Holiday in a Coma & Love Lasts Three Years: two novels by Frédéric Beigbeder

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Holiday in a Coma & Love Lasts Three Years: two novels by Frédéric Beigbeder
Frédéric Beigbeder

Frank Wynne

One night in a Parisian nightclub and the aftermath of a marriage provide the stories for these two novels by Frederic Beigbeder, award-winning author of ‘Windows on the World’.In ‘Holiday in a Coma’, Marc Marronnier, a shallow, superficial, rich Parisian who works as an advertising executive, is invited by his old friend to the opening of a new nightclub called The Shitter (a satirical take on the famous Paris nightclub Les Bains Douche). Taking place over a single unforgettable night, the novel documents everything from the pit-bull bouncer on the door, to the drugs, cocktails and wannabes who frequent the club, and Marc’s attempts to seduce a catwalk model – any one will do. A catalogue of degeneracy, drugs, sex and decibels, ‘Holiday in a Coma’ is written with a fury and passion that reflect the author's own relationship with a world and he both loves and loathes.In ‘Love Lasts Three Years’, Marc Marronnier has just been divorced and – shallow opportunist that he is – has decided to write a book about it. He has a theory that love lasts no more than three years, and here – recounting the highs and lows of his marriage and taking us through brash nightclubs, vainglorious offices and soulless designer apartments – he brings to bear the theoretical and the empirical to prove his point. Both frightening and funny, the book reads like a diary: sometimes tender and real, sometimes fantastical and cruel, peppered with Beigbeder’s acerbic one-liners and trademark wit.

FRÉDÉRIC BEIGBEDER

HOLIDAY IN A COMA and LOVE LASTS THREE YEARS

Two Novels

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY FRANK WYNNE

Contents

Title Page (#u46530412-b581-5f1f-ad8e-e5540b6e36f6)Holiday In A Coma (#uaeacae19-63fb-5643-9470-4808fd39c058)Dedication (#u8db76efc-f08a-5142-afb2-80ff09b0a1f6)Epigraph (#u52c5c563-3694-55eb-983c-68a85bdcb4ce)7.00 P.M. (#u4a80818a-7daf-5fa7-a4fa-3209e0691056)8.00 P.M. (#ue8400ac8-29af-5669-b187-fde2c3686bd2)9.00 P.M. (#u3eb82da6-88da-542a-ab29-840d25b19884)10.00 P.M. (#u651a2cc1-76e0-5ac0-b0c3-89d57419d1a9)11.00 P.M. (#ucee46b82-0d9c-512d-898b-f399d5479dfd)12.00 A.M. (#uae874437-f5c4-54fb-8aec-f949dda92913)1.00 A.M. (#u1b4b7f53-14aa-574c-974c-4defb4b1ae70)2.00 A.M. Interval (#uc789a183-6296-5647-aef0-2d90793d1fc9)3.00 A.M. (#u658825fa-506d-5062-a5c8-aab9bc3a3a44)4.00 A.M. (#u2bb5433a-2069-5da3-bce9-c185e513ce8b)5.00 A.M. (#u19be715a-9ea1-5d7f-a724-277e373e9f22)6.00 A.M. (#u7a325779-c240-53b4-bf99-f5dfcc32ef5d)7.00 A.M. (#uff6a90e7-e0a3-5167-9b5e-22b7ab5c983f)Love Lasts Three Years (#u6c14bf55-b2e4-5e57-9a79-979f583ffd8f)Dedication (#u0b46fa74-b2c7-5ba2-a4dd-173342fcff57)Epigraph (#u0d01a07b-cf50-5af5-8acf-fc08d3ab2fe6)Chapter I: Connected Vessels (#u4292a1ad-a407-5c4a-9e2c-225e544822ee)Chapter I: Endless Love (#u6d1b7f57-5c98-5116-900f-2d838aaf343d)Chapter II: The Gay Divorcé (#u63c387bd-3895-594a-9b40-49ca96711a39)Chapter III: On The Beach (#u70e277d7-2e2b-5fa8-9aa4-76482e1e9d1e)Chapter IV: The Saddest Human Being I Ever Met (#uf40c653c-0019-5c8d-84ab-ade4ff8f3a20)Chapter V: Best Before Date (#u8604e773-bbe6-52ec-83ef-51601aa9d1dc)Chapter VI: The End Of The Road (#u98d602ae-abb1-5160-8f05-2f99f79ec36b)Chapter VII: Some Tips For Surviving Heartbreak (#uab1d812a-a83f-5921-960e-e2d2f475ea53)Chapter VIII: For Those Who Missed The Beginning (#ue76cdfdb-8bdb-52f8-af11-b4740cc95825)Chapter IX: Rain Over Copacabana (#uadd38d3e-66c5-5124-863b-794606c414e8)Chapter X: Palais De Justice, Paris (#ue18cb509-8e4d-55cd-88a4-2f3f369caab7)Chapter XI: The Human Man At Thirty (#ub9e4c5d5-4c5f-51ed-b813-cd8562e57450)Chapter XII: Lost Illusions (#ub068bc0b-0ff6-5ccc-97bb-be842a01fbe8)Chapter XIII: Flirting With Disaster (#uca4b9fbf-f075-5443-a52f-8fef918059d6)Chapter XIV: Provisional Resurrection (#u94c834b2-61e8-57c8-b4d4-09b58a158536)Chapter XV: The Wailing Wall (#u9549b574-da20-5c2c-b322-6f034353cfca)Chapter XVI: Would You Like To Be My Harem? (#u94e8cfac-dbdc-5711-af2b-fec63b5d68d6)Chapter XVII: The Horns Of A Dilemma (#uffaf5186-e552-5ec6-9837-575b98d238fb)Chapter XVIII: Highs And Lows (#u3cb2d2eb-0bb4-5be5-a996-b2917ddac277)Chapter XIX: Flee Happiness Lest It Run Away (#u567da3aa-ab44-5266-86ab-4ff206ea9d32)Chapter XX: Things Fall Apart (#uf6b89ab3-39a1-5149-9b94-6216d5b51b9c)Chapter XXI: Question Marks (#u8aacafef-6a95-5974-8385-4bbbbb0596ee)Chapter XXII: Reunion (#ua6b239e6-725d-51f1-a41c-5328e5a509f8)Chapter XXIII: Leave (#u1b0c872f-6084-5569-a85f-2a5f73dc895f)Chapter XXIV: The Beauty Of Beginnings (#u3324c223-8c0d-55c0-aa25-f6b8b3b38e83)Chapter XXV: Thank You, Wolfgang (#u29e3c94a-42a6-512e-b154-b0542950ce56)Chapter XXVI: Hot Sex Chapter (#uef28277c-fb0b-5c3c-862c-eb339d1802f9)Chapter XXVII: Letters (I) (#u1a74fe8c-a827-5a70-947f-fe685b6401ae)Chapter XXVIII: The Depths Of Despair (#ub4c9f00b-3ce2-5484-aca8-539d17715404)Chapter XXIX: The South Bitch Diet (#u3e99bbcc-b647-53a3-89f0-decfd03e0be8)Chapter XXX: Letters (Ii) (#u2f9cc328-bcb3-5d4d-af64-fb1cd34dc0e4)Chapter XXXI: L’amant (#u109b5d51-b698-5d47-acec-541b07e64f7d)Chapter XXXII: Dunno (#u64ee0050-8f62-5da8-8e51-7df83fd46896)Chapter XXXIII: The Impossible Decrystallisation (#u11700213-2dba-5d9f-a4d5-2c051ab79666)Chapter XXXIV: The Theory Of Eternal Return (#uc878d7cb-4a12-545b-b92f-f5333cc37b5f)Chapter XXXV: Tender Is The Night (#u17efb858-4b6c-5ac9-afe4-d7212bc01db4)Chapter XXXVI: Freelance (#u33a951c3-9ba7-5fb5-b305-444d7b381225)Chapter XXXVII: The Romantic Cynic (#uf66f97e8-527b-5c6f-80ce-3a5aecd20631)Chapter XXXVIII: Letters (Iii) (#u67c10673-b965-5ecd-b612-b589b1fed6ce)Chapter XXXIX: Still Falling (#u362c057c-16ab-5784-8806-f2a2e181fde9)Chapter XL: Conversation In A Palace (#ufe50680f-0174-595f-a7d0-40a4e0dca99b)Chapter XLI: Conjectures (#ued6775eb-9974-59a1-8cac-debde5ecb2d5)Chapter XLII: The Cunning Plan (#u3daf0029-5c01-5199-a046-7fdbe0bcd9bb)Chapter XLIII: A Cheap Trick (#u2bd578ac-3dab-5fe3-9022-b47946d8fbe6)Chapter XLIV: Letters (Iv) (#uaffc2bb1-bb02-58f1-abb6-013bf6323c9a)Chapter XLV: So (#ude2cad69-211e-5c6b-9748-2e80e1b588e1)Chapter II: Three Years Later In Formentera (#ud43941ee-d587-549f-b6a3-013eb7149ae6)Chapter I: D-Day –7 (#u09dd6e80-908d-51ba-b6ff-89859f747766)Chapter II: D-Day –6 (#ua5dd402f-2302-55d4-9189-8ea7ee1a62aa)Chapter III: D-Day –5 (#u7664dbd2-a14c-5328-ac3e-712c49fbe643)Chapter IV: D-Day –4 (#ub4c1681e-25b5-58e3-a28d-7c0f093b0106)Chapter V: D-Day –3 (#uccfb1f32-e981-5e23-a2f3-1f7fac98925c)Chapter VI: D-Day –2 (#u9727d0cc-b432-560f-98d1-3cec428a543a)Chapter VII: D-Day –1 (#u1a87a8ac-bd56-5833-9d0b-e7e0043dddfd)Chapter VIII: D-Day (#ubdb7c911-287b-508d-8dfe-384fe6de1744)Also By Frédéric Beigbeder (#ueeae009e-97c1-542f-bc81-fc3ea72890a9)Copyright (#ud81c0767-c084-52cb-9446-b5c82773c0bd)About the Publisher (#uc6fc7e43-a0eb-5516-a692-5856e68c30fd)

HOLIDAY IN A COMA (#ud27d4736-7f82-5863-adb5-1e6ecc2c0e86)

For Diane Β.,I fell,Head over heels.

Let’s dance

The last dance

Tonight

Yes it’s my last chance

For romance

Tonight.

Donna Summer, ‘Last Dance’

Casablanca Records

Second novels are written in a secondary frame of mind.

Me

7.00 P.M. (#ud27d4736-7f82-5863-adb5-1e6ecc2c0e86)

He combs his hair, puts on or takes off his jacket or his scarf as one might toss a flower into a grave which is still open’

Jean-Jacques Schuhl

Rose Poussière

Marc Marronnier is twenty-seven years old, he has a beautiful apartment, a cool job and still he doesn’t kill himself. Go figure.

His doorbell rings. Marc Marronnier loves a lot of things: the photos in the American edition of Harper’s Bazaar, Irish whiskey straight up, the avenue Vélasquez, a song (‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys), chocolate éclairs, a book (les Deux Veuves by Dominique Noguez) and belated ejaculation. Doorbells ringing is not one of those things.

‘Monsieur Marronnier?’ asks a bell-boy in a motorcycle helmet.

‘In the flesh.’

‘This is for you.’

The bell-boy in the motorcycle helmet (he looks like ‘Spirou and the Golden Bowl’) hands him an envelope approximately three feet square, jiggling impatiently as though he urgently needs a piss. Marc takes the envelope and gives him a ten-franc piece to disappear out of his life. Marc Marronnier doesn’t need a bell-boy in a motorcycle helmet in his life.

Inside the envelope, he is utterly unsurprised to discover the following:

A NIGHT IN SHIT

* * * * * * * * *

Grand Opening Night

Place de la Madeleine

Paris

He is, however, pretty surprised to find, stapled to the invitation:

See you tonight, you old queerJoss DumoulinDJ

JOSS DUMOULIN? Marc was sure he was living in permanent exile in Japan. Or dead.

But dead men don’t host club nights.

And so Marc Marronnier brushes his fingers through his hair, a gesture that indicates a certain inner contentment. It has to be said, he’s been waiting a long time for ‘a night in Shit’. Every day for the past year he’s walked past the construction site for the new club, ‘the biggest nightclub in Paris’. And every time he passes, he thinks, on opening night, there are going to be a truckload of honeys.

Marc Marronnier aims to please. This is probably why he wears glasses. When they’re perched on his nose, his colleagues think he looks like William Hurt, only uglier. (NB His myopia dates from his secondary school days at Louis-le-Grand, his scoliosis from his days studying at Sciences Po.)

It’s official: Marc Marronnier is going to have sexual relations tonight, whatever happens. He may even do the deed with more than one person, who knows? He has packed six condoms, for he is an ambitious young man.

Marc Marronnier senses he is going to die, in forty years or so. When he’s quite finished getting on our nerves.

Society scoundrel, armchair rebel, photo-opportunity mercenary, disgraceful bourgeois, his life consists of listening to messages on his answering machine and leaving them on other answering machines. All the while watching thirty channels simultaneously using picture-in-picture on cable TV. He sometimes forgets to eat for several days.

On the day he was born, he was already a has-been. There are countries where one dies at a ripe old age, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, you are born at an old age. Blasé before he had lived a day, he now cultivates his failures. For example, he boasts about writing slim volumes of barely a hundred pages with print runs of less than 3,000. ‘Since literature is dead, I make do with writing for my friends,’ he eructates at formal dinners, knocking back the dregs from the glasses of the girls sitting next to him. It is important that Neuilly-sur-Seine not give up hope.

A nightlife correspondent, copywriter–editor, literary journalist: Marc cannot commit to anything. He refuses to choose one life over another. These days, he says, ‘everyone is insane, the only choice left is between schizophrenia and paranoia: we are either many in one or one against all’. And yet, like all chameleons (Fregoli, Zelig, Thierry Le Luron), if there is one thing he hates, it is being alone. This is why there are multiple Marc Marronniers.

Delphine Seyrig passed away in the late morning, it is now 7 p.m. Marc has taken off his glasses to brush his teeth. I’ve just told you he is unstable by nature.

Is Marc Marronnier happy? Well, he’s got nothing to complain about. He spends vast sums of money every month and has no children. That, surely, is happiness: having no problems. And yet, from time to time he feels something like worry in his belly. The annoying thing is that he is unable to determine what kind of worry. It is an Unidentified Anguish. It makes him cry watching dreadful movies. He is definitely missing something, but what? Thank God the feeling invariably wears off.

In the meantime, it will be very strange for him to see Joss Dumoulin again after all this time. Joss Dumoulin, dubbed ‘the million dollar DJ’ in last month’s Vanity Fair: an old friend who hit the big time. Marc is unsure if he is really happy about the fact that Joss has become so famous. He feels like a sprinter still at the starting-blocks, watching his best mate ascend the podium to howls of adulation from the crowd.

In a nutshell, Joss Dumoulin is master of the universe, since he practises the most important profession in the world in the greatest city in the world: he is the best DJ in Tokyo.

Is it really necessary to remind you how the DJs seized power? In a hedonistic society as superficial as ours, the citizens of the world are interested in only one thing: partying. (Sex and money being implicitly part and parcel of the whole: money facilitates partying which facilitates sex.) And DJs have complete control. Not content just with clubs, they spawn the rave culture and have people dancing in warehouses, car parks, building sites, any available patch of waste ground. They are the ones who killed off rock and roll, inventing first rap and then house. They lord it over the Top 40 by day and the clubs by night. It’s getting hard to avoid them.

DJs remix our lives. Nobody gives them a hard time about it: if you’re going to hand over power to someone, a DJ is at least as qualified as a movie star or an ex-lawyer. After all, to govern, all you need is a good ear, a little general knowledge and the ability to segue.

Being a DJ is a curious profession. Somewhere between priest and prostitute. You give everything you have to people who give nothing in return. You spin discs so that other people can dance, have it large, come on to the pretty girl in the skin-tight dress. Then you head home on your own with your records under your arm. Being a DJ is a dilemma. A DJ exists only through other people: he steals other people’s music to get other people to dance. He’s a mix of Robin Hood (steals from one to give to the other) and Cyrano de Bergerac (living his life by proxy). All in all, the most important profession of our time is enough to drive anyone mad.

Joss Dumoulin didn’t squander his youth at the Institut d’Études Politiques like Marc. At twenty, he headed straight for Japan with nothing in his luggage except the three Bs of success: Bone Idleness, Bullshit Artistry and Bigging It Up. Why Japan? Because, he used to say, ‘If you’re going to take a gap year somewhere, you might as well head for the richest country on earth. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.’

Of course, Joss’s gap year turned into a gap life. In no time flat he was the mascot of Nippon nightlife. His club nights at Juliana’s, it is said, were bangin’. It has to be said he arrived at just the right time: Tokyo was just discovering the delights of capitalist decadence. Government ministers were increasingly corrupt, foreigners increasingly numerous. Tokyo’s gilded youth was having a hard time spending all their parents’ money. All in all, Marc Marronnier took the wrong turn.

He went over for a visit once. He can confirm that Joss Dumoulin has only to walk into Gold and suddenly every guy in the place is snorting loudly or popping little bits of blotter. As for the girls, they turn themselves into geishas as he walks by. Marc has Polaroids in a drawer somewhere to prove it.

Joss Dumoulin has lived Marc Marronnier’s life for him. Pulled all the girls he doesn’t have the balls to talk to. Taken all the drugs he’s afraid to try. Joss is the polar opposite of Marc; maybe this is why they got on so well once upon a time.

Marc only drinks fizzy drinks: Coca-Cola in the morning, Berocca in the afternoon, vodka and tonic at night. He fills himself with bubbles all day long. As he puts down his glass of Alka-Seltzer (just this once), he thinks back to Tokyo bay and that fantastically Pacific ocean.

He remembers the night he spent at Love and Sex on the top floor of Gold where a dozen of Joss’s mates fucked some Chink girl as innocent as she was handcuffed. It was here, after he’d had his turn, that Marc was introduced to Joss’s wife. You learn something new every night.

Marc is horribly unlucky: his parents are in great shape. Every day, they fritter away a little more of his inheritance. Meanwhile, the Digital Sampler, a machine invented in the mid-eighties, has made Joss Dumoulin rich and famous. The sampler makes it possible to nick the best bits from any piece of music and recycle them to make ‘dance’ tracks. Thanks to this invention, DJs, who were previously little more than human jukeboxes, have become musicians in their own right. (It’s as if librarians were writing books or museum curators painting pictures.) Joss was quick on the uptake: suddenly, his productions flooded the Japanese club market and from there the world. All he need do is drag out whatever he likes from his record collection and serve it up to his nocturnal public. He watches their reactions, ditches anything that doesn’t make them dance, notes what works. He feels his way: there is no better focus group than a dance floor. This is how you become an inter-national star while your old friend goes on uselessly studying.

Commercial success wasn’t long in coming. It was Joss who first mixed birdsong with Mesopotamian choirs: the record was number one in thirty countries including Sri Lanka and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Then Joss launched bossa-soukouss over a melody stolen from the Goldberg Variations: a huge hit which made it onto the heavy rotation playlist of MTV Europe. Marc still laughs when he thinks about that summer when, thanks to Dumoulin’s bossa-soukouss video (sponsored by Orangina), everyone was doing the dance where you yank the girl’s breasts.

And so on and so on: Joss chalked up a fortune pretty quickly. Georges Guétary dressed in Jean-Paul Gaultier singing traditional Israeli chants? Joss produced that one: twenty-three weeks at number one in the French charts. Techno-gospel? Joss. That instrumental with Archie Shepp playing sax over a drum solo by Keith Moon (of course you remember – the one that made acid jazz seem gay)? That was Joss. The Sylvie Vartan–Johnny Rotten duet? Joss again. Right now (Marc read about it in the Vanity Fair article where Joss was photographed by Annie Leibovitz drowning in a sea of quarter-inch tape), he’s working on a mix featuring an Airbus A320 crashing and Petula Clark singing ‘Don’t Sleep in the Subway’, a garage version of the speeches of Maréchal Pétain and a one-off concert at Wembley Stadium featuring Luciano Pavarotti singing with AC/DC. He’s got his work cut out for him. His kleptomaniac imagination knows no bounds, to say nothing of his CD sales. Joss Dumoulin understands the age in which he lives: he only makes collages.

And here he is, Joss Dumoulin organising the grand opening of Shit, the club all of Paris has been waiting for. It’s hardly a revelation: Joss does one-nighters all over the world. And not just anywhere: at Club USA (New York), Pacha (Madrid), the Ministry of Sound (London), 90° (Berlin), the Baby’O (Acapulco), the Bash (Miami), the Roxy (Amsterdam), the Mau-Mau (Buenos Aires), Alien (Rome) and – obviously–Space (Ibiza). Different sets where the same people are squirming, depending on the season. Marc is a little bitter but decides to look on the bright side. After all, Joss will be able to introduce him to the prettiest girls at the gig. Or at least the one he doesn’t want for himself.

Marc has access to a network of informants: PR sluts and certified star-fuckers. They phone him to tell him that Shit really was built in an old public toilet. They’ve built a giant toilet on the place de la Madeleine. A six-feet-high pink bog roll serves as an awning above the entrance. But the main attraction, the thing that will completely revolutionise clubbing in Paris, is that they’ve built a submersible circular dance floor in the shape of a toilet seat, equipped with a giant flush mechanism which plunges the dancers into a huge whirlpool at some unspecified point during the evening. Marc also learns that, to maintain the element of surprise, the guests for the opening were deliberately not sent their invitations until the day of the opening, at the last possible minute. He thinks that most of the interesting people will somehow manage to wriggle out of their multiple prior engagements.

*

Although tonight he is spoiled for choice. Marc’s coffee table groans under the weight of possibilities: a performance at a gallery opening on the rue des Beaux-Arts (the painter is scheduled to cut off both hands at around 9 p.m.), a dinner at the Arc in honour of the half-brother of Lenny Kravitz’s bassist’s best friend, a fancy-dress ball in the old Renault factory at Issy-les-Moulineaux to launch a new perfume (Assembly Line by Chanel), a private concert by the hot new English band (The John Lennons) at La Cigale, a themed party at Denise’s on the ‘Heterosexual Lesbians as Leather Queens in Drag’ and a rave at the Élysée Palace. In spite of everything, Marc knows that all over the city, the question of the moment is: ‘Are you going to Shit tonight?’ (The uninitiated who misunderstands risks betraying not only his ignorance but a personal incontinence problem.)

Marc poses in front of the bathroom mirror. Tonight he’s going to kiss girls he hasn’t been introduced to. He’s going to sleep with people he’s never met, people he hasn’t previously had fifteen intimate dinners with.

He’s impressing nobody, especially not himself. Deep down, he knows he wants the same thing all his friends want: to fall in love again.

He grabs a white shirt and a navy blue tie with white polka dots, he shaves quickly, douses himself with eau de toilette, howls in pain and leaves the flat. He refuses to panic.

He thinks: ‘Mythify everything because everything is mythic. Things, places, dates, people are all potential legends, you just have to find the right myth. Everyone who lived in Paris in 1940 will eventually be a character in a Patrick Modiano novel. Anyone who set foot in a London pub in 1965 will have slept with Mick Jagger. When you get down to it, being a legend is easy: you just have to wait your turn. Carnaby Street, the Hamptons, Greenwich Village, le Lac d’Aiguebelette, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Goa, Guéthary, le Paradou, Mustique, Phuket: it doesn’t matter if you’re bored shitless at the time, and twenty years from now you can brag that you were there. Time is a sacrament. Sick and tired of your life? Hang in there and you’ll be a legend.’ Walking gives Marc some peculiar ideas.

The toughest problem is managing to be mythic and alive atthe same time. Joss Dumoulin might have pulled it off.

Does a living legend keep his hands in his pockets? Does he wear a cashmere scarf? Does he agree to spend ‘a night at Shit’?

Marc checks to make sure he has no signal on his mobile. No, not a single bar. There’s no need to worry, then. It’s perfectly normal that his phone isn’t ringing. Marc will be uncontactable for another six yards.

There was a time when he went out every night, and not just for professional reasons. Sometimes he’d run into a certain Jocelyn du Moulin (oh yes, that’s what he was called back in the day; the ‘du’ which indicates he’s part of the old French aristocracy is something he only dropped recently: now he’s pseudo-working class).

The weather is fine so Marc starts singing ‘Singing in the Rain’. It’s still better than humming ‘Le Lundi au Soleil’ when it’s raining (especially given that it’s Friday.)

Paris is a film set mock-up. Marc Marronnier wishes that it was all really made of pasteboard. He prefers the fake Pont Neuf, the one Leos Carax had built in the middle of nowhere, to the real one that Christo wrapped. He wishes that this whole city were deliberately fake instead of pretending to be real. It’s too beautiful to be real! He wishes the shadowy figures he can see behind the curtains were cardboard cut-outs moved by a system of electric pulleys. Unfortunately, the Seine is full of liquid water, the buildings are made of dressed stone and the passers-by he encounters are not paid extras. The special effects are elsewhere, better hidden.

Marc has been seeing fewer people recently. He’s selective. It’s something called ‘getting old’. He loathes it, even though it appears to be a commonplace phenomenon.

Tonight, he will pick up girls. Why isn’t he gay? It’s pretty surprising, given the decadent circles he hangs out in, his so-called creative work and his taste for provocation. But that’s just it: that’s where the shoe pinches. He thinks being gay nowadays is too conformist. It’s the easy way out. Besides, he loathes hairy people.

We might as well face facts: Marronnier is the sort of guy who wears polka-dot ties and picks up girls.

Once upon a time there was him and the rest of the world. Just a guy wandering down the boulevard Malesherbes. Desperately banal, i.e. unique. That’s him heading to the party of the year. Do you recognise him? He’s got nothing better to do. He’s an unforgivable optimist. (Though it must be said the pigs never pull him over and ask for his papers.) He heads towards the festivities with complete impunity. ‘The Festivity is what is waited for, what is expected.’ (Roland Barthes, Fragments of aLover’s Discourse.)

‘Shut the fuck up, you legendary stiff,’ grumbles Marronnier. ‘Wait long enough, you’ll ALWAYS get run over by a dry-cleaning van.’

A few steps later, Marc changes his mind. ‘Actually, Barthes is right. All I ever do is wait and I’m ashamed of it. At sixteen I wanted to take on the world, I wanted to be a rock star, or be a great writer, or be president of France, or die young. But here I am at twenty-seven, already resigned to my fate, rock is too complicated, cinema too elitist, great writers too dead, France too corrupt and nowadays I want to die as old as possible.’