I’d been waiting two or three minutes when a door opened to my left and in walked a teenage girl wearing low-waisted jeans and a Hello Kitty T-shirt, her long black hair loose over her shoulders. When she saw me, she shrieked, tried awkwardly to cover her face with her hands, and dashed back out of the room. At that very moment, Rediger appeared on the landing and came down the stairs to greet me. He had witnessed the incident, and shook my hand with a look of resignation.
‘That’s Aïcha, my new wife. She’ll be very embarrassed that you saw her without her veil.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘No, don’t apologise. It’s her fault. She should have asked whether there was a guest before she came into the front hall. She doesn’t know her way around the house yet, but she will.’
‘Yes, she looks very young.’
‘She just turned fifteen.’
I followed Rediger up the stairs and into a large study with a ceiling that must have been almost five metres high. One of the walls was entirely covered with bookshelves. At a glance I noticed lots of old editions, mainly nineteenth century. Two solid metal ladders, mounted on rollers, provided access to the higher shelves. On the other side of the room, potted plants hung from a dark wooden trellis that ran the length of the wall. Ivy, ferns and Virginia creeper cascaded from ceiling to floor, twining along the edges of various picture frames, some of which held hand-lettered verses from the Koran, others large, matted photos of galaxy clusters, supernovas and spiral nebulas. In one corner a massive Directoire desk stood at an angle to the room. Rediger led me to the opposite corner, where two worn armchairs, upholstered in red-and-green stripes, were placed around a low, copper-topped table.
‘I do have tea, if you like,’ he said, inviting me to sit. ‘Or perhaps a drink? I have whisky, port — well, I have everything. And an excellent Meursault.’
‘The Meursault, then,’ I said, but I was a little bit confused. I had some idea that Islam prohibited drinking alcohol, at least that’s what I’d heard. To be honest, it wasn’t a religion I knew much about.
He left the room, presumably to see about the wine. My armchair faced a high, old, lead-mullioned window overlooking the Roman arena. The view was really something, I think it was the first time I’d had such a complete view of the terraces. And yet after a few minutes I found myself perusing the bookshelves. They were impressive, too.
The two bottom shelves were full of bound photocopies. These were dissertations from various European universities. As I browsed the titles, my eye was drawn to a philosophy dissertation, presented at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, entitled ‘René Guénon: Reader of Nietszche’, by Robert Rediger. I was just pulling it from the shelf when Rediger came back into the room. I jumped, as if I’d been caught doing something wrong, and tried to slip it back in place. He walked over to me, smiling. ‘Don’t worry, there are no secrets here. And besides, why shouldn’t you be curious about the contents of a bookshelf? For a man like you, that’s almost a professional duty.’
Coming closer, he saw the title. ‘Ah, you’ve found my dissertation.’ He shook his head. ‘They gave me my doctorate, but it wasn’t much of a thesis. Nothing like yours, anyway. My reading was, as they say, selective. In retrospect, I don’t think Guénon was all that influenced by Nietszche. His rejection of the modern world was just as vehement as Nietzsche’s, but it had radically different sources. In any case, I’d write the thing very differently today. I have yours, too …’ he said, pulling another bound copy from the shelf. ‘As you know, we keep five copies in the university archives. So, considering how few researchers actually consult them in a given year, I thought I might as well keep one for myself.’
I could barely hear what he was saying — I was on the verge of collapse. It was almost twenty years since I’d been in the presence of ‘Joris-Karl Huysmans: Out of the Tunnel’. It was extraordinary how thick it was, almost embarrassing — it was, I suddenly remembered, 788 pages long. To be fair, it also contained seven years of my life.
Still holding my dissertation, he led us over to the armchairs. ‘It really is a remarkable piece of work …’ he insisted. ‘It reminded me very much of the young Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy.’
‘Please, you’re exaggerating.’
‘I don’t think I am. The Birth of Tragedy was, after all, a sort of dissertation. And in both you find the same incredible profligacy, the same profusion of ideas, all simply flung onto the page, without the slightest preparation so that, really, the text is almost impossible to read — the astonishing thing is that you managed to keep it up for almost eight hundred pages. By the time he wrote the Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche had calmed down. He realised that you can’t overwhelm the reader with too many concepts at once, that you have to structure your argument and give him time to breathe. The same thing happened to you in Vertigos of Coining, which made it a more accessible book. The difference between you and Nietzsche is that Nietzsche kept going.’
‘I’m not Nietzsche.’
‘No, you’re not. But you’re you — and you’re interesting. And if you’ll forgive me for being blunt, I want you on my team. I might as well put my cards on the table, since you already know why you’re here: I want to convince you to come back and teach at the Sorbonne. I want you to work for me.’
At that moment the door opened, just in time to save me from having to answer. It was a plump woman, perhaps forty years old, with a kind face, carrying a tray of warm canapés arranged around an ice bucket. This held the promised bottle of Meursault.
‘That’s my first wife, Malika,’ he said once she’d left. ‘You seem to be meeting all my wives today. I married her when I was still living in Belgium … Yes, my family’s Belgian. So am I, for that matter. I was never naturalised, though I’ve lived here for twenty years.’
The canapés were delicious, spicy but not too; I tasted coriander. And the wine was sublime. ‘I don’t think people talk enough about Meursault!’ I said, with gusto. ‘Meursault is a synthesis. It’s like a lot of wines in one, don’t you think?’ I wanted to talk about anything besides my future as an academic, but I wasn’t kidding myself. I knew he’d return to the subject at hand.
After a decent interval of silence, he returned to the subject at hand. ‘I’m so glad it worked out with the Pléiade edition. It’s the obvious thing, the right thing — well, it’s a good thing all round. When Lacoue mentioned it to me, what could I tell him? I said you’d be the natural choice, the right choice, and that you happened to be the best choice, too. Now, I’ll be perfectly frank with you: apart from Gignac, I haven’t managed to enlist any faculty who are truly respected, who have real international reputations. It’s hardly a disaster, the university just opened. But the fact is, I want something from you and I haven’t got much to offer you in return. That is, I can offer you plenty of money, as you know, and money isn’t nothing. But from an intellectual standpoint, a teaching position at the Sorbonne is much less prestigious than editing a Pléiade. I know that. What I can promise is that nothing would be allowed to interfere with your real work. That’s a personal promise. No hard classes, just a couple of first- and second-year lectures. No dissertations to advise — I know what those are like, I’ve done enough of them myself. I’d arrange everything with the department.’