Later in the day I went out and bought five packs of cigarettes, then I found the menu from that Lebanese caterer, and two weeks later my preface was done. A low-pressure system had entered France from the Azores, there was something balmy and springlike in the air, a kind of suspicious sweetness. Only a year ago, under the same meteorological conditions, you’d have seen the arrival of the first short skirts. I walked down the avenue de Choisy, then the avenue des Gobelins, and turned onto the rue Monge. In a cafe near the Institute of the Arab World, I reread the forty pages I had written. Some of the punctuation needed correcting, a few of the references still had to be filled in, but even so, there was no doubt about it: it was the best thing I’d ever written, the best thing ever written on Huysmans, full stop.
I made my way home slowly on foot, like a little old man, more aware with every step that this time my intellectual life really was over; and that so was my long, very long relationship with Joris-Karl Huysmans.
~ ~ ~
Naturally, I didn’t say anything to Bastien Lacoue. I knew it would be at least a year, maybe two, before he got worried and gave me a deadline. I had all the time in the world to refine my footnotes. My immediate future promised to be, as they say in English, supercool.
Or maybe just cool, I hedged, as I opened my mailbox for the first time since I’d got back from Brussels; there were still bureaucratic headaches to deal with, and bureaucracy ‘never sleeps’.
I didn’t have the courage to open any of the envelopes just yet. I had spent the past two weeks in what you might call the realms of the ideal. In my own small way, I had created. To go back to my status as an ordinary cog in the bureaucratic machine felt slightly jarring. I did see one not-quite-bureaucratic envelope from the Islamic University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. Aha, I thought to myself.
My ‘aha’ took on a new dimension as I read the contents of the letter: I was invited, the very next day, to the ceremony welcoming Jean-François Loiseleur into his new position of university professor. There would be an official reception in the Richelieu amphitheatre, with a speech, then a cocktail party in an adjacent suite set aside for the purpose.
I remembered Loiseleur very well. He was the one who introduced me to the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies, years ago. He had joined the faculty after publishing a groundbreaking dissertation on the poems of Leconte de Lisle. Because he was considered one of the two leaders of the Parnassians, along with Heredia, Leconte de Lisle tended to be dismissed as ‘workmanlike and uninspired’, in the anthologists’ phrase. As an old man, however, in the wake of some kind of mystico-cosmological crisis, Leconte de Lisle had written some strange poems that were unlike anything he or anyone else had ever written. In fact, no one had ever known what to make of them, beyond pointing out that they had all been completely bonkers. Loiseleur could take credit for having unearthed these poems, and for having managed to say something about them, although he wasn’t able to place them in any real literary tradition — according to him, it made more sense to situate them in relation to certain intellectual phenomena known to the ageing Parnassian, such as theosophy or spiritualism. In this way Loiseleur acquired, in a field where he had no rivals, a certain notoriety — not the international status of a Gignac, to be sure, but he was regularly invited to give lectures at Oxford and St Andrews.
In person, Loiseleur was a remarkably good match for his subject. I have never met anyone so reminiscent of the comic-strip hero Cosinus. With his long, grey, dirty hair, his Coke-bottle glasses, and his mismatched suits, generally in a state that approached the unhygienic, he inspired a kind of pitying respect. It’s not that he was trying to play a character: that’s just the way he was, he couldn’t help it. For all that, he was the kindest, sweetest man in the world, and completely without vanity. The act of teaching — implying, as it did, a certain amount of contact with people of different backgrounds— had always terrified him. How had Rediger managed to get him back? I would go to the cocktail party, at least; I wanted to know.