A Meteorite

The awareness of a failure comes late to every author, in the same way as a military defeat: certain units continue the battle, kernels of resistance are still warding off the thrust of the enemy, and a few scattered soldiers even have the illusion that they are moving forward … but the defeat is already there and the writer, since we’re speaking about him, finally notices it; the calls from the press attaché have stopped, his book has disappeared from the display stands, and he feels somewhat laughable for still having the desire to defend his ideas.

The situation was familiar to me, so I tried to defuse it as much as I could for Jean-Claude. In the weeks that followed June 18—as our waiting was becoming more and more pointless—I often talked to him about the caprices of literary recognition. Like an emergency survival ration, every writer holds onto these kinds of anecdotes because they help him tolerate the incomprehension, the defamations, the failure. Yes, Proust was refused by Gallimard and published at his own expense. And before him there had been Nietzsche and his forty self-published copies of Zarathustra. Schopenhauer, overwhelmed by his rejected manuscripts. Chekhov and his Mouette (Seagull), which, in the beginning, never “took off” from the stage because of skeptical audiences. Gide’s famous calculation: in twenty-five years, his Nourritures terrestres (Fruits of the Earth) achieved a print run of six hundred copies; in other words, twenty-five new readers per year! Verlaine did better: one of his poetry collections sold eight copies.

These testaments to the blindness of one’s contemporaries did indeed make the old man smile. After all, hadn’t Flaubert, Turgenev, and a few others created a “circle of the booed” which only allowed writers reviled by public opinion to become members? Each candidate had to provide formal proof of having been “booed” by a critic.

Jean-Claude was not fooled by these literary parallels, for his book, while not booed, had elicited a reaction that was much more difficult to parry: indifference.

He never showed himself to be a poor loser, placed no blame, and even expressed his remorse: “I made Charles Dupêchez spend a lot of money! I feel terrible.” I reassured him; since he had never touched any advance, he was not really an author who would destroy the publishing house. And besides, just wait, maybe in July or August the book will have a rebound!

A delayed spike in interest was wishful thinking, we knew: as if those vacationers liquefied by heat were supposed to read Lieutenant Schreiber’s memories. The publishers had already prepared for them the usual summer grazing material made from fat books whose pages would be covered with sunscreen fingerprints.

Jean-Claude pretended to believe in a hypothetical resurgence, most of all so as not to contradict my encouragements. He sometimes even exchanged roles with me: “Oh, you know, the book is out there, that’s what’s most important. If in ten years someone wants to study that period in history, they will always be able to find two or three interesting things in the story I’m telling.”

From then on, each time I went to his home, his apartment seemed to have been emptied of a presence. Nothing had moved, though: the furniture was the same, there was still the large amphora on its pedestal, and the German daggers, those war trophies, were still attached to the walls. There were the photos in which, as though I were among close friends, I recognized every gaze, every gesture, and the light of their distant days. And that snapshot where the man whose name Jean-Claude could not manage to remember is standing in a group of soldiers. On a small side table near the window, a sliver of the porcelain figurine, that decapitated little nativity figure.

One evening Jean-Claude stood up, went over, and squeezed the mutilated relic stained with dirt. Then he examined it, as if the fragment’s presence seemed out of the ordinary to him, too. I held my breath, afraid to ask a question that would disturb the shadow of the past I could see in his eyes.

“It was back in Germany, in the Black Forest. Our offensive was preparing itself and Captain de la Lance had given me the honor of commanding the head of the platoon. I was going to attack in the tank that would open the march! I was crazy with joy … and then, paf, a radio call comes in: I’ve been summoned by Colonel de Beaufort. I try to explain that we’re fifteen minutes away from attacking but … an order is an order. So I leave, and Lieutenant Mauclerc was to command the head tank in my place.”

He told the story I already knew, but this time he was holding the broken figurine in his hand. As if, with this touching, he had wanted to attest to the truth of what he was saying.

The sliver of porcelain resembled a speck of cosmic dust that, minute but undeniable, demonstrated the existence of a galaxy that no one wanted to believe was real.