WHEN I TOLD him, two years later, that I was getting back to work, he was not surprised. He had expected it, although perhaps not so soon. And he was confident.

Marie-France also thought this was good news. I called to collect the dossier. According to law, the convicted person remains the owner of the original file, but since it takes up quite a bit of space, and the cells are small, and the lockers at the entrances to prisons are overloaded, Romand had deposited his dossier with Marie-France. Her advice, when she invited me to come get it, was to clean out my car trunk thoroughly if I wanted to fit in all the boxes. I gathered that she was not displeased to be passing this sinister business on to me and that by bringing it back to Paris I was committing myself to keeping it until he got out.

She lives in a village thirty miles east of Lyon. I’d had no sense of her background and was surprised to find an immense and magnificent house surrounded by a park that sloped gently down toward the Ain River. The spot is delightful, and the house is opulently furnished. Marie-France had told me to come during the week, when it’s quiet, because she and her husband have a number of children and grandchildren who come for the weekend, rarely fewer than twenty of them. Raph, the husband, was a textile manufacturer before he retired. Marie-France herself comes from a line of Lyonese silk merchants, and until her children were all grown, she led the life of a mother and housewife, slightly more devout as a Christian than most. If you press her to tell you, she will say that when she reached fifty she heard a call. She was to go to prison. To prison? It took her some time to understand and allow herself to be persuaded, as she is not a religious fanatic. Besides, you don’t become a prison visitor overnight. There is a probation period during which you welcome and give support to the families of prisoners before and after visiting hours. I’d been struck at Villefranche by the atmosphere created by these kind souls in the mobile home at the prison gate that serves as a waiting room. Thanks to them, it’s not too grim; they offer coffee, people talk to one another, and those coming for the first time don’t have to learn the rules the hard way. After this apprenticeship, Marie-France crossed the threshold and has since assisted with her friendship dozens of prisoners in the Lyon area. Jean-Claude, whom she has known for almost six years now, is clearly one of her favorites. She knows all about his torments and his mental fragility (it wouldn’t take very much, in her opinion, for him to relapse into despair and kill himself), but she admires as a gift from God his ability to look “on the bright side of life,” in spite of everything. “And then it’s easy to help him, you see. It does you good when someone is easy to help. When I see him, he often repeats to me something I told him the last time I visited and he assures me that it has helped him get through the week. This cheers me up.”

This goodwill, which makes him a gratifying client for a prison visitor, has won him another guardian angel, Bernard, whom he had mentioned in his letters to me. Marie-France had invited Bernard and his wife to lunch with us. The day before, Bernard had made the trip from Lyon to Paris and back to go see Jean-Claude in Fresnes, where he had just been transferred. Rudely torn from surroundings that had become familiar, Jean-Claude had found himself in a strange place, among strangers, treated like a package in a sorting room, and Bernard, who is seventy-five years old, had thought it only natural to set right off on the train so that the new inmate might see a friendly face for at least a half hour. I who had gone only once to Villefranche felt vaguely ashamed, especially since Bernard must have had to force himself to go through the gate at Fresnes, a place that brings back painful memories for him. Condemned to death as a member of the Resistance, he was imprisoned there by the Gestapo and lived for two months in the expectation of execution. His only reading material was a copy of the writings of Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, thanks to whom he was converted and ceased to fear death. In the end, he was deported. He spent four days en route to Buchenwald in a locked boxcar without food or anything to drink but urine, huddled among the dying, most of whom were corpses by the time the journey was over. I would never claim that such an experience necessarily endows a man with infallible lucidity later on, but I mention it to make clear that Bernard is not a sacristan who knows nothing of evil and life. And when this rather right-wing, rather conservative elderly Gaullist speaks of the crook and murderer Jean-Claude Romand as a charming fellow whom he is always pleased to see, one can tell that he does so not from any charitable obligation but from real friendship.

After lunch, we went out onto the terrace overlooking the Ain and the surrounding open country, which seemed to me remarkably hilly for a plain. It was Indian summer; the trees were a russet color, the sky was very blue, and thrushes were singing. We enjoyed sunshine and coffee while eating Swiss chocolates. Raph, who looks a bit like the French actor Philippe Noiret, listened benevolently to his wife and his friend Bernard speaking about their protégé. By this time, Raph felt as though he knew him. And he liked him. “So,” he said to me, “are you a member of the club, too?” I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t want to abuse the trust of these people by making them believe that I was, like them, unconditionally devoted to Jean-Claude. To me, he was not “Jean-Claude.” I had begun my letters to him at first with “Monsieur,” then “Dear Monsieur,” then “Dear Jean-Claude Romand,” but I would have stuck at “Dear Jean-Claude.” Listening to Marie-France and Bernard animatedly discussing his winter wardrobe (“He already has the blue pullover, which is warm, but it would be good if he also had the gray Polarfleece sweater; perhaps Emmanuel could take it to him …”), I found their affection—so straightforward, so natural—both admirable and almost monstrous. Not only was I myself not capable of it, but I did not wish to be. I did not wish to take the path that would allow me to swallow unflinchingly a fabrication as blatant as the story of the rejected lover who killed herself on the day before the exam, or to believe like Bernard that at bottom this tragic fate was providential: “To think that it should have taken all those lies, those random accidents, and that terrible tragedy so that today he might do all the good he does around him. It’s something I’ve always believed, you see, and that I see at work in Jean-Claude’s life: everything works out and finds its meaning in the end for those who love God.”

I was just speechless. But no doubt so were the people who listened in 1887 to little Thérèse Martin, not yet de Lisieux, pray to God to pardon Henri Pranzini, the brutal murderer of two women and a little girl. I was perfectly aware that Bernard’s attitude, which I found so scandalous, was simply that of a deeply committed Christian. I wound up imagining Marie-France and Bernard leaning over my work to one side of me, rejoicing even more—and all heaven with them—for a repentant sinner than for the ninety-nine just souls who have no need to repent; on my other side, I heard Martine Servandoni saying that the worst thing that could happen to Romand would be to fall into the hands of those people, let himself be lulled by angelic speeches on the infinite mercy of the Lord and the wonders He would work in his soul, and thus lose all chance of someday getting back in touch with reality. One could obviously maintain that in a case like his, that might be preferable, but Martine felt that in every case, without exception, painful lucidity was better than soothing illusion, and I’m not one to argue with her about that.

BERNARD AND HIS wife belong to a Catholic movement called the Intercessors, who organize shifts to ensure a chain of uninterrupted prayer. At any given moment in France, and I believe throughout the world, there is at least one intercessor praying. Each one signs up for a certain time and date, and Jean-Claude, recruited by Bernard, has been zealous in choosing unpopular time slots, for example from two to four in the morning. Bernard asked him to bear witness about his experience and published his statement anonymously in the group’s newsletter:

“Since I have been in prison for several years, condemned to a life sentence after a terrible family tragedy, naturally you would not think my situation would lead me to bear witness, but speaking as one intercessor among two thousand others about the Grace and Love of God, I will try to give thanks to Him.

“The ordeal of incarceration but above all the trials of mourning and despair should have separated me forever from God. Encounters with a chaplain and two prison visitors blessed with the gift of listening and of speaking frankly, without judging, have released me from the exile of unspeakable suffering that cut me off from God and the rest of humanity. Today, I know that these providential helping hands were for me the first manifestations of divine Grace.

“Events of a mystical nature, not easy to communicate, have deeply stirred me and become the foundations of my new faith. Among the most striking: during a night of insomnia and anguish, when I felt more than ever guilty for living, the presence of God burst upon me unexpectedly as I contemplated in the darkness the Holy Face painted by Rouault. After the most dreadful despondency, my tears were no longer those of sadness but the result of an inner fire and of the profound Peace that comes from the certainty of being loved.

“Prayer has an essential place in my life. It is harder than one would imagine to fall silent and pray in a cell. Finding the time certainly isn’t a problem; the main obstacle is the noise of radios, TVs, and shouting from windows that lasts late into the night. Often, saying prayers for a while, mechanically, without paying attention to the meaning of the words, allows one to neutralize the surrounding din and the static of thought before finding the peace conducive to a personal prayer.

“When I was free, I had heard, without paying much attention or feeling in any way concerned, these words from the Gospel: ‘I was in prison and you visited me’ (Matthew 25:36). I had the good fortune to become acquainted with the Intercessors thanks to one of these visitors, now a most dear friend. These two hours of prayer every month, at a very late hour when the difference between the outside world and the inner world fades away, are blessed moments. The struggle against sleep that precedes them is always rewarded. It is a joy to be able to be a link in this continuous chain of prayer that banishes isolation and the feeling of uselessness. It is also reassuring for me to feel, in the depths of the abyss that is prison, that there remain these invisible safety ropes to keep us from going under: prayers. I often think of this image of the rope one must cling to so that I may remain faithful, at all costs, to the appointment of these hours of intercession.

“In discovering that Grace is not in the fulfillment of my desires, even though they may be generous and altruistic, but in the strength to accept everything with joy, from the depths of my cell my De Profundis becomes Magnificat and all is Light.”

DRIVING BACK TO Paris to set to work, I no longer saw any mystery in his long imposture, only a pathetic mixture of blindness, cowardice, and distress. What went on in his head during those empty hours dragged out in highway rest stops or parking lots was something I was familiar with, having experienced it in my own way, and it was no longer any of my business. But what goes on in his heart now, in the hours of the night when he stays awake to pray?

I unloaded the trunk, and as I put the boxes of files away for the next twenty years in a closet in my studio, I understood that I would never open them again. The account written at Bernard’s request, however, lay open on my table. I found its wooden Catholic jargon truly mysterious. In the logical sense, undecidable.

He is not putting on an act, of that I’m sure, but isn’t the liar inside him putting one over on him? When Christ enters his heart, when the certainty of being loved in spite of everything makes tears of joy run down his cheeks, isn’t it the adversary deceiving him yet again?

I thought that writing this story could only be either a crime or a prayer.

Paris, January 1999