred copies of the Ponte the moment it went on sale, put them in his car and, in one hour, stuck them up all around the bookstore. Someone who knew the article was going to come out.”
“I picture it differently,” said Van. “I picture maybe a dozen or so young guys each of them given ten articles already cut out, and told which is zone of action and be quick about it.”
“What’s the difference?”
“We’re no longer dealing with some bilious individual like the author of the article, but a whole commando. Concerted action.”
“Do you think they’re keeping a watch on us, even here? That they’re getting a kick out of seeing our faces?”
“It could be. Let’s not stay outside.”
“I’m going to call Tourterelli.”
“The publisher of the Ponte? Don’t do that. That’s giving too much importance to an unfair article. What we have to hope is that a lot of the friends of The Good Novel will respond to that Abéha article through the newspaper.”
“And what about us, should we respond?”
“An open letter, yes. They attack us, we defend ourselves. You want me to draft a response?”
“Would you? You’ll do it with more restraint than I would. Van, I can’t stand the idea that someone might be watching us, I’ll be off. Call me.”
Van shut himself in the big office on the second floor. Half an hour was enough. He put forth two sorts of arguments, which made up the two parts of his reply.
First of all, the article was full of falsehoods. Van had never hidden his identity, his name was in the paper when The Good Novel opened, it had been heard on television, and you could find it on the bookstore’s Web site (“Who are we?”).
He was not assuming the right to decide on the quality of the novels: it was a committee of experts who selected them, in secret, in order to avoid any pressure. This procedure had also been described on The Good Novel’s Web site, and at great length in the newspapers.
And did he need to point out that there was nothing totalitarian about their project? Given the fact that they were one bookstore among thousands in France who were biased toward a certain type of novels, and not an exclusive authority, a State, or a monopoly?
Secondly—Van’s pen hurried across the paper—selection is a common practice where culture is concerned. Museums, art galleries, theatre festivals, and movie theatres all make their choices. As for books, publishers choose—to publish or not to publish—and literary prizes have selection as their vocation; the literary sections in newspapers are nothing other than selections, and do not cover even one tenth of the fiction published overall, and the bookstores that have always been qualified as good bookstores are the ones that make no secret about what they prefer. In all these spheres of cultural life there comes a moment of “this, yes, that, no,” which means, “we think this is good, but not that.”
It was four o’clock. Ivan called Francesca and suggested he show her his draft. She asked to meet at La Grille on rue Mabillon. She did not want to go through the neighborhood. She did not have the heart to see that article again, multiplied by thirty.
Van was about to leave the office when suddenly it occurred to him that the name Abéha sounded like the initials A.B.A. in French. He sat right down behind his computer, and went back to the Web site of the University of Paris IV. Once again he scrolled through it, department by department. There were two professors with the initials A.B.A., Anne-Brigitte Acker and Alain Bernard-Amont. In addition, if he were to believe the telephone directory, there was no one in Paris or in the region with the last name Abéha.
Francesca thought it was pointless to investigate the two people with the initials A.B.A. or to write to them. Both of them would say, it’s not me.
Other than the fact that she thought it was necessary to add that Abéha was by all appearances a pseudonym, she did not want to change a single word in Van’s draft.
“The tone is perfect. Not the least bit aggressive. The truth, nothing else. Do you mind signing it?”
“Not at all, it will be an honor.”
“What should we do? Send a letter to this Abéha?”
“Yes, but an open one. A reply to the signatory but addressed to the Ponte, and we’ll ask them to publish it.”
“Shall we send it by mail?”
“No, that would take too long. I’ll hand deliver it.”
“Let me go. You have things to do at the bookstore. Type the letter, and sign it. It will take you quarter of an hour. I’ll wait here. Send me Oscar, I’ll stop in at the newspaper. By the way, Ivan, where exactly is Paris IV? Which faculty is it?”
“It’s the Sorbonne,” said Ivan.
When she saw Oscar coming, Francesca hesitated, then asked him, “Have you heard?”
“Yes,” said the young man calmly. “It’s hardly surprising. The Devil only ever attacks whatever is beautiful and pure.”
He smiled.
“In his place, I would do the same. As for the rest, everything that’s really ugly, everything that’s wrong on earth, that’s up to God and his saints to fix.”
Francesca thought about what she had known that was most tender and pure: Violette.
“Sit down,” she said. “Do you believe in God and the Devil?”
“I can see how someone might not believe in God,” said Oscar, “although for me personally, that’s difficult. But not to believe in the Devil, that I find very hard to understand. You have to be really distracted, and be totally unaware of what’s going on around you.”
“What worries me is the terrible struggle between the powers, I mean the fact that the struggle is unceasing, there’s never a victor, there’s never an end, and we are just terrified playthings.”
“I see things differently. I don’t believe we are on the sidelines. I don’t think that’s even possible. We are in one camp or the other, sometimes first in one then the other, in succession, and I’m afraid that most often we are in one and the other at the same time, because we are ambiguous by nature. But we are not doomed to ambiguity, we can escape it: that’s what we call making progress, I think. And of course the struggle will end. One side will be victorious.”
“For someone so young, you have made a lot of progress.”
“Young? I’m almost twenty-five.”
“An age when people think they’ve been around a lot, that they’re mature. Later on, you’ll see, you realize that you don’t know much, you discover that you are a novice, and then a beginner. You realize that you’re going to spend your entire life practicing scales.”
“What a gloomy prospect!”
“Do I seem gloomy?”
Oscar hesitated. Francesca expected him to say, not all the time.
“Not only,” he said.
“How is your novel coming along, Oscar?”
“I’m letting it settle, get some air.”
“Have you finished it?”
“I finished a first draft before we opened the bookstore, in Méribel, at your place. For the time being I have other things to do. And it’s good timing, I had planned to put the manuscript aside for a while, to forget about it, and then reread it with a fresh gaze, a reader’s gaze.”
“Well, that certainly is wise. And what’s it about, your novel?”
“Everything we’ve just talked about—God, the Devil, the great cosmic struggle, the weak and the strong, faith, discouragement . . .”
“All that!”
“What else should I write about?”
“Is there a plot?”
“Ten plots. And, above all, it’s a novel with a country.”
“Madagascar?”
“Yes. It’s a political novel. But I’m wasting your time. Ivan asked me to give you this note, and he told me to be quick.”
Francesca looked at her watch.
“I’m not sorry we had this conversation, believe me,” she said, getting up. “We’ll continue it someday, if you like.”
She went on foot along boulevard Blanqui, to the editorial offices of the Ponte, by way of the rue Monge and the avenue des Gobelins. A half hour more or less made no difference. In any case, Ivan’s response would not come out the next day. And she needed to walk. All afternoon she had imagined those little brutes hastily gluing their filthy article on the walls. Striding now through the fifth arrondissement, she was looking out for angels. But it is always difficult when thinking of angels not to have a stereotyped idea, and Francesca had in mind long tall creatures with coffee-colored skin and very black hair tied at the neck.
Oscar was right, far too often we forget the Devil, and we are wrong to do so. When Francesca went home to the rue de Condé, it was eight o’clock in the evening. From the streets outside her building, she could see light in the windows. That was unusual for that time of day. She found Henri in the living room and immediately saw Le Ponte spread out on the sofa where he had been sitting.
“You should have told me you were having dinner here tonight,” she said. “I would not have made plans to go back out.”
Two minutes earlier all she had wanted was to lie down—she was exhausted. But the prospect of a tête-à-tête with Henri was beyond her strength. No sooner had she seen him than the words “go back out” had sprung to her lips.
Doultremont had been able to read as much on her face.
“I’m going back out, too,” he said. “But I wanted to tell you how sorry I am, after such a terrible blow.”
“The article in Le Ponte? A blow below the belt, more like.”
“Terrible and below the belt.”
“No. Such a rotten trick is not necessarily terrible. We’ll let it crawl along on the ground, and go around it, and go on our way.”
“Are you going to respond?”
“With composure, yes. We won’t use the same tone.”
“Do you know where the article came from?”
“No, and I have no intention of trying to find out. It comes from spite, envy, and mediocrity.”
“Well that’s already not bad.”
Francesca thought of Oscar.
“Not so bad,” she said.
Doultremont folded up Le Ponte and took it with him.
“Fine,” he said. “I’m on my way. I was afraid you might be upset, but I see you are holding up. I feel better, knowing you’re going out. I wish you an excellent evening.”
Francesca raised her eyes to look at Heffner, who was listening carefully.
“Showing off, playing tough, was probably exactly what one shouldn’t do. I must have provoked him. God knows that was not my intention. I had only one desire, to get away. To escape from a tête-à-tête where I would only take a battering, in spite of appearances.”
“Go on,” said Heffner.