Yet if you put your work, your ordinary activities, your everyday agitation, on hold, and devote yourself solely to thinking, things go very differently. Soon things start rising up, in heavy, dark waves. At night, your dreams fall apart, unfurl, and proliferate, and when you wake they leave a fine, bitter film at the back of your mind, which takes a long time to dissolve. Don’t misunderstand me: I am not talking about remorse, or about guilt. These too exist, no doubt, I don’t want to deny it, but I think things are far more complex than that. Even a man who has never gone to war, who has never had to kill, will experience what I’m talking about. All the meanness, the cowardice, the lies, the pettiness that afflict everyone will come back to haunt him. No wonder men have invented work, alcohol, meaningless chatter. No wonder televisions sell so well. I quickly cut short my leave of absence, it was better that way. I had plenty of time left to scribble, at lunchtime or in the evening after the secretaries had gone home.

A brief interruption while I go and vomit, then I’ll continue. That’s another one of my numerous little afflictions: from time to time my meals come back up, sometimes right away, sometimes later on, for no reason, just like that. It’s an old problem, I’ve had it since the war, since the fall of 1941, to be precise, it started in the Ukraine, in Kiev I think, or maybe Zhitomir. I’ll talk about that too probably. In any case, I have long since gotten used to it: I brush my teeth, down a little shot of alcohol, and continue what I was doing. Let’s get back to my memories. I bought myself a stack of copybooks, the large ones, quadrille-ruled, which I keep in a locked drawer at my office. Before, I used to jot my notes down on index cards, also quadrille-ruled; now I’ve decided to start all over and forge ahead. I’m not really sure why. Certainly not for the edification of my progeny. If at this very moment I were suddenly to keel over, from a heart attack, say, or a stroke, and my secretaries were to take the key and open this drawer, they’d have a shock, the poor things, and my wife too: the index cards alone would be more than enough. They’d have to burn every last scrap quickly to avoid a scandal. It would be all the same to me, I’d be dead. And in the end, even though I’m addressing you, it’s not for you that I am writing.

My office is a pleasant place to write, airy, sober, peaceful. White, almost bare walls, a glass cabinet for samples; and across from my desk a long bay window that looks out onto the factory floor. Despite the double-glazed glass, the incessant clatter of the Leavers looms resonates through the room. When I want to think, I leave my work table and go stand in front of the window; I gaze down at the looms lined up below, at the sure, precise movements of the workers, and let myself be lulled. Sometimes I go down and stroll among the machinery. The room is dark, the filthy windows are tinted blue, since lace is fragile and sensitive to light, and this bluish light soothes my mind. I like to lose myself for a while in the monotonous, syncopated clanking that fills the space, a metallic, obsessive two-step beat. The looms always impress me. They are made of cast iron, were once painted green, and each one weighs ten tons. Some of them are very old, they stopped being made a long time ago; I have the spare parts made to order; after the war, electricity replaced steam power, but the looms themselves haven’t been touched. I never go near them, to keep from getting dirty: all these moving parts have to be constantly lubricated, but oil, of course, would ruin the lace, so we use graphite, a fine black powder dusted over the moving parts of the mechanism with an old sock, swung like a censer. It turns the lace black and coats the walls, as well as the floor, the machinery, and the men who supervise it. Even though I don’t often get my hands dirty, I know these great machines well. The first looms were British and a jealously guarded secret; a few were smuggled into France just after the Napoleonic Wars by workers fleeing the excise duties. They were modified to produce lace by a man from Lyon, Jacquard, who added a series of perforated strips to them to determine the pattern. Cylinders down below feed the thread upward; in the heart of the loom, five thousand bobbins, the soul, are slotted into a carriage; then a catch-bar (the English term has been carried over into French) grips and sets this carriage swinging front to back, with a loud hypnotic clapping. The threads are guided laterally, according to a complex choreography encoded within some five or six hundred Jacquard strips, by copper combs sealed onto lead, and are thus woven into knots; a swan’s neck carries the rake up; finally the lace appears, gossamer-like, disturbingly beautiful under its coat of graphite, slowly rolled onto a drum, fixed at the top of the Leavers.

Work in the factory runs according to a strict principle of sexual segregation: the men design the patterns, punch the strips, set up the chains, supervise the looms, and manage the supply racks surrounding them; their wives and daughters, even today, remain bobbin threaders, bleachers, menders, taperers, and folders. Tradition runs strong. Our tulle makers, up here, are something of a proletarian aristocracy. Apprenticeship is lengthy, the work delicate; a century ago, the weavers of Calais came to work in buggies, wearing top hats, and called the boss by his first name. Times have changed. The war ruined the industry, despite a few looms kept working for Germany. Everything had to be started again from scratch; whereas before the war four thousand looms used to operate, today, in the North, only about three hundred are left. Still, during the postwar boom, tulle makers were able to buy themselves cars before many a banker did. But my workers don’t call me by my first name. I don’t think my workers like me. That’s all right, I’m not asking them to like me. And I don’t like them either. We work together, that’s all. When an employee is conscientious and hardworking, when the lace that comes out of his loom doesn’t need much mending, I give him a bonus at the end of the year; if someone comes to work late, or drunk, I punish him. On that basis we understand each other.

You might be wondering how I ended up in the lace business. Nothing particularly marked me out for commerce, far from it. I studied law and political science and received my doctorate in law; in Germany the letters Dr. jur. form a legal part of my name. Yet it must be said that circumstances played a part in preventing me from making use of my diploma after 1945. If you really want to know, nothing truly marked me out for law, either: as a young man I wanted above all else to study literature and philosophy. But I was prevented from doing so; another sad episode in my family romance—maybe I’ll come back to it at some point. But I have to admit that when it comes to lace, law is more useful than literature. Here’s what happened, more or less. When it was all over, I managed to slip into France, to pass myself off as a Frenchman; in all the chaos, it wasn’t too difficult. I returned along with the deported, we weren’t asked many questions. It must be said that I speak perfect French; that’s because I had a French mother; I spent ten years of my childhood in France, I went through middle school there, then high school, preparatory classes, and even two years of university, at the ELSP, and since I grew up in the South I could even muster a Provençal drawl, but in any case no one was paying attention, it was a real mess, we were greeted at the Gare d’Orsay with some soup, some insults too—I should say that I hadn’t tried to pass myself off as a camp inmate, but as an STO worker, and the Gaullists didn’t like those too much, so they roughed me up a little, the other poor bastards too, and then they let us go, no Hotel Lutetia for us, but freedom at least. I didn’t stay in Paris, I knew too many people there, and not the right ones, so I wandered around the countryside and lived off odd jobs here and there. And then things calmed down. They soon stopped shooting people, and then they didn’t even bother putting them in jail anymore. So I started looking around and I ended up finding a man I knew. He had done well for himself, he’d managed the change of regime without a hitch; being a man of foresight, he had taken care not to advertise his services on our behalf. At first he refused to meet me, but when he finally realized who I was, he saw that he didn’t really have a choice. I can’t say it was a pleasant conversation: there was a distinct feeling of embarrassment to it, of constraint. But he clearly understood that we had a common interest: I, to find a job, and he, to keep his. He had a cousin up North, a former broker who was trying to start up his own business with three Leavers bought off a bankrupt widow. This man hired me as a salesman; I had to travel and find customers for his lace. This work exasperated me; I finally managed to convince him that I could be more useful to him in management. I did indeed have quite a bit of experience in that field, even though I could make even less use of it than of my doctorate. The business grew, especially in the 1950s, when I renewed my contacts in the Federal Republic and succeeded in opening up the German market for us. I could easily have gone back to Germany then: many of my former colleagues were living there peacefully; some of them had served a little time, others hadn’t even been charged. Given my record, I could have resumed my name, my doctorate, claimed my veteran’s and disability benefits, no one would have noticed. I would easily have found work. But, I said to myself, what would be the point? Law didn’t really interest me any more than business, and I had actually come to acquire a taste for lace, that ravishing, harmonious creation of man. When we had bought up enough looms, my boss decided to set up a second factory, and he put me in charge of it. I have kept this position ever since, and will until I retire. In the meantime, I got married, rather reluctantly I must admit, but up here, in the North, it seemed necessary, a way of fitting in and consolidating my situation. I picked a woman from a good family; she was relatively good-looking, a proper sort of woman, and I immediately got her with child, to keep her busy. Unfortunately she had twins, it must run in the family, mine, I mean—one brat would have been more than enough for me. My boss lent me some money, I bought a comfortable house, not too far from the sea. And that is how the bourgeoisie finally made me one of its own. It was better that way. After everything that had happened, I craved calm and predictability above all. The course of my life had crushed the bones of my childhood dreams, and my anguish had slowly smoldered out, from one end of German Europe to the other. I emerged from the war an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame, like sand crunching in your teeth. So a life in keeping with all the social conventions suited me fine: a comfortable strait-jacket, even if I often contemplate it with irony, and occasionally with contempt. At this rate, I hope someday to reach Jerome Nadal’s state of grace, and to strive for nothing except to strive for nothing. Now I’m becoming bookish; another one of my failings. Alas for saintliness, I am not yet fully free of desire. I still honor my wife from time to time, conscientiously, with little pleasure but also without excessive disgust, so as to guarantee the peace of my household. And every now and then, during business trips, I go to the trouble of renewing some of my old habits—but mainly as a matter of hygiene, so to speak. All that has lost much of its interest for me. The body of a beautiful boy, a sculpture by Michelangelo, it’s all the same: they no longer take my breath away. It’s like after a long illness, when food has lost all taste; what then does it matter if you eat chicken or beef? You have to feed yourself, that’s all. To tell the truth, there isn’t much that has kept an interest for me. Literature, possibly, but even then, I’m not sure if that’s not just out of habit. Maybe that’s why I am writing these memoirs: to get my blood flowing, to see if I can still feel anything, if I can still suffer a little. A curious exercise indeed.