Hygiene and the Assassin by Amélie Nothomb

better of anyone who’s the lackey of bad faith—all of you, that is. And there is one exercise that really brings me extreme pleasure: humiliating pretentious airhead females like yourself.”
    â€œAs for me, my preferred entertainment is to take the wind out of obese self-satisfied airbags.”
    â€œWhat you just said is so typical of your day and age. Does this mean I’m dealing with someone who churns out slogans?”
    â€œHave no fear, Monsieur Tach: you too, with your reactionary spitefulness and everyday racism, are typical of our day and age. You take pride in thinking you’re an anachronism, don’t you? Well you’re not, not at all. Historically, you’re not even original: every generation has had its prophet of doom, its sacred monster whose glory was founded solely on the terror he inspired in naïve souls. Do I need to tell you how fragile that glory is, and that you will be forgotten? You are right to say that no one reads you. Nowadays, your crassness and insults may remind people that you exist; but once your shouts fall silent, no one will even remember you because no one will read you. And so much the better.”
    â€œWhat a delicious little morsel of eloquence, Mademoiselle! Where the devil were you educated? This mixture of pathetic aggression and Ciceronian flights of oratory—all carefully nuanced, so to speak, with little touches of Hegel and amateur sociology: what a masterpiece.”
    â€œSir, may I remind you that, wager or no wager, I am still a journalist. Everything you say is being recorded.”
    â€œFantastic. We are enriching Western thought with its most brilliant dialectic.”
    â€œDialectic, isn’t that the word everyone drags out when they’ve run out of anything else to say?”
    â€œWell put. The joker of the drawing room.”
    â€œAm I to conclude that you’ve already run out of things to tell me?”
    â€œI never have had anything to tell you, Mademoiselle. When you are as bored as I am and have been for twenty-four years, you have nothing to say to people. If you nevertheless aspire to their company, it is in the hopes of being entertained, if not by their wit, at least by their stupidity. So do something, entertain me.”
    â€œI don’t know if I’ll manage to entertain you, but I am certain I shall manage to disturb you.”
    â€œDisturb me! My poor child, my respect for you has just dropped below zero. Disturb me! Well, you could have come out with something worse, you could have said disturb, full stop. What era does that intransitive use of the verb disturb date from? May 1968? It wouldn’t surprise me, it reeks of little Molotov cocktails and police barricades, a nice little revolution for well-fed students, and bright little futures for young men of means. Wanting to ‘disturb’ means wanting to ‘re-examine everything,’ to ‘raise consciousness’—and no pronouns, please, it sounds so much more intelligent, and then it’s very practical because, basically, it enables you not to specify what you would be incapable of specifying in the first place.”
    â€œWhy are you wasting your time telling me this? I already used a pronoun: I said ‘disturb
you
.’”
    â€œYeah. That’s not much better. My poor child, you would have made a perfect social worker. The funniest thing is the foolish pride of people who declare that they want to disturb: they speak to you with all the smugness of budding messiahs. Because they’re on a mission, aren’t they! Well then, go ahead, raise my consciousness, disturb me, let’s have a good laugh.”
    â€œIt’s extraordinary, I’m entertaining you already.”
    â€œI’m a good audience. Go on.”
    â€œAll right. Just now you said that you had nothing to tell me. It’s not reciprocal.”
    â€œLet me guess. What might a little female like you have to say