sort of pedestal and people have begun worshipping me, which is to say licking my feet. I have barely become accustomed to this ritual when I realize they’re actually trying to assassinate me by knocking me from the top of my pedestal. I end up falling, but I manage to hang on to the bumps on the wall (which is still dangerously slick) and I land uninjured on the floor. From way up high, people are bombarding me with enormous boulders, but none hits me.
I have fled into the high grass; I have met up with a horde and we have wandered for several years, several centuries, following animal tracks (maybe I knew how to find the passage about animals in the book?).
After long centuries of wandering, we come back to the regions we fled. On the steppe, a city has been built. It is called Texas. We see firearms for the first time …
Texas is a new city, made of wooden houses. Mostly saloons. The town hall, where a meeting is about to be held, is in a back room between two saloons. This arrangement is rather surprising at first, but you realize quickly that it’s actually quite clever.
No. 106
February 1972
La Bibliothèque nationale
I’m working in the large reading room at the library. Alain G. comes and sits down at a table next to mine.
No. 107
February 1972
At the Kuntz restaurant
I am at the Kuntz restaurant. I call over an old man with white hair (a sort of maître d’) and a young waiter who—blocking the passage of another, older waiter who has to go to miraculous lengths not to spill anything while serving the neighboring table—brings me a text that I finally identify as a pastiche of “la fabrique du pré” (not exactly a pastiche, nor a copy, more of a text for which “la fabrique du pré” is the source text).
Next to us, there is a box of “After Eight” chocolates.
No. 108
February 1972
The play
… and perhaps the play has already begun and, after a little while, I realize (or remember) that I’ve gone to the suburbs to see it, that I know the actors and the director personally and that, to put it on, the producers might have found money to borrow—maybe 20,000 francs—in Dampierre.
The main character is a Byron who wants to be a Malatesta, which is to say a warlord who crushes his vassals under the pretext of bravery.
In one act, I am an actor: I am to shut off all the lights of a large house and I know that at the death of the lights something terrible will happen. This expectation triggers a light panic in me. But nothing happens.
Later, I’m laid out on a bed with a woman whom I eventually (surprised and stunned as though I had long dreamed of this impossible encounter) recognize as C. We are both overcome with an indescribable pleasure (even the word“ecstasy” gives only a distant, impoverished sense of it). I am on my back. C. mounts me, but she makes a quick movement that jolts me out of her. She begins to moan softly, which quickly excites me again. She kneels and, while she props herself up from behind, I enter her again. Coupled this way, we begin to creep on the carpet.
In the next room there are two men (one of them is F.). They see us, but it doesn’t bother us. It’s part of the play.
The next act takes place in the country. The heroine has become an ugly old woman. She is raising a bull, which we see escaping some kind of ditch. It doesn’t seem real. One character remarks that it would take only a slightly wild cat to take it down.
I have a long discussion with the man seated next to me, which ends up irritating me. He thinks the show is good because it demonstrates that the lord is a bastard, and this is what theater must demonstrate until there are no lords left. I don’t know how to respond. I think the show is awful, but that doesn’t mean the man next to me isn’t right, which makes me more and more uncomfortable.
Between each act, the characters come on stage, wearing outlandish hats. I remark to P. that, the larger the hats, the
I have fled into the high grass; I have met up with a horde and we have wandered for several years, several centuries, following animal tracks (maybe I knew how to find the passage about animals in the book?).
After long centuries of wandering, we come back to the regions we fled. On the steppe, a city has been built. It is called Texas. We see firearms for the first time …
Texas is a new city, made of wooden houses. Mostly saloons. The town hall, where a meeting is about to be held, is in a back room between two saloons. This arrangement is rather surprising at first, but you realize quickly that it’s actually quite clever.
No. 106
February 1972
La Bibliothèque nationale
I’m working in the large reading room at the library. Alain G. comes and sits down at a table next to mine.
No. 107
February 1972
At the Kuntz restaurant
I am at the Kuntz restaurant. I call over an old man with white hair (a sort of maître d’) and a young waiter who—blocking the passage of another, older waiter who has to go to miraculous lengths not to spill anything while serving the neighboring table—brings me a text that I finally identify as a pastiche of “la fabrique du pré” (not exactly a pastiche, nor a copy, more of a text for which “la fabrique du pré” is the source text).
Next to us, there is a box of “After Eight” chocolates.
No. 108
February 1972
The play
… and perhaps the play has already begun and, after a little while, I realize (or remember) that I’ve gone to the suburbs to see it, that I know the actors and the director personally and that, to put it on, the producers might have found money to borrow—maybe 20,000 francs—in Dampierre.
The main character is a Byron who wants to be a Malatesta, which is to say a warlord who crushes his vassals under the pretext of bravery.
In one act, I am an actor: I am to shut off all the lights of a large house and I know that at the death of the lights something terrible will happen. This expectation triggers a light panic in me. But nothing happens.
Later, I’m laid out on a bed with a woman whom I eventually (surprised and stunned as though I had long dreamed of this impossible encounter) recognize as C. We are both overcome with an indescribable pleasure (even the word“ecstasy” gives only a distant, impoverished sense of it). I am on my back. C. mounts me, but she makes a quick movement that jolts me out of her. She begins to moan softly, which quickly excites me again. She kneels and, while she props herself up from behind, I enter her again. Coupled this way, we begin to creep on the carpet.
In the next room there are two men (one of them is F.). They see us, but it doesn’t bother us. It’s part of the play.
The next act takes place in the country. The heroine has become an ugly old woman. She is raising a bull, which we see escaping some kind of ditch. It doesn’t seem real. One character remarks that it would take only a slightly wild cat to take it down.
I have a long discussion with the man seated next to me, which ends up irritating me. He thinks the show is good because it demonstrates that the lord is a bastard, and this is what theater must demonstrate until there are no lords left. I don’t know how to respond. I think the show is awful, but that doesn’t mean the man next to me isn’t right, which makes me more and more uncomfortable.
Between each act, the characters come on stage, wearing outlandish hats. I remark to P. that, the larger the hats, the
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